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A DEATH IN DENMARK begins with a prologue entitled "Little Jewish Annemarie" which returns to October 1943 during the occupation of Denmark by the Germans. This was the period when Jews in the country suddenly were threatened with arrest and deportation to concentration camps. There was a concerted effort to prevent this and a large majority were secretly evacuated to Sweden where they were able to survive. But some were not so fortunate. Little Annemarie and her family were hiding with a Danish farm family when they were betrayed. The farm was raided, the Jewish family rounded up and deported and the Danish family shot on the spot. There is no indication of whether this story is based on an actual event or not. In any event, its relevance to the novel as a whole will only be revealed later.
This book marks a departure for its author, who has published eight previous novels, as it is her first venture into crime fiction and the first appearance of her detective Gabriel Præst, ex-police officer, current private investigator, part-time blues guitar player, and obsessive clothes-horse. His home base is Copenhagen.
Though he puts on a good front, Gabriel is also still not fully over the breakup of his relationship with his partner, Leila, which took place ten years previously. But he is happy to assist Leila, now a lawyer, when she asks him for aid as she tries to prove that her client, Yousef Ahmed, a man accused of killing Attorney General Sanne Melgaard, has been wrongly convicted. When Ahmed's son was denied entry into Denmark where he was seeking political asylum and deported to Iraq, he fell into the hands of ISIS and was subsequently tortured to death. Ahmed held Sanne, a right-wing "Denmark Firster" responsible and his conviction was popular..
The case introduces a major theme of the book, the charge that Danes are largely oblivious to their own racism in part at least because of the pride they take in the behaviour of a prior generation during World War II and overlook instances of collaboration with the extermination of non-Danish refugee Jews. This historical background is used as background to highlight current Danish attitudes toward that part of the population that is not ethnically Danish. In an interview on the blog Jaggery (Dec. 2021) Malladi, who was born and grew up in India and took her graduate degrees in the United States, said that during the years she spent in Denmark: "I saw what a truly homogenous society looks like; and how racism is an inbuilt system within society that doesn’t stand out as odd and when pointed out becomes a reflection on the immigrant, the one who’s different, the one who’s unable to blend into the homogeneity and become a white Dane who speaks Danish fluently."
Malladi spent fourteen years in Denmark, living all over the country. While she was unhappy in rural Denmark, she loved Copenhagen and celebrates the city in her current book. It is told from the point of view of the main character, Gabriel Præst, who is perhaps oddly conceived. He is a man who has never seen a designer item he did not recognize and who obsessively identifies each as he either dresses himself or undresses someone else. He tacitly invites us to draw conclusions from the difference between the make of sunglasses he favours and the Ray-bans on someone else's nose. It's an obsession that extends to furniture. When he breaks into someone's flat to investigate, his first observations concern interior decoration. After a while, there is a fussiness about all this that can be irritating. Nevertheless, Gabriel weathers the usual noir PI injuries with aplomb.
Malladi's attempt to convey her clearly mixed feelings about Denmark via the particular subgenre and protagonist she has chosen is not altogether successful. Gabriel Præst is hard to like and sometimes difficult to take seriously. The moral questions, both current and historic, that she raises demand a fuller, more serious examination than they receive. Since this is billed as "the first Gabriel Præst novel," Malladi may very well come to feel more comfortable as a crime fiction novelist as the series progresses. Gabriel may lose some of his more annoying quirks, and readers should be happy to read books set in Denmark that are written from a unique point of view, and that would be very good indeed.
§ Yvonne Klein is a writer, translator, and retired college English professor who lives in Montreal. She's been editing RTE since 2008.
Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, March 2023
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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