The 3 best books by the shocking Jussi Adler Olsen

The rock group Tako already presented one of their albums at the time as "El club de los inquietos". There were times when records were sold to listen to them with solemnity and paraphernalia. Danish writer Jussi Adler Olsen he is an honorary member of that club. And all restless must end up focusing on some kind of artistic, cultural or intellectual manifestation. Adler Olsen opted for literature and ended up producing one of the best works of crime fiction of the Nordic current from its continental side (Denmark is certainly not the most emblematic country of this current, except for this dazzling exception).

While Jussi was looking for the writer within him, he trained in many different areas such as medicine and cinematography. But literature had already marked its plan to attract new talents.

In the mid-90s Jussi Adler Olsen published what would be his great success: The House of the Alphabet, a unique novel that transforms the adventure genre as the story progresses to end up presenting a thriller from which he could probably drink another novel: Shutter Island » , from Dennis Lehane.

With this great novel, Jussi Adler Olsen he was able to dedicate himself with greater continuity to literature, offering his famous series of detective-crime novels from Department Q, as well as some other novels of those that serve to untag while maintaining narrative quality and tension.

An author worth discovering as a discordant note of the most European noir genre. Capable of purely black frames and other really surprising proposals.

Top 3 best Jussi Adler Olsen novels

The house of the alphabet

This author owes a lot to this work that, for more glory, served him to stand out as a writer above the labeling of black genre author (which is not worse but at least it offers a more diverse notion about the ability to write). With a warlike tinge, the author of this novel presents us with a unique story, close to the author's own noir genre, and reissued by different labels since it was published for the first time in 1997.

The plot in question revolves around the escape of two English pilots in the middle of World War II. The two members of the RAF are killed in mid-flight but manage to survive and fall on German soil. At this point, the story resembled the movie We Were Never Angels by Sean Penn and Robert de Niro, where the famous actors played two escapes from a prison in Canada.

A similar escape between snowy nature with similar dialogues and a certain point of that circumstantial humor shared between both stories that will extend during this first part of the story. Returning to this novel, the point is that in their escape, Bryan and James only find one alternative, to pass as sick people destined for a Red Cross train.

What they could not know is that this train was hosting German soldiers. Bryan and James take the identity of two SS officers, their unknown destiny ends up being The House of the Alphabet, a psychiatric hospital in which they must continue to assume their dementia, without knowing what treatments they can face and perhaps putting their lives more at risk. than any other alternative taken.

That's when we change the film and we approach Scorsese's Shutter Island, with that absolutely black dot about madness. In a dark environment, surrounded by bad omens, young pilots and friends will discover that perhaps they are not the only ones who are posing as mentally ill.

The decision has been made and the situations generated by their decision to get on that train will appear to them in an unexpected way, between an acid humor and an anguished feeling in which they do not know how long they will have left there, if they can flee, if they can continue to share their confidences with which to stay sane. They fled, they made their hasty decision and now they just hope they can escape from there.

The house of the alphabet

The Marcus effect

On how the big interests can end up pulling their strings to the most remote spaces where crime intoxicates children and young people from the suburbs. Marcus is a member of a gang of petty criminals still on the border of impunity. Its leader is Zola, an unscrupulous boy who ignores the other members.

Marcus understands how twisted Zola can be when he discovers a dead body in his hiding place. Absolutely terrified, he flees from there, but the news will update him on the identity of the deceased.

And it is then that what could be thought of as a homicide parallel to a robbery is oriented towards something much more complex that links the underworld of Zola and Marcus with very high social strata capable of buying everything and paying some boys to kill in order to prolong its status of corruption. Department Q will take over the case, discovering immediately how the causes of death point to a network of insane interests.

The Marcus effect

The message that came in a bottle

There is a virtue I do not know if to say that different from the crime writer Olsen. And it is that he manages to draw humor from the bones of his victims.

Not that it's hilarious humor that runs throughout the novel, but its effect on narrative tension is like a new texture for the literary palate.

The romantic touch of a bottle with a message from the past. A text written in blood, a never-closed matter about two boys who disappeared in the 90s. Department Q with Carl Morck, Assad and Rose try to transcribe what was written in blood to find answers ...

The message that came in a bottle
5/5 - (9 votes)

Leave a comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.