Raid and the Blackest
Sheep is about men
and death. It is about settling scores, but also about nostalgia, mortality and
the changing of generations. It is about fear. There is fear of death, fear of
growing old, and fear of loneliness. But there is no fear of violence or fear
of law.
Raid is a ‘torpedo’, a gun-for-hire; a young man of few words
and lightning-fast reflexes. He first appeared in the eponymous novel Raid in 1992. So far, there are ten
books in the series. Raid and the
Blackest Sheep is number four. It was the first to be translated into
English. There are also a TV series and a film.
Harri Nykänen (1953-) worked for Helsingin Sanomat as a crime reporter until 2001, when he became a
full-time writer. His writing career began in 1986 with Kuusi katkeraa miljoonaa (‘Six Bitter Million’). His latest novel
is Mullasta Maan, published 2014
(‘From the Soil of the Land’). Nykänen writes three crime series known by their
protagonists: Raid, Ariel Kafka and Johnny & Bantzo. He has also written a
variety of other crime stories and non-fiction. Raid and the Blackest Sheep won the 2001 “Vuoden Johtolanka” (“The
Clue of the Year”) prize for the year’s best crime story in Finland, both for
the novel and the TV series created from it.
In Raid and the
Blackest Sheep, Raid returns from Sweden to chauffeur a legendary old con-man
Nygren around Finland. They run various criminal errands involving large amounts
of euros and bullets. The police are on their trail trying to piece together
Nygren and Raid’s plans. Along the way we are introduced to a cast of
idiosyncratic characters on both sides of the law. Like all good road trips in
fiction, this, too, is both a physical journey and a spiritual one.
Nygren is legendary and a larger than life villain. His dress
sense is flamboyant: “he resembled an Italian multimillionaire (Raid and Blackest Sheep, p29). His
thinking is philosophical: “My forte is the meaning of life.” (Raid and Blackest Sheep, p190) He is an
old-school con artist and a raconteur who gains the reader’s sympathy. At his
first stopping point in Turku, he says to a priest: “Were I a sheep, I’d be one
of the blackest, but the only thing I take from anybody is money. You take
their souls.” (Raid and Blackest Sheep,
p8).
On this trip, Raid is an audience to Nygren’s tales and
philosophical musings. Raid, too, has a reputation in the world of crime. When
police tell Sariola who shot him, he replies: “Raid! That guy was Raid? The Raid?” (Raid and Blackest Sheep, p117) Raid is the brand name of the most
popular insect killer in Finland. We can assume that it is the hero’s chosen
professional name. As Lieutenant Kempas puts it: “He kills bugs dead.” (Ibid.) From early on in the book, we
learn that Raid has a personal relationship with Lieutenant Jansson.
Jansson is fifty-four years old, overweight with “sixty
pounds of excess fat” (Raid and Blackest
Sheep, p13), and balding. For most of the narrative he is feeling
uncomfortable with his physical condition, his career and his marriage. He has
been sent to a “physical rehabilitation center” (Raid and Blackest Sheep, p14) full of war veterans (Raid and Blackest Sheep, pp18, 24).
Jansson, like Nygren, is a sympathetic figure. Jansson, like Nygren, also has a
young side-kick. Jansson’s is Sergeant Huusko, with his “trademark black leather
jacket” (Raid and Blackest Sheep, p20)
and a fondness for women and bad jokes.
The story
successfully contrasts the older men’s preoccupation with ideas of aging, decay
and approaching death with the younger men’s apparently less problematic
approach to life, which is reflected in Raid’s cold-hearted violence and Huusko’s
careless attitude to women: “Women are strange. One night together and they wnt
to wash your clothes and knit you a sweater.” (Raid and Blackest Sheep, p96)
Raid and the Blackest
Sheep is written in
an economical and effective style. It is delightfully noir with undertones of
American pulp fiction, reminiscent of Richard Stark and Laurence Block but with
distinctly Finnish slumbering gloom and irony. The humour is black, the
violence is brutal and the sauna is hot.
The opening
is very strong. Raid is at the wheel of Nygren’s classic Mercedes and Nygren is
sleeping in the back seat. When he wakes up he asks Raid: “Where are we?” Raid
replies: Just past the half-way mark.” (Raid
and Blackest Sheep, p2). We join these two men on the road knowing nothing
about them or the purpose of their trip. Their conversation is enough to make
us curious. Alternate chapters follow the crooks and the cops. Each chapter
consists of smaller scenes; there is hardly any padding and very little
explanation or background information. The reading experience is cinematic – a
series of scenes that make up a coherent story.
The language follows the same principle of economy, there is
hardly a metaphor in sight; even adverbs are kept to a minimum. This
undoubtedly has made the novel a little easier to translate from Finnish to
English. It is hard to say whether the short, call-spade-a-spade-style is carried
on from the original or partly created by a particularly brisk translator, but
it works. The translation is good. There are linguistic touches which add to
the exotic Finnish feel. ‘Torpedo’ (the same word in Finnish) as a slang term
used for a hired thug or assassin is familiar in Finnish crime fiction, but it is
seldom encountered in English-language crime novels (Raid and Blackest Sheep, pp21, 213). Some Finnish words have been
left in the text: Raid’s mother serves “pulla
rolls with cold milk.” Pulla is a sweet wheat bun, often flavoured with raisins
and cardamom. Sariola has “salmiakki salt liquorice” (Raid and Blackest Sheep, p115) on the table by his hospital bed. Salmiakki
is liquorice flavoured with ammonium chloride (for more about this Finnish
favourite, see http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-24303423).
Leaving these Finnish words for traditional foodstuffs in the English text
suitably adds to the foreign feel in this highly stylised story. There are many
other details that are typical to Finnish culture. “Hobo’s Rose” is on the
jukebox at the local tavern (Raid and
Blackest Sheep, p27). The song, “Rentun Ruusu” by its original name was a
great come-back hit for Irwin Goodman in 1988 and remains popular. “Raid’s own
car was a Volvo Amazon” (Raid and
Blackest Sheep, p30). This was a popular car among Finnish young men back
in the 1980s. The model had an appealing echo of American cars of the 1950s
with its small tailfins and large shoulders. This was the car my friends’ big
brothers drove.
Raid and Blackest Sheep
is a good mix of
noir crime and Finnish national character. It also balances plot and character
well: the events flow from the nature of the characters. There is much suitably
dark humour in it as well as maudlin sentimentalism. In a short novel of violence
and crime, Nykänen has managed to cram in much about life and its meaning. In
the end, you almost come away thinking that all is well with the world. The
crimes have been solved, retribution is complete, and peace has been restored. But
Raid’s last act in the novel is a chilling final twist. It raises questions
about the true nature of his character and about the whole story. Nykänen is an
interesting and complex crime writer whose preoccupations clearly go far beyond
the simple act of murder.
