64. The Blue Place by Nicola Griffith

Category: 50 Books

This contains spoilers. but also this book is old. So maybe you should’ve read it by now?

64. The Blue Place by Nicola Griffith

Really good fiction. This is book one, and of course neither library had book two, but both had book three.

This is a noir piece, and it’s very well done. But I can’t say that the main character was a “typical” noir-y, hardboiled detective because Aud Torvingen is a very tall, blonde, Norwegian lesbian who lives in Atlanta, Georgia and works as a… I’m not entirely sure what her job is. She’s a retired police woman, but she’s independently wealthy (hate). She works as a body guard now? But she also teaches self defense? And apparently she also solves mysteries because that’s what the main story ends up being: a mystery that she’s hired to solve.

I didn’t really like Aud at first. Her Nordic/Scandinavian pragmatism was to the extreme in everything she did. And you’d think that her it-is-what-it-is attitude would make it really hard for the author to write huge descriptions of things, but nay, the author does all right. In fact, for noir, the book is filled to bursting with descriptions of EVERYTHING. Mostly it’s descriptions of wood, wooden things, buildings with wood in them, and other things like trees. Normally I don’t like huge paragraphs dedicated to the desription of say, a tree, but in this book the author does a great job and I didn’t skip any paragraphs. In fact, it was almost a game to me to see if the author could keep describing wood and wooden things (including Aud?) in different and non-redundant ways. You win this round, Griffith. The sex scenes were not graphic at all, which was suprising seeing as how she describes everything else to the nth degree. I was expecting the sex to be Ayn Rand-ish since the story is from Aud’s point of view. But I was pleasantly suprised to find the sexing treated with a quiet dignity and grace.

Right, so, noir. Let’s do a checklist shall we?
1. hardboiled detective character: check
2. dame someone is trying to kill: check
3. everyone is a criminal, including the good guys: check
4. love story between the hardboiled protagonist and the dame to show the tough-as-nails detective with a heart of gold: check
5. the fucking fatal wounding that you knew would happen but thought, nah, maybe this time the tough guy (girl) will get the dame and they’ll live happily ever after because obviously this isn’t a typical hardboiled crime novel what with a giant Norse woman and all. So you finally start to like the hero because she finally starts to act human, which is exactly why the fatal wounding occurs in the first place. Because OBVIOUSLY she wasn’t thinking with her cold, calculating, Thinking Brain but was instead trying out her new Human Brain because YOU AND I KNOW that when the dame is all, “No, you stay here and do that fun activity you had planned. I’ll go off to the meeting by myself because I’m a Big Girl and nothing bad ever happens to me.” Even though the whole fucking book has been about bad things happening to her. And so the hero stays behind and CLIMBS A MOUNTAIN instead of trailing the dame to the meeting (because nothing bad ever happens in Norway?) only to be ambushed, but not before the hero comes to her senses and gets to the scene just in time to NOT prevent the fatal wounding of the woman she loves. So she then murders the rest of the people who are involved in the crime ring: check

The whole time I was reading this I kept reminding myself, “noir fiction doesn’t end well; you know this. don’t get attached. it’s dark and gloomy. this is why it’s called noir.”

So, I didn’t like Aud at first but I did toward the end which is where you can see the tragedy coming from a mile away. And yes, I sobbed like a baby at the end. And now I’m not sure if Aud changes. Does she go back to being a cold, unemotional hero? or does she, since having found love, warm up a bit and become a kinder, gentler Aud? I don’t know because the library doesn’t have book two. Yet.

This book gets 2 Cansecos.
I’d recommend it to anyone who likes crime novels.

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