The Snail’s House

By Bo Tao Michaëlis
We are in the Danish-German border country, beautiful and historic southern Jutland, where in their everyday lives the two ethnic and language groups live side by side and generally fairly peaceably. Of course there are old scars from the past, from the time when the region was a part of Germany from 1864-1920, and then from the traumatic time during the Second World War and the occupation, when the area was once again regarded as a province of Germany and when the differences showed with greater brutality than in the rest of Denmark.

Out here in the country on a distant and isolated farm one winter morning the bodies of an elderly couple are found. Both have been brutally murdered. Detective inspector Carsten Mathiesen from Aabenraa is called in, and he begins his thorough investigations. However, a couple of days later a further three people are found murdered on a farm. There are clear parallels between the murders. The newspapers are soon convinced that these poor people have been slaughtered in bestial fashion by East European gangs harrying the district. Mathiesen, the policeman, does not, however, suffer from the same mistake. Something quite different is going on, and the motive is more likely to be found way back in the past – in a mysterious death just after the end of the war in 1945. A series of old photographs of a small blond girl are found on the two farms. Something seems to indicate that this girl might be the key to the mystery of the vile murders. At the same time an elderly German couple are attacked south of the border in very similar fashion to those in Denmark. A young German detective superintendent, Christiane Müller from Flensborg, agrees to collaborate with the ‘dumb Danes’ just north of the border. This leads to a teamwork that is marked both by the tangled complexities of the case and by the two cops’ mental, human and cultural differences. While Carsten Mathiesen is a faithful husband and father living with a wife and child in a happy marriage with all the wrangling that goes with day-to-day existence, Christiane Müller is single with a vengeance, leading a very fast and independent life with no less than three lovers in a variety of ages and situations.

The Snail's House has been called Aabenraa ‘noir’, because it is a ‘black’ detective story that takes place precisely in the area around this provincial town. Similar to the novel Frygtelig lykkelig (‘Frightfully Happy’) by the writer Erling Jepsen, also situated in southern Jutland, the story is about the demonic Danish province concealed behind the apparent idyll. The author Hans Schmidt Petersen was himself born and brought up in the area among the German minority. This can be sensed in the genuine ardour that informs this first volume of a new detective series with the partners Mathiesen and Müller. Two subsequent columns are planned to appear in 2010 and 2011.

Translated by John Mason

Dansk version