Jorma Napola's one-off private eye novel from 1962

Private eye novels have never been big in Finland. I don't really know why, but I have some thoughts: private eye is a product of a culture that relies much on individuals and their right to do something, to correct things, to have a vengeance. Finland is pretty much a culture that relies on authorities, on the fact that someone else takes care of things. (Of course there are regions which resemble more Wild West, but more on them later. Perhaps.)

Private eyes in Finnish literature can be counted with one man's fingers. Reijo Mäki has Vares, Markku Ropponen has Otto Kuhala, Ari Paulow has Jesse Hackman.. and there you go. Tapani Bagge's Onni Syrjänen is not really a private eye. In the seventies there were some writers who dabbled in the genre, like Matti Kokkonen and Totti Karpela, but their legacy has not endured. (One distinctive point in Finnish P.I. novels is that they pretty much go for the parody of the genre, especially Reijo Mäki's Vares, or at least are very jokey.)

One shiny example of a good Finnish private eye novel is Ruuvikierre by Jorma Napola. The Finnish title might translate as "The Big Screw". I read the novel for the first time just recently, when I was suffering a bad case of stomach complaint.

The private eye hero in the novel is one Jaakko Piira, who mentions couple of times having been in the war and having fought first against the Soviets, then against the Germans. Piira is your typical private eye, tired, lonely, suffering from melancholy, could be an alcoholic. The book starts with Piira complaining that he's got no job. All he has is him and a spider weaving its web in a corner of his office. He gets a job, though - a nice and coy young lady asks him to check upon a man who was living in her and her aunt's house as a tenant and is now disappeared. Piira promises to look into the matter and finds himself getting woven up in a web of deceits and lies and blackmail. There are couple of murders and some cops who don't really like Piira.

The book was first published in 1962 and the author, who worked as an art critic and journalist, had won the first prize in a crime novel contest a big publisher called WSOY had put up. Napola won also the second prize, but more on that later.

Ruuvikierre has its share of clichés, but if you happen to enjoy these particular clichés, you'll enjoy Ruuvikierre too. There's a strong noirish tone in the book and the style is fittingly hardboiled. Napola also does a nice job getting those American clichés smuggled in Finnish settings, even though at times I found Piira's wisecracking a bit too un-Finnish. You know, we're not really accustomed to people yapping all the time. There are some implausibilities in the plot and I didn't really believe in the scene that took place in a rehab center, but all in all I really much liked this book. As for the foreign readers, suffice it to say that this could've been published in English and no one would've noticed any difference.

Timo Kukkola, who's written the history of Finnish crime literature, doesn't give much weight to Napola's novel and says only that it's a weak attempt to bring the American influence in Finland. He seems to think that hardboiled literature is only what Chandler and maybe Hammett had to offer and says - at some other point - that the fourties should be left alone. Yet he writes page after page about some locked room mysteries and mansion murders.

Kukkola seems to have some joy when he gets to mention that Napola didn't write another novel. He didn't know it all. A small paperback publisher called Viihdeviikarit (and the man behind it, Kari Lindgren, also the man behind Book Studio and now Book Man) put out in 1981 a novel called Ministeri on murhattu/A Minister Has Been Murdered - by Jorma Napola. The back cover told that Napola had won the second prize in the crime novel contest mentioned above, but WSOY didn't want to publish two novels by the same writer (I don't know why they didn't use a pseudonym), so it had remained unpublished for almost 20 years and Viihdeviikarit had dug it up. I remember reading the cheap paperback for at least two times in my teens.

I didn't remember much of it, though, when I decided to reread it after having finished Ruuvikierre. The books don't really resemble each other, except that both have men of principle in the lead. Neither will back down. The murder in the latter book seems impossible at first, but Napola doesn't give much thought to that and focuses more on bitter human intercourse. The book ends in noirish tones of despair and bitterness, even though it's really nowhere as bleak as Ruuvikierre. It's not as humorous either and the plot is not as intriguing as in Ruuvikierre. Ministeri on murhattu seems also to have some tones of the Maigret novels by Simenon.

Jorma Napola's both books deserve rereading and perhaps Ruuvikierre should be reprinted again as an affordable paperback.