Arctic Noir

Landscape is character.  I had a new subscriber to my Substack column tell me one of the things he really liked about my Cold War spy novel Black Traffic was the evocation of Berlin, which took him back to the time when he was a kid, growing up in the city.  I was very flattered.  I certainly wanted Berlin to be an active presence, not just a backdrop.  I think this is true of the bounty hunter stories, too, the physicality of the country, between the desert and the sown, and the people taking on the character of the unforgiving terrain. 

I’ve been watching some foreign-language policiers on the cable channel MHz.  They carry a wide selection, but the quality isn’t consistent.  You wind up kissing a lot of frogs, on your way to finding a prince.  Tatort, the German show, is reliable.  Here are three more.

Arctic Circle is Finnish, specifically Lapland.  I like the lead actress a lot; the tropes, less so.  She’s chosen to work in her hometown, her mom has cancer, her daughter has Down syndrome, her sister’s a hot mess who makes bad choices in men, and so forth – there’s a little too much of this.  The plot, in the first season, involves Russian girls in the sex trade, trafficked by the mob in Murmansk, but crossing the border into Finland, and carrying an infectious virus that mimics Ebola, which piggy-backs on herpes simplex, possibly the rogue mutation of an old Nazi germ warfare program come back to life, reinvigorated by an unscrupulous pharmaceutical baron.  Whew.  And that ain’t the half of it.  What the show has, in spades, is location.  You’re way up North, maybe 70 degrees latitude, above the Arctic Circle (natch), and it’s winter, with only a couple of hours of daylight, and everything’s snowed in.  It would appear the Finns do a lot of drinking.  Oh, and it’s less than twenty miles from the Russian border, so you’ve got drugs and so forth, coming in from the Kola Peninsula.  The whole atmosphere is bracingly chilly.

Next up, we have Freezing Embrace, also from Finland, but down south, near Helsinki.  This is a more conventional cop shop series, but again, everybody’s squeaking around on packed snow, and boy, they sure do feature pulling a cork.  I don’t know whether this is a recommendation for booze tourism, or what.  Unhappily, the show jumped the shark in Episode 5, or thereabouts, and didn’t quite recover.  The cast is really good, though.  And the same thing, about the environs.  There’s something about being iced in.

The show I liked the best of my recent explorations, though, was Piste Noire.  French, as you might imagine.  On the border with Switzerland, in ski country.  The pistes, in fact, are in both France and Switzerland, the area called the Portes du Soleil, with lifts and gondolas taking you up to crests where you can ski down into the next-door country.  Snow, snowy mountain roads, and snow-covered forests.  Blindingly picturesque.  Some similarly aggravating tropes.  The heroine, yet again, gets pulled back to her hometown, and into family drama, an old flame the murder suspect, yadda-yadda.  The local cop a dry drunk, grumpy, morally compromised, chain-smoker – you get tired of the same-old, and the dynamics.  The two leads, as the odd-couple cops, are actually quite endearing, though, and they save it.  And there’s a very good meet-cute, early on, when the out-of-town cop falls for a local environmental activist, if not the big reveal you might think - lesbians, quel horreur – but very sweet.  There’s not that much of a mystery, in all honesty; it’s telegraphed early on.  What kept me watching was the cast, genuinely charming, and all those aerial shots of the snowy woods. 

So there it is.  It might seem odd, or superficial, to be drawn in by the locations, beautiful or forbidding or exotic, but in these three instances, the sense of place is very much a part of the story.  The characters would be other people - if they inhabited a different physical environment, they’d behave differently.  Maybe this is self-evident, but I think seeing your breath in the frigid air, or feeling yourself draw inward, trying to conserve body heat, say, gives you a stronger imagined connection to where these people live, and who they are.