Good Night, My Darling
Inger Frimansson
Caravel Books, 2007
How could she do it?
In Inger Frimansson’s fine novel Good Night, My Darling, published in
New York by Caravel Books, an imprint of Pleasure Boat Studio, the question is
not who committed a crime, nor whether the protagonist might meet a horrible
death. There are no guns, no drug dealers, no gangsters. Instead, crimes are
committed amid the ordinary lives of ordinary people. With this novel, Inger
Frimansson won the Swedish Academy of Mystery Authors Award for Best
Swedish Crime Novel. Newly translated into English by Laura Wideburg, this
book is a gripping account of Justine who, as a child, was first neglected and
then persecuted by a self-absorbed stepmother. At school, she was bullied by
classmates. As we, the readers, squirm with Justine’s victimization, we are
ahead of her in feeling vindictive. Not until Justine is in her forties does she
catch up with the readers’ feelings.
Good Night, My Darling follows several threads, each a life of one of
the novel’s principal characters. Only after the middle of the book do these
threads start to form a skein. Only then can we look each character in the eye.
One character is Justine. Another is her stepmother. Flora: not just selfish, but so
narcissistic that her cruelty makes us gasp. A third character is Justine’s father:
not a bad person, but neither perceptive nor strong enough to protect his
daughter from Flora. A fourth character is a former classmate of Justine’s, a
child bully who grows up to be a nonnal adult. A fifth character is a rather
characterless man who meets Justine towards the end of the book and becomes
her lover. As the threads twist together, a growing sense of the ominous makes
the book hard to put down. All is not well with Justine, but we have no idea
what will happen. It is not until we are more than three-quarters of the way
through the book that the first explicit crime occurs, and not until after that does
anyone in the role of detective appear.
Inger Frimansson enables the reader to enter Justine’s child-thoughts of
being an almost willing victim who absorbs both the hurt and the methods of
cruelty used to hurt her. We sympathize with Justine the child, but as she grows
to maturity we become less sympathetic. Justine the adult has two lovers: there
are scenes of eroticism and even affection, but the damage we know Justine has
suffered makes it difficult to believe in their goodness. Will our sympathy carry
to the point when the victim achieves sufficient power to assert herself?
Crime stories have been adored in popular culture. The inventor of the
short form was Edgar Allen Poe, with “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” of
1841. Wilkie Collins is credited with the invention of the full-length version; his
novel of 1860, The Woman in White, is a thriller with puzzles. Mary Braddon