monumental fugue of volumes

The library appeared to spread outwards from him as from a core. His dejection infected the air about him and diffused its illness upon every side. All things in the long room absorbed his melancholia. The shadowing galleries brooded with slow anguish; the books receding into the deep corners, tier upon tier, seemed each a separate tragic note in a monumental fugue of volumes.

—Mervyn Peake, Titus Groan

in search of historical Finland: The Moving Shadow~~

I asked my friend Ella if her mom or aunt, both murder mystery fans, knew of any historical Finnish mystery writers, but she said they both thought there aren't any. (There are murder mysteries written and set in the 1950s from Sweden, such as Maria Lang's series with the heroine Puck, filmed in 2013 and picked up by international Netflix under the title "Crimes of Passion".)

So I was quite surprised to find Kulkeva Varjo (The Moving Shadow), a murder mystery set in 1900 Finland, on the public tv streaming site!

But it turns out that it's actually a dramatization of Vandrande Skugga, by well-known Finland Swedish literary light Bo Carpelan, a hereditary baron known for poetry and for fiction for both children and adults. This novel just happens to concern a murder in a small coastal town (it's set in Nådendal/Naantali, a historical spa resort quite close to us here in Turku/Åbo and the site of the Finnish president's summer estate, Kultaranta, as well as Moomin World). He's not a mystery writer, and wrote in Swedish besides (Nådendal, like much of the Åbo region, was majority Swedish-speaking at the time). It's also filmed in Swedish (1980s), so watching it was completely useless from a Finnish practice perspective, but it was still interesting (the setting, not the mystery. The mystery was eh, which is fair enough because the book isn't really a murder mystery, just a literary novel about the aftermath of a murder).


For instance, here's the volunteer fire department on their way to put out a fire: a horse and cart and a handful of men and flock of barefoot boys on foot! (The production only appeared to have one horse, so maybe the actual 1900 Nådendal volunteer fire department would have had a multiple-horse carriage or two but they couldn't afford it.) ( +4 )