Something very grim

Brother Grimm. Craig Russel. Crime, European.

Grimm by name and grim by nature. This is a dark and complicated tale, with its genesis in the Grimms Fairy Tales which most of us had read to us while growing up. And which many of us read to our own children.

I don't think I'll read them to my grand-daughter.

Craig Russell is a new author to this writer. His biog notes his service as a policeman, and his big interest in things German. The brother's Grimm were German gatherers of folk tales, many of which were seriously dark, and which they apparently sanitised for children after their initial publications proved to be so successful.

Brother Grimm is the second book to feature Russell's character Jan Fabel of the Hamburg Murder Squad. Fabel is faced with a murder that turns into a rapid series of more murders, all increasingly gruesome. Eventually he and his team realise that they are based on the the tales of the Grimms. The progress of his investigation and its eventual conclusion is a vehicle not just for a murder story but also offers a perspective on the works of the Grimms which few of those children who listened to the tales would have suspected.

Brother Grimm is a cleverly crafted story. It also is very Germanic in tone and in description, which could have made it a very heavy yarn to work through. Certainly the complex titles and a certain difficulty in remembering who is who because of their German names was potentially a problem for me.

But Russell managed to give his main characters a sympathy to an English language reader which many a German writer might not have been able to. His knowledge of, and his own empathy with things German mix well with his own Celtic Scots brooding background.

It seems that I'm only the third reader of this book this year from Kilcullen Library. But I'm going to read his first one in this series, Blood Eagle, as soon as I can. Though I'll never visualise Red Riding Hood or Rapunzel in the same way again.

Brian Byrne.