Spring 2024 - Recrudescence

Thanks to the Acid Rain ** Astra Road in Tjensvoll. A winding street with both detached houses and low-rise apartments. 4 The only musical reference in the Red Handler books (with one exception) is to Glenn Gould’s two recordings of the Goldberg Variations. This may have been a conscious choice on Brandeggen’s part to emphasize the problem of duration and length vs. quality, which is further complicated by the fact that Gould’s 1955 recording has a length of thirty-eight minutes, while the 1981 recording clocks in at over fifty-one minutes. In other words, a movement opposite to the one Brandeggen took in the Red Handler project. 5 The three sentences dealing with the eyes are easy to dismiss as bland, even silly. But looking past their slapstick absurdity enables us to notice Brandeggen’s critique of crime literature, in which novels often get needlessly prolonged (often by several hundred pages) and the reader’s time wasted by the detective’s failure to look closely and follow up on clues and hunches fast enough. To Brandeggen, the overwhelming majority of crime-fighting heroes were shockingly ineffective, in the sense that they coldly allowed the suspense to idle as the reader is led on— like the dog who follows a biscuit held by its owner as the latter moves further and further away—and were therefore unworthy of the fame they were customarily afforded. To his mind, the profusion of dead ends and suspects quickly became tedious. In these three sentences, on the other hand, the Red Handler a) identifies his problem and chief constraint (his eyes are closed), takes action and solves the difficulty (he opens his eyes), and is once again able to do his job in a prompt and exemplary 6 Note the complete absence of a murder mystery in this and several other of the Red Handler novels. Brandeggen consciously chose to break with the established rules of the detective story, laid down by Van Dine and Knox, e.g., at the end of the 1920s. The private detective who only worked on murder cases, he reasoned, restricted the genre and alienated the reader, who presumably would be better

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