Detective Hole TV preview: Crime and self-loathing
Jo Nesbø’s melancholic detective is given his own telly adaptation, and it doesn’t skimp on the Scandi sadness
Analysing our love for flawed detectives would take more words than are available here, but love them we most certainly do. The winning combination of brilliant mind and terrible personal life draws readers and viewers back time and again, and Harry Hole is one of the genre’s big hitters. With a backlog of sorrow and a fondness for drowning it in Jim Beam, this detective is the subject of 13 books by Norwegian writer Jo Nesbø. Each of them is a compelling, page-turning read, dark as night and unflinching in their brutality.
Those of us who devoured each offering the second it was translated into English have a very particular Harry in our heads. So, whoever the producers chose to fill the main man’s shoes in this Netflix series could never quite match our imaginations. But Tobias Santelmann does a good line in drunken depression and caustic chat, wearing his handsomeness with almost enough alcohol-induced depreciation.
Based on The Devil’s Star, book five in the Hole series, this new TV venture features a serial killer running wild in Oslo, a dirty cop running amok in the police department and Harry himself running up a series of misdemeanours with his lady love and her young son. For those new to Nesbø’s troubled hero, there are twists and turns aplenty in the main case, while Hole’s backstory slowly unveils itself. The details of each gruesome crime may well have blended into one for avid readers, but this is a chance to delight in Hole’s takedown of nasty detective Tom Waaler all over again.
Detective Hole is Available on Netflix from Thursday 26 March; picture: Ronald Plante.