I LOVED THIS. It made me smile. It made me think. It got me invested in the characters, even or, perhaps, especially the hapless incompetent ones up to no good. It kept me turning the pages both to find out what would happen next and in the hope that at least some things might turn out well.

I’m looking forward to reading the rest of Antti Tuomainen’s books, starting with ‘Little Siberia’ in which the arrival of a meteorite in a small Finnish town causes chaos and crime.

---

When I think of good Scandi Noir, I think of dark, sad stories about the evil things people do to each other. Stories with the muscles of a thriller but with a heart that balances compassion for human frailty with an abhorrence of human cruelty. Antti Tuomainen’s first five books were like that. They won awards and had him hailed as ‘The King Of Helsinki Noir’.

Then, with his sixth novel ‘The Man Who Died‘, he decided to change the tone of his books and add elements of dark humour. He described ‘The Man Who Died’ as “…what I hoped to be, a darkly funny book about dying.” He continued on this path with his next book, ‘Palm Beach Finland‘.

What fascinated me, as I read ‘Palm Beach Finland’ was Tuomainen’s ability to add humour to his story without letting go of the attributes of the best of Scandi Noir. This book still has the muscles of a thriller and still has a heart that balances compassion for human frailty with an abhorrence of human cruelty. It just does it differently. In place of a bleak, resigned acceptance of how sad and dark the world can be, the humour suffuses the narrative with a little bubble of hope, a possibility of change and redemption that transforms everything.

‘Palm Beach Finland’ is populated by larger-than-life characters, each with their own agenda and each unknowingly slowly converging on the others with what will probably be fatal consequences. It produces a constant pulse of low-level tension that keeps the story moving forward.

I liked that none of the people were as simple as they at first appeared to be. Tuomainen pulled me into thinking of them as comic archetypes, the sort of characters that populate a Carl Hiaasen novel and then turned them into real people, transforming the story from Pantomime into something with more depth that’s less easy to label.

At about the point that I started to see the characters as people rather than vessels of comic potential energy, I started to see that, with one exception, they all had something in common. They were all dealing with how their lives had been shaped by their dreams.

There’s the not-quite-sane entrepreneur who has thrown everything he has into turning this always cold Norwegian beachfront into a facsimile of Palm Beach except without the, to him, unbearable Floridian heat. Other people look at the gaudily painted beach huts, the lifeguards in ‘Baywatch’ swimwear overlooking empty water and the oversized signage and see tack. The entrepreneur sees his dream unfolding and becoming real.

There’s the lifeguard who, in his head, is a guitarist. He dreams of being a global star like Springsteen or Clapton and is just marking time in his home town until the big break comes along. What I liked most about him was that he comes to see that his dream is his biggest source of unhappiness.

There’s his best friend since childhood, who at first seems to be the Dumber part of this incompetent Dumb and Dumber duo but who changes when he finally stops being high for long enough to realise that, if he wants the woman he dreams of, he’s going to have to do something and some of those things aren’t nice.

There’s the woman in her late thirties who works as a lifeguard, despite hating the uniform, because she needs the money. She has spent her life following the dreams of men who thought themselves talented and who left her with nothing but debt. Her own dream is more modest: to restore the failing house that had been bodged into existence by her grandfather and her father and which she grew up in. I liked her focus, her reluctance to trust and that despite her history and her clarity of vision. she retained the ability to hope.

Finally, there’s the undercover policeman who starts with no dream of his own and comes to realise that he’s good at being an undercover cop because he’s more comfortable pretending to be someone else than he is being himself. The modes dream that he develops is simply to have a real life.

The only character unaffected by dreams is the contract killer. He doesn’t dream. He just kills and moves on. I liked that the quietly efficient killer’s lost humanity was signalled by the absence of any kind of dream.

---

‘Palm Beach Finland’ to me from, ‘Who is Antti Tuomainen?’ to ‘What else has he written and which book should I read next?’ so I tried to find out a little more about him. I came across this Capital Crime interview. Take a look if you’d like to know more.