Hugin & Munin Journal

Crime fiction has never lacked brilliant investigators who are incapable of managing their own lives. They see patterns that escape everyone around them, violate ordinary social expectations and repeatedly injure the people closest to them. Very often, they also drink. Jo Nesbø’s Detective Hole returns to this familiar figure through Harry Hole, the Norwegian homicide detective played by Tobias Santelmann. The nine-episode Netflix series adapts The Devil’s Star , the fifth Harry Hole novel, with Nesbø serving as creator and showrunner. The series does not reinvent the broken-detective archetype. What it reveals, perhaps more clearly than it intends, is the bargain that has allowed the archetype to survive. Harry’s damage must be serious enough to make him tragic, dangerous and dramatically complicated, but it cannot be allowed to destroy the brilliance on which the mystery depends. Addiction may ruin the detective’s relationships, career and physical safety. His deductions remain ...