In the first Inspector Vaara novel, Snow Angels, I wrote, “Finns hate in silence.” At the time, I believed it was true, but it’s true no more. The sounds of racial hatred resonate like the tattoo of a beating war drum that grows louder every day. This atmosphere inspired me to write Helsinki White.
The hatred became vocalized with the meteoric rise of the political party Perussuomalaiset, or True Finns. In the previous parliamentary election, they took five seats. In the election of 2011, they took thirty-nine, a close third, behind Kokoomus, or National Coalition Party, and SDP, or Social Democrats.
This gave True Finns the right to participate in government and push their agenda, which includes, among other radical ideas, by way of example, withdrawal from the European Union. Not all but many True Finns are anti-immigration and blame immigrants for Finland’s social ills. One influential blogger describes his solution as “the D-word.” Deportation. Shortly after the elections, upon finding that none of the critical items on their agenda had a chance in hell of being implemented, True Finns declared themselves an opposition party.
Finland is far from the only Nordic country to have large factions holding such anti-immigrant beliefs. Other nations have instituted immigration laws that can only be described as draconian. In fact, large numbers of people in all the wealthier European Union nations are angry about the influx of foreigners, in particular Muslims.
Last year, Newsweek magazine declared Finland the best country in which to live. This presented a skewed view of the nation at best. Inflation is rampant. Wages stagnant. Real estate prices in urban areas soaring. Unemployment high. The number of poor growing because so many jobs have been outsourced. Public health care is in crisis. Perhaps Newsweek should send a journalist here and document hundred-yard-long bread lines and the queues at the soup kitchens. That’s how Finland takes care of its poor these days. Finns are very good at generating and manipulating statistics. Newsweek bought into it. It’s not all a lie. Industrialists and financiers are thriving.
It was all of these things that compelled me to make politics and social ills prominent themes in this novel.
Helsinki White is also in part a true-crime novel. The story of the Saukko kidnapping is closely based on the real kidnapping, in 2009, of Minna Nurminen, the daughter of Hanna Nurminen, who is the eldest of the late Pekka Herlin’s five children. The Herlin family is perhaps the most well-known Finnish industrial dynasty. The family is among the principal owners of the elevator company Kone and the cargo-handling equipment manufacturer Cargotec. The true story ended well. The ransom was paid and Minna returned to her family unscathed. The kidnapper, Juha Turunen, was a forty-four-year-old corporate lawyer and well outside the profile of a person likely to commit such a crime. A kidnapping of such magnitude had never before occurred in Finland.
_________
SHORTLY AFTER I COMPLETED Helsinki White, an event occurred which threw the novel’s theme of hatred into sharp relief.
On July 22, 2011, Anders Breivik bombed government buildings in Oslo, Norway, and then proceeded on to a Labor Party youth camp on the island of Ut?ya. Disguised as a policeman, he murdered sixty-nine people, mostly kids.
On the day of his attack, Breivik released his one-thousand-five-hundred-word manifesto, entitled 2083—A European Declaration of Independence. In nature, the work is xenophobic, ultranationalistic, Islamophobic, and calls for the destruction of “Eurabia” by violent means. He claims connections with far-right-wing political movements, both Norwegian and international. This has not been proven. Breivik envisions a latter-day Knights Templar that will drive the Infidel from Europe.