“Korrupt” is crime veteran Don Winslow’s second book in Norwegian this year. This one is admittedly not new – the original came in 2017, with the title “The Force”. The plot is set in the United States and New York City’s recent past. It includes the drug war, but also Black Lives Matter, political and bureaucratic hypocrisy. We meet a police officer of Irish descent named Denny Malone. Malone leads what is supposed to be “the New York Police Department’s most elite unit”: the Manhattan North Special Task Force, commonly called Da Force. The smooth slide “Corrupt” opens with a quote from Raymond Chandler’s classic “Farewell, My Love”: “Policemen are only people, she said malaproposly. That’s how they start, I’ve heard.” Denny Malone and Da Force also began as honest but hard-hitting, uncompromising cops, powers wide, hero status firmly established. Then there was this with the small services, then, for people who strictly belong to the other side of the law. An envelope that changes hands, a little foaming from a fabric fitting, delightfully salable for those who know how it all works. Can it be that careful, as long as the villains lose in the long run? After all, police officers also have children who would like to go to college. It starts small and almost innocently, but the corruption slide is both smooth and steep. Besides, the system is old and well established, envelopes find their way way up in the hierarchy. As long as the internal investigation and the FBI don’t get their nose into anything, everything will be fine. Or not? Humor and aggression It wouldn’t have been Winslow if it weren’t for dialogues set with a life-like emphasis. Exchanges of lines go as if they were fired from an automatic weapon, inside language and street slang are forced on the reader with dark humor, aggression and pessimism about each other. Here they have brought in “Fat Teddy” on Christmas Eve, heroin in packets under the car seat: The slow change in Denny’s reflections is strong reading, all while the struggle to make himself righteous in his own eyes approaches defeat and moral ruin. Committed crime kingpin Don Winslow has long been precisely a moral writer, sometimes almost too much of a preacher. Fortunately, he avoids the latter in this book. His commitment is constantly in full swing, to the extent that earlier this year he declared that he will stop writing. I think it’s pretty safe to put your money on him envisioning an activist future. His campaigns against Donald Trump are now well known. The previous book was dedicated to the victims of the covid pandemic. “Corrupt” lists the names of all police officers who were killed in the line of duty while Winslow was working on the book. They are not few, they fill more than two pages. ENGAGED: 69-year-old Don Winslow started an online fight against Trump’s re-election in 2020. Photo: Erik Simander/TT Violent depictions of violence “Corrupt” can thus be read as a kind of moral lesson, at the same time as it is definitely a suspense novel with a brisk pace. The violence is frequent and relentless, it justifies itself as Denny and his colleagues must make their choices, accept the consequences of their own actions and priorities. Here towards the end, in the hospital, one of the colleagues is badly injured: They sink deep, to outright murder, but Winslow still manages to keep a kind of balance in the description of them, the greed, the paranoia. Above all in the close friendships, the loyalty, intensely told, but which stings when the action makes them destructive and tears them apart. Exploring the gray areas Sunniva Aanonsen Sandsaard’s translation contributes a very radical Bokmål, which in some pieces adds a broad-tracked harshness to the prose that ends up in the class for more than enough. However, the reader gets used to it. Otherwise, the Norwegian version is fine. “Corrupt” is a novel about police officers in tight quarters, thankless everyday life with enormous demands, sacrifice and the willingness to risk life for little reward. In parallel, the gray areas between right and wrong, goal achievement and betrayal are drawn – the heroes’ vacillation on the border of their own criminality. Winslow gets it done this time too, without in any way throwing real police officers under the bus. Good job, that’s all. news reviewer Photo: HarperCollins Title: “Corrupt” Author: Don Winslow Genre: Crime Publisher: HarperCollins Translator: Sunniva Aanonsen Sandsgaard Number of pages: 442 Date: 2022
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“Corrupt” by Don Winslow – Reviews and recommendations
