Murder mysteries are all about the conflict between order and chaos, between the rules of society and the violence that injects havoc into the system. Nowhere does the gap between social order and homicidal mayhem seem any wider than in clean, rational, low-crime Scandinavia. This chasm gives an electric spark to crime stories set there, one that has helped make Nordic noir a juggernaut.
No Nordic detective is any noirer than Harry Hole, the brilliant, boozily self-destructive Oslo cop who's the hero of a series of violent, cleverly-plotted novels by Jo Nesbø. With tens of millions of copies sold, it was inevitable that someone would put Harry on screen. Hollywood did just that in the 2017 thriller The Snowman, starring Michael Fassbender, a movie so shockingly awful it had the rotten tomatoes begging for mercy.
Yet Harry is such a strong character that someone was bound to try again. Enter Jo Nesbø's Detective Hole, a new, clumsy-title Netflix series made by and with actual Scandinavians. Based on the fifth Harry Hole book, The Devil's Star, it's a bit drawn out, but it gets right what The Snowman got wrong.
Tobias Santelmann stars as the frazzled, stubbly, T-shirted Harry, who as the action begins, is in good shape by his standards. He's got a police partner, Ellen, who understands him, a wonderful girlfriend, Rakel, with a son he's winning over, and, best of all, a mission. He's set on taking down a fellow detective, Tom Waaler, who's everything Harry is not: sleek, efficient ... and corrupt. Waaler is played by Joel Kinnaman, the fine Swedish American actor from House of Cards who's currently got another big role in Imperfect Women.
Before he can get the goods on Waaler, something bad happens, sending Harry into an alcohol-fueled tailspin. Luckily, the one thing stronger than his drunken self-hatred is his obsession with catching killers. When a woman is found murdered with a five-starred red diamond under her eyelid, he's assigned to the case — working under Waaler.
As the body count rises, complete with ritualistic clues — is there a psycho killer afoot? — Harry deals with a slew of suspicious characters. These include a wannabe savant who talks apocalyptic guff about Martin Heidegger and a theater director — played with eerie panache by Frank Kjosås — whose actor wife has gone missing.
To be honest, by this point, I'm pretty much serial-killered out in pop culture. Folks, there just aren't that many of them. Nor is Oslo — whose charms are captured in incessant drone shots — remotely as violent as the series suggests. The police there don't even carry guns. In all of Norway, there are about 35 murders a year. In this series alone I counted 13.
Yet despite such silliness, I found myself pulled in. This is partly because the action is genuinely suspenseful, with some neat twists I won't give away. But the show's real strength lies in a sense of character that's unusually intense for a TV cop show. While alcoholic detectives are a staple of crime fiction — Inspector Morse, Inspector Rebus, Matthew Scudder, etc. — Harry's binge drinking comes steeped in the great tradition of lacerating Scandinavian angst. It's like the inside of his skull was painted by Edvard Munch. Small wonder he plays The Ramones' "I Wanna Be Sedated" in his car.
Now, when casting the role of a popular literary hero, it's usually a mistake to pick a movie star. Just as Tom Cruise was wrong for Jack Reacher, so the self-contained Fassbender didn't fit the warm, battered masculinity of Harry Hole. Santelmann does. Looking a bit like the Skid Row version of Jason Statham, his Harry comes across as driven, wounded, unsocial, but also sympathetic. And unlike, say, the self-pitying Carmy on The Bear, who I keep wanting to smack upside the head, he gets on with the job.
What gives the show its seductive tang is that Waaler is both Harry's nemesis and his alter ego. While the shopworn Harry has a sturdy moral compass, Waaler — played by Kinnaman with an air of laminated creepiness — looks like the ideal cop, but beneath that cool façade he's volcanic, all rage and paranoia and vigilante righteousness. He's one of the rare villains who keeps doing things you don't expect.
As for Harry, he does what the detective is supposed to do in a mystery: He solves the murder and restores order. But only for a while. You see, in the world of Detective Hole, the eternal war between order and chaos doesn't only happen on the streets, but in the tormented soul of its hero.
Copyright 2026 NPR
