Meta Mystery, Trafika Europe Vol. 2, 2025

Whether considering literature or life, mystery surrounds us. So much unknown becomes quotidian, which means that despite the unknown, we go into each day knowing that many things will remain mysterious for some time—perhaps forever—while other mysteries come into the light. Every story and poem has its own mystery as well. If you pick up a novel and know how it ends on page one, you no longer need to read the novel to resolve the mystery. If a poem does not require reflection and interpretation, readers (or maybe it’s just me?) have no reason to keep a poem in their minds. As our team reflected on many mysteries last year and at the beginning of this year, we found so many great literary works that played with ideas of mystery in such fascinating ways. Some used one mystery to solve another; some flipped genre conventions on their head; and some were just such intriguing pieces of contemporary European literature.

We begin with The Mystery of the Crooked Man by Tom Spencer, which is a novel that will speak to any lover of the Man of La Mancha! Agatha is quite the academic who works as an archivist with a penchant for true crime. A lost manuscript shoots her into the historian limelight, but the murder of an ex-lover who had a piece of this manuscript accompanies the news that this document is a hoax. Will Agatha be able to catch this fake Cervantes and find out why it was created before this literary crime leads to her murder?  Eva Björg Ægisdóttir’s Home Before Dark, translated from the Icelandic by Victoria Cribb, takes us to a more familiar realm of Nordic Noir with a murder and its investigation. Like Agatha in The Mystery of the Crooked Man, the investigator in Home Before Dark is the murdered girl’s sister, who has no investigative experience, ten years after the murder. Marsi’s thoughts on the murder mingle with her dreams and fantasies as she tries to find her former pen pal, who may have murdered her sister and who has recently connected with her.

Galician author Fabio Rivas then transports us to a rough world where crime seems to be the norm. In “Darkie and White Eyes” from A pintura debida translated from the Galician by Jonathan Dunne, White Eyes is a young blind girl mistreated and violently raped by these monsters. Rather than needing to investigate, the real mystery here is how this victim becomes a perpetrator, seeking revenge and not letting her lack of sight become a handicap. Trigger Warning: This story does include a description of sexual violence. Absolution by Aleš Šteger, translated from the Slovene by Urška Charney and Noah Charney, continues this exploration of the darkness in the world surrounding the what-should-be joyous event of carnival. The biggest mystery at the carnival, however, is not who hides behind the masks but who makes up the 13-person “octopus” that controls all profits and policies of the event. Corruption and lies, rather than murder, take center stage in this literary thriller.

Finally, we wrap up the focus with Son by Johana Gustawsson and Thomas Enger. Gustawsson, rightfully known as the Queen of French Noir, and Enger, one of the biggest, best-selling authors of Nordic Noir, collaborated on this thrilling novel that has a psychologist and body language expert investigating the murder of two young girls. The twist: her son, who knew the girls and many people in the village, disappeared years before without a trace. This current investigation mingles with the kidnapping of her son as she probes into whether the main suspect actually did it. She finds that the crime and people involved impact not only her son’s case, but also everyone in the village, including her.

Despite many efforts to find verse pieces that dialoged directly with the theme, we were unable to secure any for this issue. To supplement our wonderful focus, we have provided several non-focus pieces. Poems from Daniel P. Stokes and Niels Hav are thought-provoking and engage with various mysteries of life. Along with Hav’s poems, we are publishing an interview between the poet and Julián Alejandro and LC Bermeo Gamboa. They dig a bit further into his work and his view of poetry. Our last piece is a review by Daniel Koehler. Koehler dives into Yakup Kadri Karosmanoğlu’s Turkish modern classic novel Nur Baba.