2024
Frode Brandeggen (1970 – 2014), an unknown voice to most readers, made his debut in 1992 with the experimental 2000 + page novel Conglomerate Breath. It was never reviewed and soon forgotten. He created a new form of genre, writing 15 micro novels about Red-Handler, a protest-oriented crime fiction project aims at confronting genre’s weakness and often unnecessary length. As his weapon, he developed a private investigator who is already at the scene or in the immediate vicinity when foul play takes place.
This book for the first time brings together all the 15 micro-novels Brandeggen wrote about Red Handler, and is also equipped with a comprehensive amount of enthusiastic, explanatory, complementary and sometimes strangely digressing endnotes, written in the pen of Brandeggen’s closest literary confidant in the final years, German professional annotator Bruno Aigner (1934-). The book about the fictive character Red Handler is the literary talent Johan Harstad’s newest project, sprawling with creativity. Watch out – you will be caught red handed!
Red Handler showcases Harstad’s riveting creativity and impressive ability of make-believe […]
A side-project with an irrepressible charm. Wonderfully satirical, about an experimental author whose act of artistic protest consists in writing crime fiction for people who hate to read.
Brilliant, hard-boiled and banal, Johan Harstad’s The Red Handler is a wonderfully humorous book about an inaccessible, high-culture author who goes into popular crime fiction.
Johan Harstad
John Erik Riley
