Harjunpää and the pyromaniac, post 1

Okay, I'm starting with this crime novel photos experiment. The first book I picked is the second one in the Joensuu's Harjunpää series, called Harjunpää and the Pyromaniac, written in 1978. It is not available in English translation.

The events of the book take place in three northernly districts of Helsinki, Toukola, Kumpula and Arabianranta (map). The former two are fairly similar, now very pleasant areas of beautiful wood houses, divided by a major road (see Gustav Vasas Väg in the map, link above), much favoured for instance by families with young children. Arabianranta is a new district of apartment housing built in the last 10 years. The area got its name from the Arabia porcelain factory, founded in 1873, whose buildings now house a pop-jazz conservatory and the School of Art and Design. The region is historically important, since it was here that Helsinki was first founded in the mid-16th century. The town did not thrive, however, and was relocated south to where the modern city centre is located.

It is August, and a peculiar series of fires in Toukola and Kumpula is causing strain in the police force. Due to shortage of manpower, DC Timo Harjunpää is assigned to the arson unit. We learn early on that the perpetrator is Tapani, a boy of about 17 or 18, 19 at most, who lives in Toukola. His parents are divorced since he was five, and he lives with his mother. Tapani is a lonely, quiet young man, maybe shy too. Next year he is due to perform his military service, something he is anticipating with anxiety. Secretly, partly as a way of rebellion from his mother no doubt, he's trying out things of the adult world, drinking beer, smoking, dreaming of meeting girls and sex. Lighting the fires are for Tapani a way to feel strong, to be noticed, maybe to channel anger and frustration too. Mostly he has set fire to small constructions, cars and such but takes a step to a more serious direction when he is angered by an old alcoholic, who lives in a shack in the neighbourhood: he sets fire to the shack and the man burns with it. The story follows on one hand the police's frustratingly slowly advacing investigations and on the other hand Tapani's  nightly movements in the area, his anxiety and waiting. To this is tied Timo Harjunpää's worry for his wife, who is soon due to give birth to their second child.    

I should say that my motivation with taking the pictures was not so much to find the locations and then imagine the events of the book there but to get to know more of my home city through looking for the locations and to see how much has changed since the late 70s.  

Since I took so many pictures and because it takes such a long time to get them all edited, I decided to go in installments: post pictures of one location and include citations (my very unliterary translations) from the story. I've also included links to Google Maps. The pictures here in the first section are from Arabianranta. In the beginning of the story, Tapani is pictured here, and this is also where the police find the wreck of an old police bus that Tapani scorches. Arabianranta has changed considerably, particularly in the last 10 years. Please go to the end of the post to see how it's described in the story.

"The bank of Arabia had millions of those ceramic chunks, the whole embankment was made of them. With time's passage, wasteload after wasteload had been driven from the factory to the shore, and now discarded pieces of moulds, shattered dishes and parts of wash basins and toilet seats formed a mass that was 800 meters long and in places two meters tall. It had buried the rushes of the Old Town coastline, reaching from the Hanging Rock (map: see the rocks just below the word 'Arabiagatan' - they actually did hang people in the location hundreds of years ago) all the way to the end of Kaanaantie street (map). The bank did not have any humus. Here and there stood some fireweed, thistles, and in indentations some willows and cow parsley as thick as a man's thumb, but mostly the ground was bare, grey and lifeless like a disease-ravaged crown of the head. Alcoholics did not like the bank of Arabia, and not many passed through either. Someone curious might dig up a teapot missing a beak or a deaf coffee cup, but no one would stay for long. Tapani was perhaps the only person who liked that shore of failed objects that were fit only for a landfill. He had frequently come there during the summer. Even so, he, too, sometimes felt - especially when a saucer's half was crunched under his feet into smaller shards - as if he was walking in a cemetery. That's why Tapani did not walk around the shore but always came to the same spot. He would sit in the shade of a wide waste pipe for an hour, hour and a half, even two hours."

"There was haze in the air, as if smoke from a faraway forest fire. Lammassaari island and the bird trushes across the narrow bay were gleaming blue, and beyond the Old Town bay Kivinokka and Kulosaari island seemed almost grey. Tapani turned. The coast of Hermanninranta did not seem much more cheerful; smoky, bitter stench rose from the pipes of the incineration plant, the sea wallowed along the coastline, murky and heavy. His gaze moved to HKR's construction site barracks, stuck side by side; to train cars that seemed small in the distance; briefly fell on the rusty tin roof of a waste paper storage just visible beyond a maple wood copse; withdrew and remained, lost in thought, on an air house that was located in Arabia. It was grey, too, round at the ends, long and plump. It was like a larva lying helpless."