Miller, Derek B., (Norwegian by Night [hc, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013]) 978-0547934877 [pb, Mariner Books, 2014] 978-0544292666 [- his debut novel, a genre-blending thriller that functions simultaneously as a Nordic noir chase story, a fish-out-of-water dark comedy, and a poignant exploration of aging, trauma, and grief. The story follows Sheldon Horowitz, an 82-year-old, cantankerous Jewish watch repairman and widowed Korean War veteran. Reluctantly, Sheldon has moved from New York to Oslo to live with his granddaughter, Rhea, and her Norwegian husband, Lars. While adjusting to his alien surroundings, Sheldon’s world is upended when his upstairs neighbor—an Eastern European woman— is brutally murdered by a Kosovar Balkan gang. Sheldon manages to rescue the woman’s young, mute son and promptly goes on the run into the vast Norwegian wilderness. Influenced by the collective trauma of the Holocaust, he chooses immediate, active resistance, weaponizing his Marine training to protect a young boy. Crime becomes the stage where an elderly Jewish man asserts absolute agency over a chaotic world. Reflecting Derek B. Miller’s professional background in international peace and security, the book offers a sharp critique of Norway’s naive immigration policies and how war criminals easily slip through open European borders unvetted.
United States · Fiction author
Derek B. Miller
Derek B. Miller (born 1970 in Boston and has lived for periods in Norway, the UK, Switzerland, Israel, Hungary, presently in Spain) [B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College, M.A. in National Security Studies from Georgetown U., Ph.D. in International Relations from the Graduate Institute in Geneva, Switzerland and post=grad research at Oxford. Before turning to fiction full-time, Miller worked for more than a decade in international diplomacy and peace research. He has collaborated extensively with the United Nations, serving as a senior fellow with the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR). He is also the founder and director of The Policy Lab, a center focused on human-centered public policy and design. Transitioned into a novelist known for blending serious historical or political backdrops with wit and rich character development. Two of his six published novels are relevant for this bibliography:
Miller, Derek B., (How to Find Your Way in the Dark [hc, Mariner Books, 2021]) 978-0358269601 [This prequel to Norwegian by Night focuses on a 12-year-old Sheldon growing up in 1938 Massachusetts. When 12-year-old Sheldon’s father is killed in a suspicious truck crash, Sheldon does not wait for an unjust legal system. He steps into a world run by mobsters, jewel thieves, and mafia hitmen, operating on a fierce, self-determined moral compass. Sheldon, his cousin Abe, and his friend Lenny navigate a pre-WWII America that is actively ignoring the Nazi menace. By intertwining street-level mafia crime with the looming shadow of the Holocaust, Miller argues that history itself is a sequence of crimes, right and wrong, big and small. For his characters, fighting crime isn’t just about law enforcement—it is a battle against a world that tolerates the erasure of Jewish lives.
Instead of writing conventional mafia or true-crime stories, Miller utilizes the crime genre as a vessel to explore the fractured weight of 20th-century history, the generational trauma of the Holocaust and war, and the uniquely Jewish intersection of tragedy and comedy. He subverts the crime-fiction Jewish stereotypes of intellectual or cynical investigator, helpless victim or crooked gangster with an 82-year old retiree who refuses to be a passive bystander to blatant injustice. Throughout the action, Sheldon inserts his “Borscht Belt” style dark humour. The absurdity of the criminal situations, whether in the 1930s Catskills or in a noirish Nordic setting, becomes a tool for Sheldon to maintain his humanity in the face of horror. In this and his other fiction, Miller applies a Tikkun Olam consciousness. Crime is the ultimate expression of the world’s brokenness: Miller’s protagonists view their extra-legal actions not as a violation of civic law, but as a moral necessity to fix a universe shattered by violence. – Google/AI]