The Danish writer Peter Høeg made an explosive American debut in 1993 with his suspenseful literary thriller Smilla's Sense of Snow. The title character, Smilla Jasperson, is a remarkable female protagonist whose complex power is revealed in a lush layering of action, dialogue, image and flashback. The book's core gravity is her passionate intelligence as a scientific expert on the subject of ice and snow. The peculiar nature of frozen water is an extended metaphor forming the crystalline structure of the entire book. It is the cause, the effect and the tool that detects the connection. Also ranging through the narrative are mountains of information on a dozen exotic topics—survival techniques of Greenland's indigenous peoples, Thai cooking secrets, intimate details of ship construction, and so on. This hyper-dense information isn't gratuitous. It is a surgical penetration of the expert characters who deliver it, and integral to the weave of the mesmerizing story.

Høeg's newest work to hit U.S. shores is an intriguing collection of short stories titled Tales of the Night. Described by the publisher as the author's second book, this collection seems to have appeared in Denmark before Smilla's Sense of Snow. It displays Høeg as an old-fashioned storyteller in fable forms reminiscent of Isak Dinesen and occasionally Joseph Conrad. Yet the concept of the obsessed expert is as central to the fables as it is to Høeg's modern thriller.

A brief introductory note says, “These eight stories are linked by a date and a motif. All of them have to do with love. Love and its conditions on the night of March 19, 1929.” The word “love” here describes not just attachments to other people but also the focused dedication the characters bring to their various callings in art, science and law. The conflict is between human emotional warmth and the hubristic seductions of vocation.

The reader is never told why that particular date in 1929 was chosen, but its remoteness allows a formal language and a deliberately historical tone. The cast varies drastically, and the settings are diverse—central Africa, Lisbon harbor, Copenhagen's respectable residential enclaves. But the structure has a comfortably ritualized pattern of story within story. The dispassionate narrator launches each matter authoritatively, and the characters tell their own tales. Though the characters begin as types—the dancer, the judge—they are revealed as substantial and sympathetic individuals as each tells of dramatic events and conflicting obsessions. Despite the seeming limitations of the fable format, Høeg's genuine narrative gifts fill these tales with surprise and excitement, a kind of breathless anxiety for what will happen on the next page and the next.

“The Homage to Bournonville” begins in exotic fashion with a pair of starving fugitives warming themselves over a small fire on the deck of a half-foundered sailboat moored in the harbor at Lisbon. The police are searching for them, and they will soon be arrested. Both fugitives are dancers. One is a ballet dancer from Denmark. The other is a Muslim mystic of the banned order of dervishes. As they wait for the police, the ballet dancer tells the astonishingly gritty though romantic tale of a brilliant ballerina who lies to serve her art. Peter Høeg spent much of his youth as a ballet dancer, and the grueling demands of this art form become tangible on the page. The name Bournonville of the title may well refer to one or both of two 18th-century French choreographers and ballet directors, Antoine and his son August.

Høeg inserts historical figures into several of these fictions, molding them for his own purposes. “Journey into a Dark Heart” is a gleefully satiric revisiting of Heart of Darkness by train rather than riverboat. A venerable gentleman named Joseph Korzeniowski (Conrad was his pen name) is first presented as an author and journalist and then emerges as a ruthless mercenary. Høeg's vigorous dissection is undeterred by the fact that the real Conrad died five years before the date of this story. Also recast on this fateful train is German Gen. Paul Von Lettow Voerbeck, who was noted for his delaying tactics in the African campaign during World War I. A significant cameo appearance is made by the young Kurt Goedel, a real mathematician whose work demonstrated that no mathematical system can be free of inconsistency. Revelations and reversals peel out of an elaborate scenario in what, with the reader's complicity, becomes a poignant game.

The most satisfying tale for this reader is “The Verdict of the Right Honourable Ignatio Lanstad Rasker” in which a Danish supreme court judge finds his lifelong service to the law challenged by the young author he has just convicted and sentenced for homosexual perversion. The judge is long dead when his disapproving son recounts the story to his grandson. The convoluted structure is strong and lucid in Høeg's hands, and the emotional weight of one man's discovery rips through the generations with convincing impact.

Tales of the Night provides fascinating evidence of Høeg grappling with concepts that appear later in Smilla's Sense of Snow, But these stories have their own almost anachronistic pleasure. The leisurely tone and exploratory detours lend them a luxurious intellectual flavor that enhances the momentum of action and the finely tuned plot.