{"id":1993,"date":"2014-05-25T09:33:37","date_gmt":"2014-05-25T13:33:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=1993"},"modified":"2014-05-25T09:33:37","modified_gmt":"2014-05-25T13:33:37","slug":"nordic-noir-scandinavian-crime-fiction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=1993","title":{"rendered":"Nordic Noir – Scandinavian Crime Fiction"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"clouds,<\/a>

(photo: wikimedia.org)<\/p><\/div>\n

Readers and fans of modern crime novels have been aware of the Scandinavian writers\u2019 mafia for some time\u2014long before The Girl Who\/With . . . <\/em>trilogy commandeered airport book stalls. Stieg Larsson<\/a> was, in fact, only one of the hundred or so crime authors from Norway, Sweden, and Denmark whose books have been translated into English. \u201cThe crime tale has become to Scandinavia what the sonnet was to Elizabethan England: its trademark literary form,\u201d says Lee Siegel in \u201cPure Evil,\u201d a recent New Yorker essay<\/a><\/em> on the rise of Scandinavian crime fiction.<\/p>\n

An early signal of the impending invasion may have been the unexpected success of Smilla\u2019s Sense of Snow,<\/a> <\/em>by Danish author Peter Hoeg (1992), a book I enjoyed greatly. As did a friend of mine\u2019s mother, luckily only slightly injured when a tractor-trailer jackknifed in front of her on the New Jersey Turnpike and her car slid underneath. As the EMT\u2019s loaded her into the ambulance, she yelled, \u201cMy book! Get my book! It\u2019s on the front seat of the car.\u201d Smilla\u2019s Sense of Snow.<\/em><\/p>\n

A line from Swedish crimewriter Henning Mankell<\/a>\u2014\u201cevery good story has a mystery in it\u201d titles the home page of this website. He\u2019s familiar to American readers and PBS Mystery!<\/a> watchers for his Inspector Kurt Wallander mysteries. Several of these novels have been dramatized starring Kenneth Branaugh of the tiny mouth and co-starring the unutterably grey-and-gloomy Swedish skies.<\/p>\n

From what source did all this high Nordic gloom arise? Siegel\u2019s essay, which features Norway\u2019s popular author Jo Nesb\u00f8<\/a> cites several causes, perhaps most significantly the unsolved 1986 assassination of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme, shot in the back while walking home from a movie theater. \u201cThe paranoia engendered by Palme\u2019s killing,\u201d Siegel says, \u201cendowed the Scandinavian crime novel with a horrifying vitality.\u201d<\/p>\n

Also, in Norway\u2014the territory of Nesb\u00f8\u2019s Inspector Harry Hole novels<\/a>\u2014the discovery of oil led to a newly privileged class, and the social fears and resentments that ensued became fodder for the crime novelist, Siegel says. You will recall how in 2011, those class differences erupted in real life, when Anders Behring Breivik with bombs and guns killed 77 people, \u201cmost of them the young sons and daughters of the country\u2019s liberal political \u00e9lite\u201d murdered at an island-based Workers\u2019 Youth League camp.<\/p>\n

Harry Hole of the Oslo Police Department is the protagonist in ten of Nesb\u00f8\u2019s books\u2014works that \u201cstand out for their blackness.\u201d Nesb\u00f8 himself, on the interesting author-interview website Five Books<\/a> (which also has interviews about Swedish and Nordic crime fiction), talks about how the mentality of the criminal is \u201cactually very similar to the mentality of the police. And that is true for the main character in my books, Harry Hole. He experiences the same. The people he feels he can most relate to are the criminals that he is hunting.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nesb\u00f8\u2019s books have sold 23 million copies in 40 languages, and several are on their way to being made into movies, suggesting that social fears and resentments are not themes confined to a single geographic locale, even if they can be presented in bleaker aspect against a lowering sky.<\/p>\n

Read more:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Scandinavian Crime Fiction<\/a> \u2013 billed as \u201cyour literary portal into Northern deviance,\u201d featuring numerous authors, downloadable books (audio and e), and other resources<\/p>\n

A Cold Night\u2019s Death: The Allure of Scandinavian Crime Fiction<\/a> \u2013 a guide from the New York Public Library<\/p>\n

No. 1 With an Umlaut<\/a> \u2013 Boris Kachka in New York<\/em> magazine includes Iceland and Finland in his guide to this \u201cmassive iceberg of a genre.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Enhanced<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Readers and fans of modern crime novels have been aware of the Scandinavian writers\u2019 mafia for some time\u2014long before The Girl Who\/With . . . trilogy commandeered airport book stalls. Stieg Larsson was, in fact, only one of the hundred … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[62,52,54,40,174,3,66,32,29],"tags":[31,412,30,89,415,414],"class_list":["post-1993","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-authors","category-crime","category-detective","category-fiction","category-first-draft-blog","category-mystery","category-suspense","category-thriller","category-writing","tag-author","tag-mystery","tag-novel","tag-reading","tag-thriller","tag-writing"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-w9","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1993","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1993"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1993\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1995,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1993\/revisions\/1995"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1993"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1993"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1993"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}