There was this interesting LitHub article that came out a little while back On the Rise of Scandinavian Crime Fiction, which got me to thinking about the Millenium series by Stieg Larsson (of which there are now two more books written by David Lagercrantz: The Girl in the Spider’s Web and The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye). Given that crime fiction isn’t my specialty, when I first read the article, I have to say I wasn’t too surprised, seeing as I could easily call to mind at least a few Scandinavian authors just from my travels through our collection: Larsson, Nesbø, Fossum, to name a few. And with a quick search, there are at least a few more names I recognize, even if I’m not familiar enough to recall them or know much about them (which is not to say I know much about the three aforementioned): Mankell, Indriðason (though I suppose he’s technically not Scandinavian, but Iceland’s Nordic, so close enough!), and Sigurðardóttir (ditto), for example. (There was another article specifically on the emergence of the portrayal of sleepy Reykjavik as a criminal hub in Icelandic fiction.) What’s really interesting, though, is the – not absence, but – relatively low crime rates found in those countries, especially in comparison to North America*. For an area with relatively low crime rates**, and considering Nordic countries are always on the top spots in terms of happiness worldwide, Nordic noir sure is booming – what’s the deal?
*Looks like Toronto’s actually the 4th safest city worldwide, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit.
**No international comparisons, though they address the topic, but you can take a look at the Swedish Crime Survey.
What I ran into first when looking into this topic was that all these Nordic Noirs were a grim and brutal social critique from within, but is that really all? I mean, I’m pretty sure other parts of the world also pen social critiques in the form of novels – even more specifically noirs, I’d be willing to bet. Did Nordic Noir just happen to be at the right place at the right time with the right series at the ready? By which I’m referring to Larsson’s Millenium series, or so it seems to me. Of course, there were other Scandinavian crime novels being written before Larsson’s series came out (see Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö), but that trilogy (now a… quintology? What’s the 5-book equivalent of a trilogy?) really seemed to be what started the – is it worldwide? I can only speak from a North American, perhaps even more specifically only a Canadian, standpoint – rise of Scandinavian/Nordic Noir crime fiction.
Is it because Scandinavian countries have this wonderful utopian image (see The Almost Nearly Perfect People by Michael Booth, which is hilarious, though it does read as though Booth might have some personal beef with Sweden), and now what looks like dirty laundry has been hung to dry out in the limelight? Or is there something more to it, like how the acting detective being put on the case in Larsson’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo isn’t actually a detective at all, but is instead a journalist? And that the titular girl isn’t who you might expect to be on the “good” side, typically? The unlikely “hero” of the story, I suppose. But – and like I said, I’m not a crime fiction aficionado – isn’t that one of the characteristics of noir fiction anyway? That there’s no real hero to the story?
(As a huge aside, for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo in particular, I did enjoy the movie better. I watched the Swedish version and found it helped round out some of the edges that I found not too appealing in novel format. I’m assuming this has something to do with translation, especially in light of reading this article about the references to Pippi Longstocking and the character whence Blomkvist gets his nickname, where the English translation of a passage is a lot more cumbersome.)
Because there’s such a proliferation of Nordic Noir, I’m going to point you instead towards a few articles that I found while looking up this topic in the hopes of finding out why exactly it did boom so much in the past few years.
- Oxford Research Encyclopedias: Nordic Noir
- Post45: a series on Nordic Noir that I quite enjoyed
- The Telegraph article with interview segments featuring Maj Sjowall, on the two that arguably made the genre what it is today by paving the road for writers ahead: The Couple Who Invented Nordic Noir
- An entire section from the official site of Sweden talking about Crime and Social Criticism in Swedish literature (read: Nordic Noir)
It would be interesting to compare how Nordic Noir differs from American noir and take a look at why Nordic Noir experienced such a great reception in North America at the time that it did (in… 2005), because, from what I can see, it doesn’t seem as though American noir has gone through that same surge (or resurgence, if it was ever quite as popular and mainstream as Nordic Noir is currently).