Since 1990s, Nordic crime fiction has been a significant sub-genre within the global genre of crime fiction. Usually characterised by social realism, gloomy locations and morose detectives, crime novels and TV series from across the Nordic region provide puzzling mysteries and thrilling stories that use the crime plot to investigate the state of justice, equality, vulnerability and current debates specific to the Nordic welfare societies. The genre includes modern TV classics such as the Danish Forbrydelsen (The Killing, 2007-2012), the Danish/Swedish co-production Bron/Broen (The Bridge, 2011-2018) and global bestsellers by the Norwegian Jo Nesbø and the Swede Stieg Larsson, but it also includes dark and critical images of the underbelly of the Nordic states, which extend further back in history, even to literary works from the nineteenth century.
2019.03.05 |
In the twenty-first century, Nordic crime fiction is a literary genre and a publishing phenomenon which has maintained its local socio-critical potential in a global market place for books and entertainment. The success of the genre is increasingly reinforced by film adaptations and series made for television. Arguably, Nordic crime fiction only became recognised as constituting a common ‘regional genre’ when crime novels from the Nordic countries became translated and television series subtitled, dubbed or remade into a wide range of languages. The reasons for the international success of Nordic crime fiction abroad are many ranging, from the ability of authors and screen writers to blend regional particularities with widely recognisable international forms, to Nordic publishing and media industries’ growing internationalisation since the 1990s.
In some countries outside the Nordic region, the twenty-first century crime boom coincided with a wider fascination with the apparently successful Nordic welfare states and desirable Nordic stereotypes including happiness, quality designer furniture and New Nordic food. The publishing and media industries have benefited greatly from the global ‘brand’ of the Nordic countries and participated in stimulating a desire for ‘all things Nordic’ abroad. Nordic crime fiction as an intermedial genre and a twenty-first century global brand is often referred to as ‘Nordic noir’.
Crime fiction in the Nordic countries has a long history with early examples being the Danish Steen Steensen Blicher’s Præsten i Vejlbye (1829) (The Pastor of Vejlbye, 1991) and the Norwegian Maurits Hansen’s detective story Mordet på Maskinbygger Roolfsen (1839) (The Murder of Engineer Roolfsen). It is in the period since the Second World War, however, that Nordic crime fiction has contributed a particular accent and a growing number of globally successful authors to a predominantly Anglo-American genre.
Nordic crime fiction since the Second World War is indebted to the British Golden Age of crime writers in the 1920s and 1930s, with writers such as Dorothy L. Sayers and Agatha Christie, and shares many traits with the American hard-boiled private detective stories of Raymond Chandler and the police procedurals of Ed McBain. However, it was with the Swedish author duo Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö’s ten-volume series about Martin Beck (1965-75), collectively known as ‘Roman om ett brott’ (‘Report of a Crime’), and the new wave of crime writing in the 1990s, that Nordic crime fiction added to the various sub-genres of crime fiction an emphasis on social realism and criticism, gloomy Nordic locations and the trademark morose detective.
In the 1960s, Sjöwall and Wahlöö translated into Swedish several of Ed McBain’s ‘87th precinct’ novels which were pioneering police procedurals. This inspired the use of a formula wherein the private lives and personal struggles of police officers are mirrored in the larger socio-political landscape of Sweden’s folkhem (People’s Home), the particular Swedish version of the Nordic welfare state. The Swedes Sjöwall and Wahlöö went on to write the Report of a Crime series, which is often cited as the single most influential work of socio-critical crime fiction to subsequent writers in the genre across the Nordic region and beyond.
From their Marxist-Leninist perspective, Sjöwall and Wahlöö explicitly aimed to use their crime novels as a means to analyse the Swedish welfare state, to relate crime to its political and ideological doctrines, and to reveal its perceived fascist nature. The subtitle of the novel, ‘Report of a crime’, was then both an indicator of the genre and a programmatic statement criticising the ‘criminal’ subservience of the welfare state to capitalism. From Roseanna (1965) (Roseanna, 1967) to Terroristerna (1975) (The Terrorists, 1976), Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s crime novels follow Martin Beck and his homicide squad from the sex murder of an American tourist to the murder of the prime minister of a Swedish police state, anticipating the murder of the Swedish prime minister Olof Palme by a decade. In their investigations, Beck and his team are constantly faced with an impenetrable police bureaucracy, a metonymy for a brutal society that gradually overshadows the idyllic Swedish post-war welfare state.
Less politically radical in his critique of Danish society, Anders Bodelsen from Denmark similarly used the social realistic thriller to explore the new realities of the welfare state in his Tænk på et tal (1968) (Think of a Number, 1969). Bodelsen insisted that collective conflicts should be understood through the private; and in his breakthrough novel the personal conflict of a bank cashier, who is tempted to hide the loot from a bank robbery, is reflected in society’s balancing act between materialism and social responsibility.
In the late 1980s and the 1990s, the Nordic thriller gained international attention with the Swede Jan Guillou’s Coq Rouge series (1986-2006) featuring the Swedish spy Carl Hamilton, a nobleman with socialist leanings, and with the work of Danish Leif Davidsen, whose political thrillers focused on Russia and the new Europe, e.g. in Den russiske sangerinde (1988) (The Russian Singer, 1991) and Den serbiske dansker (1996) (The Serbian Dane, 2007). Like Bodelsen and later Stieg Larsson (Sweden), these writers were already well-known and, in the case of Guillou, a controversial journalist, who used the sub-genre of the thriller to criticise and reflect on the changing national and global socio-political climate in the final years of the 20th century.
The police procedural rode the cusp of the new wave of Nordic crime fiction in 1990s.
It was the police procedural in the style of Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s that would ride the cusp of the new wave of Nordic crime fiction in the 1990s. Henning Mankell’s (from Sweden) Inspector Kurt Wallander, Åke Edwardson’s (also Swedish) Chief Inspector Erik Winter, Arnaldur Indriðason’s (from Iceland) Detective Erlendur, Matti Yrjänä Joensuu’s (Finland) Detective Sergeant Timo Harjunpää and Håkan Nesser’s (both from Sweden) Chief Inspector Van Veeteren have all become synonymous with the Nordic police procedural’s male anti-hero investigator.
Rather than focusing solely on crimes and their investigation, Mankell’s texts devote much attention to Wallander’s thought processes, his poor habits, ailing body and deteriorating relationships. Throughout the series, Wallander, with his psychological and bodily wounds, becomes a complex reflector of a society unable to commit ethically and with solidarity to the challenges of a globalised world.
In the twenty-first century, Nordic crime fiction is a literary genre and a publishing phenomenon which has maintained its local socio-critical potential in a global market place for books and entertainment with strong traditions and publishing catalogues in all of the Nordic countries. The success of the genre is increasingly reinforced by adaptations into film and series made for television, as well as original TV drama productions. For instance: