Nordic Noir, or Beyond Stieg Larsson

Nordic Noir

or

Beyond Stieg Larsson

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and its two sequels may have sparked a burst of worldwide interest in Scandinavian crime fiction, but not everyone goes for that particular combination of over-the-top violence and political harangue. Aside from the brilliant creation of Lizbeth Salander, the autistic, molested, Goth computer genius at their center, I find these books a bit thin. But Nordic noir has a lot more to offer than Salander. If you like well-written fiction with lots of plot and engaging characters, read on. 

Sweden first. Even before Larsson captured the best-seller lists, Henning Mankell was internationally well-known. It didn’t hurt that his detective, Kurt Wallander, was played by Kenneth Branagh in an excellent BBC series that was also aired on PBS. While there is plenty of gore in his novels -- I’m going to keep coming back to that, since I know a lot of people like detective fiction, but hate being grossed out -- character development is far more important than shock value here. Wallander has his demons, as is mandatory for modern detectives. His are relationship problems, a difficult father with dementia, an estranged daughter he yearns for. In the later novels Mankell’s left-wing sympathies perhaps go too far for most tastes, as he extols the likes of Robert Mugabe and Mao Zedong. When last seen, Wallander is suffering from Alzheimer’s, but his daughter is following in his footsteps. Start with Faceless Killers.

Among other Swedish crime writers -- Håkon Nesser, Mai Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, Camilla Lackberg -- I’d like to single out two lesser-known women. Mari Jungstedt has written a series of novels set on the island of Gotland, a popular vacation spot off the Swedish coast. The tight geographical setting keeps the plot focused and her journalist hero is engaging. Try The Dead of Summer. Even less well-known is Carin Gerhardsen, a mathematician whose The Gingerbread House -- if you can find it -- will have you on the edge of your seat until the last unexpected twist. These two authors have been published by an English language house in Sweden called Stockholm Text. The books are sometimes available on Amazon, and sometimes not. You can, however, check out the website stockholmtext.com.

In Norway crime fiction is synonymous with Jo Nesbo. Here the gore level is extremely high, but no one can say Nesbo isn’t inventive when it comes to methods of killing and torture. If you can stand the bloodshed, these books are riveting, with tight plots and lots of psychological suspense. In the rather haphazard manner of translated series, the books have appeared out of order, leaving devoted readers wondering about allusions to some dark scandal in Australia. Now that the first one, The Bat, has finally appeared in English, they can find out. It’s not as good as its sequels, however; I’d recommend starting with Nemesis or The Redbreast. Your detective is Harry Hole, and he is an alcoholic. Seldom has the longing for a drink been so agonizingly described.

Nesbo’s compatriot, Karin Fossum is quite different. Her novels are low-key, short on sensation, and psychologically complex. The plots are nevertheless engrossing, and many readers will find it a relief that her detective, Konrad Sejer, though a bit depressed, is not a basket case. Don’t Look Back was Fossum’s first to be translated into English, and it is a good place to start. Once again, though, the books are appearing in English out of their original order, and puzzling references to past events are an occasional annoyance.

Danish crime reaches its heights in TV series, especially The Killing. It has been remade for AMC, but the American series is far inferior to the Danish original. Unfortunately, to see it in the U.S. or Canada you will either need a region-free DVD player or some skill with pirate sites. The Killing is a TV original, not based on a novel. 

For Danish crime in print, I highly recommend Jussi Adler-Olsen’s The Keeper of Lost Causes. Detective Carl Mørck’s problem is that he might have prevented a shootout in which one of his partners died (another was paralyzed). His embarrassed boss hides Mørck in a basement office with a brilliant but erratic Arab assistant, and gives them some cold case papers to shuffle. When one of the cases proves all too warm, there is a race against time to save a woman who has been imprisoned for five years. Along with the almost unbearable suspense, Adler-Olsen also serves up humor -- something generally lacking in Nordic noir.

Not quite a crime novel, but definitely a thriller, is one of the best books I have read in recent years: Christian Jungersen’s The Exception. Set in a Copenhagen institute for the study of genocide, the novel gives us four women who must work at close quarters. When one of them starts receiving death threats, each in turn becomes a suspect. But the relationships between the women begin to reflect the very issues their institute addresses: prejudice, hatred, group identity and exclusion. The book will stay with you long after you finish it, making you wonder who, exactly, is the exception -- or if there really are any exceptions.

Although there are plenty of Finnish thrillers, I haven’t read many. I can, however, recommend one pleasing novelty: Harri Nykanen’s Nights of Awe, featuring a Jewish policeman in Helsinki. Ariel Kafka isn’t alcoholic and he doesn’t have problems with ex-wives or children (he is a bachelor), nor is he riddled with guilt. He does struggle with conflicting loyalties, as members of the Jewish community urge him not to pursue certain leads that may prove embarrassing. This is a good read, and it has sequels, though it remains to be seen if any of them will be translated.

Finally, Iceland, where Arnaldur Indriđason rules. His detective, Erlendur Sveinsson, suffers from a childhood trauma when his brother disappeared from his side during a snowstorm, and was never found again. His marriage was a disaster, and his drug addicted daughter flits in and out of his life. Nevertheless, Erlendur finds time and energy to pursue a series of quite original crimes with nicely plotted trajectories. Once again, the earliest books have not yet been translated into English, but if you begin with Jar City, you’ll enjoy a taut series that does not disappoint. A good film adaptation of Jar City also exists, available to stream on Amazon.

I prefer another Icelandic writer, though. Viktor Arnur Ingolfsson is more eccentric, which is to say more Icelandic, than Arnaldur Indriđason. If you enjoy a good puzzle without excessive violence, set in a restricted ambiance where the suspects are necessarily few, check out The Flatey Enigma, available on Amazon (and free to borrow if you have a Kindle and are an Amazon Prime member). A bonus is the enigma of the title, which is a genuine medieval mystery, spelled out in an appendix to the book. This one is truly unusual.

All of these writers have one thing in common: they are determined to relieve you of any illusions you may hold that Scandinavia is anything approaching an ideal society. No, they say, they are just as riddled with hatred, racial prejudice, corruption, violence against women, sadism and greed as any other country you can name. It’s a shame. I would still like to believe that some societies have managed to strike a healthy balance between prosperity and social generosity. And as much as I enjoy these crime novelists, they have not yet convinced me otherwise.

Auto-Bibliography: Books and Life

The term was coined by Seth Lerer, and I encountered it in a TLS review by Leah Price. Here’s how she describes it: 

“As interested in the narrator’s readings as in his doings, such memoirs typically open with a lonely and precocious child, unappreciated by the coarser souls who surround him. (The author’s first memory is often a printed page; his second, resisting his mother’s injunction to go outside and play with other children).”

That’s me, all right! And I enjoy such memoirs. But to be honest, my first question is always, “Did he like the same books I did?” And even, “Did she like them for the same reasons?” If the answer is no, my interest is likely to flag. 

The memoirs don’t have to be about childhood, of course, but there is a special sweetness in recalling favorite children’s books. (Price was probably thinking of Francis Spufford’s 2003 The Child that Books Built, a classic of the genre). Proust suggested that a collector of children’s books should look not for first editions, but for the editions in which he first read them. Finding one of these is a great pleasure, and then you can offer them to your children or grandchildren. Or perhaps “push” is a better word than offer. The kids will then -- I guarantee it -- break your heart by not liking them at all.

So you can reread them yourself instead. Wendy Lesser wrote an enjoyable memoir about rereading (adult) books she had read decades earlier. Her menu includes Don Quixote (which she first read at eleven), Portrait of a Lady, The Idiot, and Huckleberry Finn, among others, and one movie, Vertigo. I found her reactions acute and thought-provoking and I recommend both the book and the experiment. 

It’s an experiment that I’ve also conducted a few times lately, enticed by the free editions of classic fiction that I can download on my Kindle. An old favorite, Trollope’s Orley Farm, left me wondering why I bother to read any one other than Trollope. The Brothers Karamazov produced more mixed reactions. When I first read it in the 1950’s, it was accepted practice to suspend one’s own biases for the duration of the novel. Atheist though I was (and am), I could accept Dostoevsky’s religious fervor as the premise of his fiction, just as I could accept elves and orcs when I read Tolkien. After decades of socially conscious criticism, that is much harder to do. Nevertheless, the extraordinary psychological penetration of the novel enthralled me as it did when I was a teen-ager, and I was swept away.

Will Schwalbe’s The End of Your Life Book Club reverses the pattern; it’s a memoir not of childhood but of (his mother’s) old age and death. When Mary Ann Schwalbe received her diagnosis of pancreatic cancer, mother and son undertook the project of reading books together and discussing them to while away the longeurs of waiting rooms and chemo drips. It’s immediately obvious that this scenario combines two of the most poplar formulae for upscale non-fiction: the reading memoir and the death memoir. So how does it work out?

For the most part, it works well. Schwalbe has an engaging writing style, and the choice of books is wide, if the discussion of them is a bit shallow. What gave me pause was the sugar-coated picture of the Schwalbe family, and even of his mother’s death. Mary Ann Schwalbe was obvously a remarkable woman, with a high-profile career first in education, then in serving the oppressed of the earth. It is hard to believe, however, that any family was so free of conflict as this one, or that anyone remains so selfless and upbeat in the face of death. Of course, one must always speak well of the dead, and it is good policy to speak well of one’s relatives when they are still alive. But it doesn’t make for spine-tingling reading.

No such problem with Joe Queenan’s One for the Books. This time it’s a whole-life memoir, by a bibliophile who knows how to be funny. Here he is on Nordic noir:

      “The books a borrow from the library are often about bitter, hard-drinking coppers who’ve been divorced three times, whose children hate them, whose new girlfriend is a diseased slut, and who are trying to figure out why decapitated bodies keep popping up in a drainage ditch in that play area right behind the nursery school. A lot of these books are set in Scandinavia, a hotbed of angst, anomie, alcoholism and decapitation.”

(Its only later in the book that you learn he really likes Nordic noir).

This is a book you probably won’t be able to put down, if you like reading and you like memoirs. No place for piety here, toward authors, critics, or family. Even when you disagree, you’ll have a good time.

So -- about disagreement. I was crushed to find that both Schalbe and Queenan hated -- hated -- Thomas Mann’s Joseph and his Brothers, which I’ve read three times. (Though Schwalbe’s mother liked it. Maybe it’s a generational thing). In fact, Queenan scarcely lets a page go by without skewering Mann, or people who like to read him. On the other hand, both liked Alan Bennett’s The Uncommon Reader, a novel about Queen Elizabeth II discovering a newfound passion for books. It sounded forced to me, not to mention that I’m dubious about using a living person as a fictional character. But I’ll give it a try. Both of them read Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo; only Queenan uses it as a jumping-off place to recommend lesser-known and much better Nordic noir. Queenan detests George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, but he likes Jane Eyre and at least some Dickens. As for me, I’ve seldom met the Victorian novelist I didn’t love.

Neither has a good word to say for Kindles. That must be because neither one thought of downloading a free copy of Orley Farm.