Death in a Cold Climate A Guide to Scandinavian Crime Fiction
Crime Files Series
General Editor: Clive Bloom
Since its invention in the nineteenth century, detective fiction has never been more popular. In novels, short stories, films, radio, television and now in computer games, private detectives and psychopaths, prim poisoners and overworked cops, tommy gun gangsters and cocaine criminals are the very stuff of modern imagination, and their creators one mainstay of popular consciousness. Crime Files is a ground-breaking series offering scholars, students and discerning readers a comprehensive set of guides to the world of crime and detective fiction. Every aspect of crime writing, detective fiction, gangster movie, true-crime exposé, police procedural and post-colonial investigation is explored through clear and informative texts offering comprehensive coverage and theoretical sophistication.
Published titles include:
Maurizio Ascari
A COUNTER-HISTORY OF CRIME FICTION
Supernatural, Gothic, Sensational
Hans Bertens and Theo D’haen
CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN CRIME FICTION
Anita Biressi
CRIME, FEAR AND THE LAW IN TRUE CRIME STORIES
Ed Christian (editor)
THE POST-COLONIAL DETECTIVE
Paul Cobley
THE AMERICAN THRILLER
Generic Innovation and Social Change in the 1970s
Michael Cook
NARRATIVES OF ENCLOSURE IN DETECTIVE FICTION
The Locked Room Mystery
Barry Forshaw
DEATH IN A COLD CLIMATE
A Guide to Scandinavian Crime Fiction
Emelyne Godfrey
MASCULINITY, CRIME AND SELF-DEFENCE IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE
Christiana Gregoriou
DEVIANCE IN CONTEMPORARY CRIME FICTION
Lee Horsley
THE NOIR THRILLER
Merja Makinen
AGATHA CHRISTIE
Investigating Femininity
Fran Mason
AMERICAN GANGSTER CINEMA
From Little Caesar to Pulp Fiction
Fran Mason
HOLLYWOOD’S DETECTIVES
Crime Series in the 1930s and 1940s from the Whodunnit to Hardboiled Noir
Linden Peach
MASQUERADE, CRIME AND FICTION
Criminal Deceptions
Alistair Rolls and Deborah Walker
FRENCH AND AMERICAN NOIR
Dark Crossings
Susan Rowland
FROM AGATHA CHRISTIE TO RUTH RENDELL
British Women Writers in Detective and Crime Fiction
Adrian Schober
POSSESSED CHILD NARRATIVES IN LITERATURE AND FILM
Contrary States
Lucy Sussex
WOMEN WRITERS AND DETECTIVES IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY
CRIME FICTION
The Mothers of the Mystery Genre
Heather Worthington
THE RISE OF THE DETECTIVE IN EARLY NINETEENTH-CENTURY
POPULAR FICTION
R.A. York
AGATHA CHRISTIE
Power and Illusion
* * *
Crime Files
Series Standing Order ISBN 978–0–333–71471–3 (hardback)
978–0–333–93064–9 (paperback)
(outside North America only)
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* * *
Death in a Cold Climate
A Guide to Scandinavian Crime Fiction
Barry Forshaw
palgrave
macmillan
© Barry Forshaw 2012
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this
publication may be made without written permission.
No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted
save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence
permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency,
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Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication
may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published 2012 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN
Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke,
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ISBN 978–0–230–30369–0 hardback
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‘With customary depth and precision, Forshaw gets under the skin of this celebrated genre, uncovering many of its secrets and riches. Like its subjects, this book is hard to put down, and will undoubtedly be returned to time and again.’
– Dr Steven Peacock, University of Hertfordshire, UK
‘Not a stone is left unturned in Barry Forshaw’s witty, encyclopedic investigation into the fictional crimes that have made Scandinavia the most talked about region in the world of books. Death in a Cold Climate is a unique and admirable personal testament to the writers, translators and publishers who have dedicated themselves to introducing Scandinavian crime fiction, its many languages and cultures, to the English speaking world. If upon turning the last page of Forshaw’s book you are not immediately heading for the nearest bookstore to buy up every Scandinavian crime novel on its shelves, you were probably not meant to read this book in the first place.’
– Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen, University College London, UK
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1 Crime and the Left
2 The Cracks Appear: Henning Mankell
3 Sweden: The Dream Darkens
4 Sweden: Foreign Policy and Unreliable Narratives
5 Last Orders: The Larsson Phenomenon
6 The Fight Back: Anti-Larsson Writers
7 Criminals and Criminologists
8 Norway: Crime and C
ontext
9 Norway and Nesbø
10 Iceland: Crime and Context
11 Fringe Benefits: Icelandic Woes
12 Finland: Crime and Context
13 Death in Denmark
14 Danish Uncertainties
15 Film and TV Adaptations
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgements
When writing Death in a Cold Climate, I decided that it was important to call on more than my own resources. Writing about, reviewing and interviewing many Scandinavian authors for both print and broadcast media over the years has brought me into contact with most of the principal writers, publishers and translators of this astonishingly rich genre, but it was important for me to ensure that my impressions were as up-to-date as I could possibly manage. To that end, I contacted again every author I could with whom I had previously spoken, along with many with whom I had not been in touch before. In the entire field of Nordic crime fiction I found a welcome readiness (almost without exception) among novelists to discuss their own writing, and to answer the many questions I had about their individual countries and societies. Similarly, all of the doughty translators of my acquaintance (along with several I had not met) proved equally ready to give me their impressions – this was particularly important to me, as it is an open secret to all cognoscenti of fiction in translation how crucial is the role of these talented people. I also called upon one of the key crime fiction journalists in Britain, Bob Cornwell, whose research work on international crime fiction for Tangled Web is prodigious (when editing Crime Time, I found his ‘crime scene’ articles on a variety of countries invaluable in the sheer depth of their organisation), and he has made a great deal of material available for me for this book. Rather than thanking the many individual authors who have been helpful, I would simply direct the reader to the variety of entries that follow. But I would like to register a special mention for three of the most important translators in Britain: Sarah Death (who also edits Swedish Book Review, the files of which she generously opened for me); the immensely well-informed Tom Geddes; and the man who bids fair to be the doyen of Scandinavian translators in this country, Laurie Thompson (a man who avoids the Metropolis like the plague). A woman who doesn’t mince her words, Sofia Odsberg of the Nordin Agency, has been an early warning system for me regarding new talent (and helpfully – and patiently – corrected my Swedish pronunciation, when we both worked for Publishing News). Several obliging people at London’s various Scandinavian embassies have also been a highly useful resource, such as the cosmopolitan Stein Iversen of the Norwegian Embassy, as has Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen of University College London. And being invited to a Saint Lucia evening at the Swedish Ambassador’s residence by Carl Otto Werkelid and Ann Nilsen helped put me in the right Nordic mindset. Without these individuals on my side, my task would have been considerably more difficult.
Although not strictly accurate, the words ‘Scandinavian’ and ‘Nordic’ are used throughout this book to refer to the countries of Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Finland and Denmark.
Where two dates are listed for novels, parentheses indicate the English-language publication date and square brackets the year of publication in the original language.
Introduction
The Scandinavian literary invasion is complete – at least in terms of crime fiction produced in the Nordic countries: now, in sympathetic translations, that fiction is jostling for pole position with (often resentful) British and American practitioners in the field. The Vikings made bloody sorties against Britain in the era when storytelling was largely an oral form. Thirteen centuries later, however, the descendants of those ruthless pillagers now make their mark not with axes but with computer keyboards, dispensing bleak and atmospheric (but strangely exhilarating) genre fiction. Long after their ancestors left their mark on hapless Britishers, more and more British readers are coming to the realisation that crime fiction from the Scandinavian countries affords subtle pleasures often more rich and atmospheric than those provided by the standard British or American variety with which we are so familiar. But just why has the field of Nordic crime fiction in translation – for so long caviar to the general – become such a hot ticket in recent years? The desire for novelty in an exhausted, over-visited field? That is one factor, certainly, but there are a variety of reasons – and the study of this phenomenon makes for some fascinating conclusions, relating as much to the insights into Scandinavian society provided by this fiction as much as to any intrinsic literary merit (and regarding the latter, it is undoubtedly true that Nordic crime fiction carries a more respectable cachet – justifiably or otherwise – than similar genre fiction produced in Britain or the US). Novelty and perceived ‘quality’ are both factors in the astonishing success in Britain of the lengthy, slow-burning Danish TV series The Killing, which refracted and reinvented police procedural clichés through an intriguing Danish prism; the actress Sofie Gråbøl, as the tenacious, unsmiling copper Sarah Lund with a dysfunctional personal life (in unvarying black-and-white Faroe Island jumper), is now a cult figure, and has even generated leader columns in The Times.
Despite the proximity to each other of the various Scandinavian countries, their individual identities are remarkably pronounced, and the patience generally shown by the inhabitants when the British and the Americans lazily lump all the Scandinavian nations together is admirable – it is a laziness that this study will do its best to avoid. However, if there is anglocentric bias here, it lies in the concentration on authors available in translation, for ease of general reader accessibility – though I have made an attempt to include key names from the past not available in English, and promising authors yet to be (or on the point of being) translated. The eternal publishers’ question: ‘Who is the Next Big Name in Scandinavian crime fiction?’ is answered – somewhere in this book.
But the commercial exigencies are only one consideration here (albeit a persuasive one in making a mass of unfamiliar material available in translated form): any intelligent reader of the genre will quickly become aware of the sociopolitical insights afforded by the novels, building up a complex picture of Scandinavian society – in particular, the cracks that have appeared in the social democratic ideal, an ideal which has been cherished for so long by observers in America, Britain and the rest of Europe.
But these insights, it should be stressed, are not conveyed by any po-faced editorialising on the part of the various Nordic authors: such notions have appeared, inter alia, within the context of reader-friendly popular fiction, in which the pleasures of narrative remain paramount. In this context, the analysis of society freighted into the novels is more forensic and detailed than in the crime fiction of virtually any other country, even within the orbit of such mordant social critics as the writers James Lee Burke (in America) and Val McDermid (in Britain). The political narrative of this cold wind from the North was clearly worth both anatomising and expanding – and those are two of the imperatives of this volume (along with a celebration of the crucial role of translation). Death in a Cold Climate attempts to place all the key authors and their work in the context of social changes in their respective countries, and illustrates the radical revision (via the novels) of fondly held British and American images of Nordic society.
While writing the first biography of Stieg Larsson (and covering and interviewing Nordic writers for a variety of newspapers and magazines), along with recording television and radio programmes on Scandinavian crime fiction, it became clear to me that there had not been a definitive book on what is now a key arena of the crime fiction field: writing from Sweden, Denmark and the other Scandinavian countries, already highly successful in its native countries and Germany. But by the first decade of the twenty-first century, the books were beginning to break through in Britain and America. The fact that there is an ever-growing market is clearly evidenced by the TV, radio and newspaper articles now appearing on the subject – and the current initiatives by many publishers to sign up new S
candinavian authors to (hopefully) match the sales of Mankell, Larsson et al. (a marked change from several years ago, when Scandinavian literary agencies trying to sell the rights to their hard-to-pronounce authors in Britain were met with an unenthusiastic response).
Many authors are content to relate their narratives in carefully organised, linear fashion without attempting to test the elasticity of the medium. The result: work which is weighted with precisely those elements required to produce a Pavlovian response in the reader, with all the customary elements (suspense, obfuscation, resolution) employed in a straightforward contract between author and reader. Scandinavian crime fiction, however, is more prepared to toy with notions of improvisation and destabilisation of the generic form, producing writing which may sketch in the rough parameters of the crime novel but also attempts to expand the possibilities of the medium – those possibilities which so often remained unexplored. The publishing industry, of course, survives (and thrives) by creating a production-line product without any individual signature (or, to put it another way, with an anonymous but reliable series of signifiers that will satisfy the undemanding crime reader). In fact, the great majority of product coasts by with this kind of anonymity, and to some degree this is a consequence of the dictates and expectations of the reading audience. There is often an initial resistance to unfamiliar, convention-stretching innovation which is why so much anodyne product is available. Even the least ambitious Nordic fiction, however, is often prepared to take some audacious steps into the unknown, producing fiction which can function as both popular product and personal statement from the author.
This is not to say that the elements of innovation (or improvisation) are incorporated into the majority of Nordic crime novels – the field has more than its fair share of workaday writers. But the very best novelists are well aware that it is almost always necessary to resist lazy, warmed-over conclusions delivered by rote about both society and human psychology within the context of a crime novel. Such writers – the most ambitious practitioners of the form – are temperamentally unable to merely recycle and reheat clichés and various second-hand aspects of the genre. These writers are obliged to dig more assiduously beneath the engaging surface of popular fiction and discover the hidden striations of meaning and significance that are often under-exploited in the crime fiction genre. With a newly forged technical and psychological armoury in place, the writer with this approach has a capacity to elevate the genre above its most basic entertainment status. Again, this level of ambition appears to be more readily employed in the Nordic countries.