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Scandinavian Crime WaveWhy the most peaceful people on earth write the greatest homicide thrillers.

By Nathaniel RichPosted Wednesday, July 8, 2009, at 7:02 AM ET

"The Girl Who Played With Fire" Having read close to 30 Scandinavian crime novels over the last several months, I can come to only one conclusion: Scandinavia is a bleak, ungodly, extraordinarily violent place to live. The capitals are seething hot pots of murder. In Oslo, a serial killer slips red diamond pentagrams under the eyelids of his victims (Jo Nesbø's The Devil's Star), while in Stockholm a stalker terrorizes young girls in public parks (Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö's The Man on the Balcony). The situation is even worse at the local level. Take, for instance, Ystad, population 17,000, a quaint fishing village on Sweden's southern shore best known for its high-speed ferry terminal. It has suffered, in the novels of Henning Mankell, the following horrors: the torture and execution of an elderly farmer and his wife (Faceless Killers); the torture and execution of two men who are found floating off the coast in a life boat (The Dogs of Riga); the impalement of a retired bird-watcher on sharpened bamboo poles (The Fifth Woman); and the self-immolation of a teenage girl (Sidetracked). Each of these crimes—and many, many more—is committed by a different killer and all within just three years. In terms of per capita incidence of violent crime, Mankell's Ystad would rank behind Mosul but well ahead of Johannesburg and Mogadishu.

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Fortunately, more people are murdered every year in the pages of Scandinavian crime novels than are murdered in Scandinavia itself. The homicide rates in Scandinavian countries are among the lowest on the planet. This year, the Global Peace Index ranked Denmark and Norway the second and third most peaceful countries. Sweden came in 13^th. The Nordic countries also consistently rank as the happiest countries in the world. It is not surprising to observe a trend of Chinese novels about Communist oppression or Ugandan novels about child soldiers. But Scandinavian homicide fiction? Why do such peace-loving societies produce internationally best-selling authors like Mankell, Nesbø, Karin Fossum, and Håkan Nesser? How to explain Stieg Larsson, author of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, who was the second-best-selling author in the world last year?

There are a few reasons Scandinavian writers have taken to the genre. The crime novel, and particularly the British crime novel, has been enormously popular in Scandinavia for decades. And the famous Nordic pragmatism is well-suited to the intricate mechanics of crime investigation plots. But the best explanation is the most mundane: Crime novels sell. Most of the Scandinavian crime novelists began their careers in other genres. Mankell, for instance, wrote seven well-received but unlucrative novels, and more than a dozen plays, before turning to a life of crime; Karin Fossum was a prize-winning poet; Maj Sjöwall was an editor and translator. Before the current explosion of crime novels, the only contemporary Scandinavian novelist to enjoy major international success was Peter Høeg. Høeg may be a "literary" novelist, but his breakout Smilla's Sense of Snow is about the investigation of a suspected homicide. The lesson is clear: If you want your novel to be read abroad, particularly in the English-speaking world, you'd better include a murder. Even if you've never heard of a murder actually being committed in your country.

A better question: Why have readers taken to these writers? The novels are not formally innovative: With a few exceptions, these are straightforward whodunits, hewing closely to conventional models from the English tradition. Nor does their appeal depend on a "relentlessly bleak view of the world," as a writer for the London Times has put it. Bleak worldviews are not particularly hard to come by in crime novels, no matter what country they come from.

What distinguishes these books is not some element of Nordic grimness but their evocation of an almost sublime tranquility. When a crime occurs, it is shocking exactly because it disrupts a world that, at least to an American reader, seems utopian in its peacefulness, happiness, and orderliness. There is a good reason why Mankell's corpses tend to turn up in serene, bucolic settings—on a country farm, on a bobbing raft, in a secluded meadow, or in the middle of a snow-covered field: A dark bloodstain in a field of pure, white snow is far creepier than a body ditched in a trash-littered alley.

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Nathaniel Rich is an editor at the Paris Review and the author of The Mayor's Tongue.

COMMENTS

I read the Scandinavian mystery writers because most of their stories are strongly character driven. We know who Kurt Wallander is, we know his brooding, confounded mind, his pain. Håkon Nesser's Van Veeteren, Eriksson's Ann Lindell and Indriðason's Erlandur are people who work to know more about themselves. None are them are typical cops, they all seem to be fish out of the water of their own careers. I love them all.

-- BeverlyCY
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