A DANE IN AMERICA: The avalanche of Scandinavian mysteries and thrillers
By Lis King –
EDITOR’S NOTE: The Danish Pioneer Newspaper’s popular columnist Lis King was a journalist in her native Denmark. She has become a well-known writer in the USA, is the author of several how-to books and has written a novel. She is now living in Pennsylvania Dutch country. The Danish Pioneer thanks Lis for her interesting columns on being “A Dane in America”.
Pardon the pun, but I’m mystified by the avalanche of Scandinavian mysteries and thrillers that has created a whole new literary genre, Nordic noir. How did this happen? I don’t recall seeing any mysteries on my parents’ bookshelves, nor do I recall a lot of shocking crime taking place when I grew up in Denmark. I was a journalist in Copenhagen and Ålborg covering police beats among other things, and I have no recollection of any crimes more serious than burglaries and bar fights.
But here’s a whole slew of writers introducing the world to a Scandinavia of gruesome mayhem by murderous skinheads, sleazy sex merchants, motorcycle gangs, perverted parents and drug addicts. But in between encountering corpses and pursuing killers, the novels do provide us with gratifying glimpses of the other Scandinavia, the ones I love to dwell on.
I thoroughly enjoy riding across Øresundsbroen with Henning Mankell’s Inspector Wallander and vacationing on Jylland’s West Coast with him and his girl friend from Riga. I also glory in the Northern Lights, the never-ending summer evenings, the Christmas festivities so welcome in darkest December, skiing down Norwegian mountains, sunbathing between high dunes, sailing on Roskilde Fjord, and drinking in the heady scent of Bornholm’s fields of heather.
Like Mankell’s crime-solving Wallander, Helen Tursten’s protagonist, detective inspector Irene Hus, operates out of Gøteborg. Other Swedish authors, who’ve excited lovers of mysteries and thrillers are Lisa Narklund, Lars Kepler, Håkan Nesser and Maj Sjowall, Åke Edwardson and Karin Alvtegen, but I admit to being partial to Kerstin Ekman and Åsa Larsen. Those two ladies create high-caliber crime fiction set in the eerie atmosphere of Northernmost Sweden, where it’s either dark or light around the clock.
Thanks to the power of film, Stieg Larsson has got to be the best-known writer of all the Swedes. Who hasn’t seen either the Swedish or Hollywood version of his Girl With A Dragon Tattoo? The two subsequent novels featuring the brilliant Lisbeth Salander were also sensations, and in 2008 Larsson was the second best-selling author in the world.
From Norway we have Karin Fossum, whom Time of London has called one of the greatest 50 crime writers of all time; Anne Holt, the former Norwegian Minister of Justice; and Jo Nesbø whose tough, FBI-trained crime solver, Harry Hole, is another favorite of mine. Harry’s battles with alcohol and personal relationships add deep layers to his novels. Nesbø is a former financial analyst, manages to be a rock singer and songwriter in between penning his novels, and takes his inspiration from Oslo, which, he claims, now has the most drug overdose fatalities in Europe, organized crime, prostitution and trafficking.
Danish novelists Jussi Adler-Olsen, Leif Davidson and Helen Tursten have all made their distinctive marks in the world of crime fiction and thrillers, and we should probably include Peter Høeg, whose Smilla’s Sense of Snow became an international sensation and a Hollywood film.
Iceland and Finland are creeping into Nordic noir as well via writers like Arnaldur Indridason, Yrsa Sigurdardottir, Victor Arnov Ingolfsson and James Thompson. I finished reading Thompson’s Snow Angel this week and the chill of it was so intense that I postponed turning on the air conditioning at my house. It’s set in Finland, well above the Arctic Circle, and after so many years in the US, I felt like I had been dropped into a strange new world.
So why are there no Greenlander or Faroe Islands authors in the mix? Seems to me that both could provide great fodder for some fascinating mysteries. Perhaps I’ll take them on. It would give me a great excuse for some long, tax-exempt vacations.
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