by VASANTHA K. KRISHNARAJ
Maj Sjowall (above) and Per Wahloo wrote a series of 10 novels featuring a police detective called Inspector Martin Beck. Each book was a Marxist critique of Swedish society. PHOTO/Dr Jost Hindersman
is something decidedly different about Nordic, or Scandinavian, noir as it is called. Perhaps it has to do with its evolution in the 1960s in Sweden as a disguised commentary on the failure of Sweden’s much-admired social welfare state. The people behind this were a real-life couple: Per Wahloo and Maj Sjowall. As leftist intellectuals, they were dismayed by the realisation that on its march to progress, Sweden had left its working classes behind and was on its way to becoming a cold, capitalist state, betraying the ideals it was founded upon. Realising that political writing would not garner a wide audience, they borrowed the social realist tradition of the 19th century novel to write crime fiction with an ideological agenda. They wrote a series of 10 novels featuring a police detective called Inspector Martin Beck. Each book was a Marxist critique of Swedish society and was subtitled “The story of a crime”.
But the real crime in these novels went beyond the obvious one depicted in the novel: it was the neglect of the working classes by the Swedish government and society.
And right up to Stieg Larsson, this tradition of social criticism has continued to inform Nordic noir even though Larsson reinvented the genre in many ways but most remarkably in the way he conceived his heroine, Lisbeth Salander, the nemesis of misogynistic men.
Before Wahloo and Maj Sjowall began writing their stories, the Swedish intellectual establishment did not take crime fiction seriously. It was seen as a vulgar bourgeois pastime. This perhaps explains why many Nordic crime writers before the 1960s chose to write using pseudonyms. But Wahloo and Maj Sjowall made writing (and reading) crime fiction respectable, as John-Henri Holmberg, a writer and the editor of the Swedish crime anthology A Darker Shade (2013) attests. Their works won international acclaim but mostly within Europe. Thus began the trend in Nordic countries of writing crime fiction with a social message.
The next most important milestone in Nordic noir came in the 1990s with the publication in 1992 of Smilla’s Sense of Snow by the Danish writer Peter Hoeg. Written in a language that evoked the cadences of poetry, it soon became an international bestseller and the world began to take notice.
A decade later, Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2005) created publishing history. Sadly, Larsson never got to enjoy the phenomenal success of his books. He died in 2004 of a heart attack, the result of an unhealthy lifestyle. It was also during the 1990s that Henning Mankell started writing his Kurt Wallander novels, which were adapted for television in Sweden and Britain (by the BBC). Many such TV series like The Bridge and The Killing proved incredibly popular, testifying to an increasing interest in crime stories originating from the frigid and barren landscapes of northern Europe.
Ironically, there is not much crime in the Nordic countries compared with other countries. The isolation of small towns, the desolate, frozen expanses of land and sea, the scanty population (Iceland has a population of only 300,000 people), all contribute to the atmospheric quality of these novels. But Liza Marklund, author of the Annika Bengstom novels, says that if one lived in places such as Africa or South America, where violence and bloodshed are part of everyday life, it would be difficult to read or write about crime. She speaks of how the 2003 assassination of Anna Lindh, the Swedish Minister for Foreign Affairs, so traumatised her that she could not write for three years.
But it is not as if there is no crime either. One of the most shocking crimes of the 20th century happened in 1986 when Swedish Prime Minister Olaf Palme was assassinated in the heart of Stockholm as he returned home from a visit to a theatre. The murder, still unsolved, is like a festering wound in the Scandinavian psyche. Perhaps that is why many Nordic noir writers such as Mankell and Liza Marklund keep agonising over the “vulnerability of society” in their novels. If the head of a country could be killed in public, as people went about their daily business, then no one was safe. With Palme’s assassination, there was a sense of pervasive loss—of innocence, of a way of life even, among the Nordic nations. Something had changed, irrevocably. It was a crime that created ripples throughout the Nordic countries, which have strong cultural, political, historical, economic and linguistic bonds.
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Women to the fore
Another remarkable feature of Nordic noir is its amazing wealth of female practitioners. Karin Fossum, the queen of Norwegian crime fiction, who has been compared to Ruth Rendell, is my personal favourite. Her novels are minimalistic. A few characters, a small-town setting, a crime that tears apart a small community where everyone knows each other—with these staple ingredients, she weaves a story of such psychological depth and tragic intensity that it haunts one for days afterwards. In many of her novels such as Don’t Look Back (1996), The Indian Bride (2000) and Black Seconds (2002), she describes how crime unravels a community in slow but insidious ways and changes people forever. There is no greater villain in her works than the circumstances that can make an ordinary person commit the most brutal of crimes.
Women writers such as Liza Marklund and Camilla Lackberg feature female protagonists who have to juggle motherhood and career, and such novels are also dubbed “femicrimi” because they deal with issues that are unique to women. A common theme in many of these novels is domestic violence, which is rather surprising considering that women in these countries enjoy a good deal of freedom and equality. Strangely, the Swedish title of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo when translated means men who hate women. Perhaps, there is a lot going on under the surface that the outside world does not know about. Annika Bengstom, the reporter sleuth in Liza Marklund’s novels, kills an abusive boyfriend as does Anna, the sister of Erika Falck, the writer sleuth of Camilla Lackberg’s novels. The only book where I came across a woman abusing her husband was Asa Larsson’s The Second Deadly Sin (2011). These writers write well-researched novels that tell us a lot about their countries’ past and the present. Liza Marklund herself was a reporter.
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