Scandinavian Noir Read online

  Another precedent—perhaps even farther from the Martin Becks in style and intent, though closer temporally and geographically—consisted of the various Swedish mysteries written for children in the mid-twentieth century. These included Åke Holmberg’s novels about the private eye Ture Sventon, issued between 1948 and 1973, and Nils-Olof Franzén’s illustrated books about the detective Agaton Sax, which came out around the same time. Those detective characters, too, were clearly modeled on Holmes, though with certain features—such as a jolly round figure and an animal associate, in the case of Sax—that would make them especially appealing to children. The most famous series in this genre, perhaps because it actually employed a child as the detective, was Astrid Lindgren’s trio of mysteries featuring a schoolboy named Kalle Blomqvist (a central character who, when the books proved popular enough to export, was later renamed Bill Bergson). These three tales, which appeared in Sweden between 1946 and 1953, are somewhat reminiscent of America’s Nancy Drew series, with a youthful amateur detective who, together with the necessary age-appropriate sidekicks, always succeeds in outwitting the bad guys. Even now, the books remain sufficiently well known in Sweden so that present-day readers of the Stieg Larsson books are expected to get the joke when Lisbeth’s ally, the crusading journalist Mikael Blomkvist, is nicknamed “Kalle” by his friends. (This would seem to be a joke that never stales among Swedish mystery writers, for Leif G. W. Persson brings it up again in his recent novel The Dying Detective.)

  But here I am getting ahead of myself, for the Larsson and Persson books—not to mention the dozens of other Nordic crime novels I’ll be mentioning in the forthcoming pages—did not exist until decades after the Martin Becks were first published. It took a particular pair of authors working together at a specific moment in history to create that now-dominant form, the modern-day Scandinavian mystery. And despite the fact that they were naive beginners, or perhaps in some ways because of that, their achievement in the form has never been topped.

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  Let’s agree at the outset to dispense with any discussion about brow levels. If I happen to invoke Dickens, Balzac, or Dostoyevsky when talking about these books, it is not to insist that Per Wahlöö and Maj Sjöwall are their equals as the writers of sentences and paragraphs—though nor would I want to grant outright that they are not at the same level in some other way. After all, Wilkie Collins was a thriller writer of the late nineteenth century whose best novels we are still reading with enormous satisfaction today; with each passing decade, he comes to seem more and more of a Victorian classic. One could also argue that Eric Ambler is as much a twentieth-century stylist as Ernest Hemingway, along the same spare lines, and it is not yet clear, if you ask me, which we’ll be reading longer. My point is not just that we can’t, from our limited perspective, answer questions about longevity and importance. It’s also that I don’t particularly want to, for that is not really what this book is about.

  What matters to me is how persuasively these mystery writers manage to create a world that one can imaginatively inhabit—for the duration of a first reading, initially, but also long after. The various features of Martin Beck’s world, including his Stockholm streets, his police department colleagues, his lovers, his friends, the crimes he solves, the murderers he pities, the politicians and bureaucrats he deplores, even the apartments he inhabits, all seemed terribly real to me when I first encountered them, and all continue to seem so today, even after one or more re-readings. This is the mystery novel not as a puzzle that can be forgotten as soon as it is solved, but as an experience one is living through along with the characters. If they are sometimes “flat” characters in the manner of Dickens’s grotesques or Shakespeare’s clowns, that is not an absence of realism, but rather a realistic acknowledgment that in our own lives most other people remain opaque to us, often memorable mainly through their caricaturable qualities. We do not have the capacity, as George Eliot famously noted, to be fully empathetic at all times. Much of our observant life, and even much of our own experience, is conducted in a kind of shorthand.

  Yet part of what makes the Sjöwall/Wahlöö books great, in comparison to most other mystery series, is precisely the opposite of this shorthand. They are oddly inclusive, with an eye for extraneous detail and a concern with the kinds of trivialities (subways ridden, meals eaten, suspicions vaguely aroused, meandering conversations, useless trains of thought, sudden bursts of intuition, random acts or events that cause everything to change suddenly) which make up not only every life, but every prolonged police investigation. This means that the timing of the books is, for some readers, excessively slow: we often have to wait for the necessary facts to surface, so we tend to find ourselves floating along rather than racing toward an increasingly visible conclusion. I always tell people that they have to wade through at least the first two volumes, Roseanna and The Man Who Went Up in Smoke, before things really get going in the Martin Beck series. Only when they reach The Man on the Balcony or, even better, The Laughing Policeman will they be able to judge how much they like the series. Patience is required of the reader, just as it is of the detective.

  Nor are these the sort of “fair” mystery that lays out all the potential suspects and relevant clues (if perhaps in cleverly disguised form) early enough for you to arrive at the solution yourself. Leave that to Agatha Christie and the other puzzle-mongers. In the Martin Becks, the murderer might be someone we meet on the first page, but he equally well might not appear until nearly the end of the volume. The solution is only part of the point; it is getting there that matters.

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  The only other Scandinavian series that approaches the Martin Becks in having this same quality of lived, unhurried, persuasively real experience is the Kurt Wallander sequence devised by Henning Mankell. Also a Swede, and also someone with pronounced political interests (though his tended toward a kind of global progressivism rather than a locally focused Marxism), Mankell placed his lead detective in the town of Ystad, which sits along the southern coast of Sweden in the Skåne region. Characters from Skåne who appear in the Stockholm mysteries are always portrayed as rather slow-paced and small-townish, with a distinctive regional accent and a willingness to suspend quick judgment. (Think of Frances McDormand’s Marge character in Fargo, if you want a good American comparison.) And Kurt Wallander would certainly not deny this characterization of himself. He is a small-town policeman who happens, in the course of his own ten-book series, to solve murders that begin or end on Swedish soil but that grow increasingly complex and international in scope as the series moves forward. Partly, this is due to his moment in time (roughly 1989 to 1997, with a single follow-up volume appearing over a decade later)—a period when the Soviet Union was breaking down, South African apartheid was coming to an end, and all sorts of other global events were having a direct effect on once-isolated Sweden. Partly, though, the wide-angle view is attributable to Henning Mankell’s own life, which was divided annually between Sweden and Mozambique, and which included theatrical work and journalism as well as fiction-writing.

  Kurt Wallander is, in a way, like a cross between Martin Beck and Kollberg. He is overweight like the latter and emotionally isolated like the former, though with an increasingly close relationship with his daughter, Linda, who eventually becomes a police officer too. Moreover, he is as ruminative as the two of them put together—and this, in a way, is both the virtue and the flaw of the series. Much of the narrative, although it is voiced in third-person, takes place inside Kurt’s mind. Instead of the back-and-forth conversations which characterize the Stockholm squad room, and which in a way define both the social nature and the low-key humor of the Martin Beck series, Kurt Wallander’s conversations and realizations are either with a dead colleague (the sainted Rydberg) or, mostly, with himself. Even as he spends a great deal of time re-reading the case notes and thinking about what he might have missed, he is also reserving the laundry room in his apartment building, checking the temperature outdoors, go
ing to the doctor, getting his old Peugeot repaired, remembering to call or visit his father, and otherwise leading a slow, uneventful life. Thoughts flicker in the margins of his brain before they take shape fully, and it is this recognizable process—of questioning and intuition gradually transforming itself into realization and understanding—that most fully characterizes the Wallander books. Granted, they have a few moments of cinematic excitement (as when Wallander is pursued by the armed and hostile Latvian police in The Dogs of Riga, or engages in a gun battle with foreign assassins in The White Lioness), but for the most part they lack the high-wire, shoot-’em-up denouements that more commonly characterize the thriller genre. They are mysteries, for the most part, about the process of thinking.

  I began reading the Kurt Wallanders in the 1990s, just as they were coming out in English translations, and by the time the ninth one had appeared, around the beginning of the twenty-first century, I had pretty much read them all. Unlike Sjöwall and Wahlöö, Mankell had not envisioned the Wallander series as a complete arc to begin with. He just kept producing them, one after another, as both the rapt audiences and the increasing seriousness of world events made their demands on him. Like many other thriller writers before him (including, notoriously, Arthur Conan Doyle), he eventually came to find his famous detective a burden, and in the belated final volume, A Troubled Man, which came out in English in 2011, he firmly shut Kurt Wallander down by giving him Alzheimer’s.

  By this time, though, the dam had burst on Scandinavian mysteries and America was flooded with them. I can still recall my initial encounter with Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, which almost singlehandedly set off the whole process. It was the summer of 2009, and I was in the hospital for a few days, resting up after some routine orthopedic surgery. As I lay there, intermittently pushing the button that allowed morphine to flow directly into my body, I finished the entire first volume of Larsson’s Lisbeth Salander series. (My surgeon was so impressed by my evident fascination that he subsequently bought the book to take on his vacation.) It was not, I thought, that the book was so good; as a staunch mystery reader, I had plenty of objections to it on the grounds of implausibility, superficial character creation, and general axe-grinding. But it was, almost literally, un-put-downable. I found this with both of the subsequent two volumes as well. Even as I despised the cheap feminism of the books, with their obvious approval of Lisbeth’s take-no-prisoners, violent-revenge-on-behalf-of-the-abused approach, I still couldn’t stop reading them until I got to the end of each.

  And the rest of Larsson’s English readership apparently felt the same way, because from that point onward, the American publishing industry couldn’t get enough of the Scandinavian mystery genre. That, I suppose, is how my addiction really got started (my addiction to Scandinavian mysteries, I mean: I had no trouble leaving behind the hospital’s morphine drip). It was a case of supply generating demand. Abetted by Amazon’s algorithm recommending similar books purchased by other customers, the American branch of the Scandinavian mystery industry located my weakness and proceeded to feed my seemingly bottomless need.

  Practically on the heels of Stieg Larsson, I remember, came Jo Nesbø—a Norwegian, and therefore a somewhat new taste to be added to the existing Swedish mixture. I loved the first three volumes I read in Nesbø’s Harry Hole series, and even though I found that the violence and hair-raising tactics began to get old after a while, I still bought each new one as it came out. But even the best current series, in which new entries will appear at intervals of twelve or eighteen months, is not enough to feed a serious obsession. In some moods, I can consume four or five of these in a week. So a host of other Scandinavian detectives lined up behind Martin, Kurt, and Harry: Swedes like Mari Jungstedt’s Anders Knutas, Åke Edwardson’s Erik Winter, Kjell Eriksson’s Ann Lindell, Arne Dahl’s Paul Hjelm, Helene Tursten’s Irene Huss, and Lars Kepler’s Joona Linna (who is actually a Finn working in Sweden); Norwegian investigators like Karin Fossum’s Konrad Sejer, K. O. Dahl’s Frank Frølich, Gunnar Staalesen’s Varg Veum, Gard Sveen’s Tommy Bergmann, and Thomas Enger’s Henning Juul; and a collection of Danes ranging from Jussi Adler-Olsen’s Carl Mørck through Lene Kaaberbøl and Agnete Friis’s Nina Borg to Lotte and Søren Hammer’s Konrad Simonsen and beyond.

  If your mind now feels like a stew of indifferentiable Scandinavian names, well, all I can say is: Welcome to my world. A steady diet of these things will cause anyone to lose track of the individual differences, and this is complicated by the fact that the three countries themselves have a great deal in common. The Swedish currency is the krona, whose plural is kronor, while in Denmark and Norway they are called kroner; as with Canadian and U.S. dollars, they are not worth exactly the same, though all three values are in the same ballpark. The languages, too, manifest a similar “near but not the same” quality. Swedish and Danish, for instance, although often considered (even by their speakers) to be mutually understandable, are apparently different enough to cause confusion, a fact that is pointed out in a number of the novels and also in a recent television program, The Bridge, that is set between the cities of Malmö and Copenhagen. There are definite borders between these three countries—at times heavily enforced borders—but the criminals in these mysteries seem able to flee relatively easily from one to another, in part because of the prevalence of watery modes of transport.

  Overall, the people of these three nations, though they may think of themselves as distinct nationalities, share so many cultural traits that from an American point of view they tend to come across as generally Scandinavian rather than specifically Danish, Swedish, or Norwegian. Perhaps the thing they seem to share most, in fact, is a kind of emphasis on insuperable regional differences within each small country, such that Stockholmers feel superior to citizens of Gothenburg and Malmö, Oslo inhabitants think of Bergen as the sticks, and citizens of Copenhagen view the rest of Denmark as a mere appendage. Or so it would seem from the mysteries these countries export to the rest of the world.

  Because they are mysteries, you might expect that plot is primary. But in fact plot is the first thing to dissolve, at least in my mental reservoir. What I am left with instead is a wide-ranging but rather formless body of knowledge about the way things are done in these three Nordic countries. “Knowledge” may not be quite the right word, since what I’ve learned from these books could well be illusory and is almost certainly distorted. But I do have a number of remarkably clear impressions about this imaginary region, and they run the full gamut, pertaining to many different parts of the culture’s daily and communal existence. I want to get some of this information across to you, but I don’t want to burden you with dozens of summarized murder plots. So, in an effort to contain the chaos, I’ve trammeled my various perceptions into a sequence of logically arranged categories, each of which explores an aspect of how life is lived in my fictional Scandinavia—and perhaps in the real one, too.

  You might well ask why you need to take in all this information (or perhaps non-information, if my assumptions prove wrong), and that is a fair question. The answer lies in the division of our responsibilities. For now, I am posing as the expert, the one who has read all these books, and as such I am attempting to transmit to you in capsule form the fruits of my ill-gotten knowledge. But later on it will be you who has to draw the conclusions about how accurate this so-called knowledge really is. That is, you will be the one responsible for testing the fictional rules I outline here against the reality they supposedly represent.

  I say “you” as if it means something specific, but of course I don’t know exactly who you are. In fact, I don’t have any idea who you are, except that you have been enticed this far into a book that has something to do with Nordic crime fiction. For all I know, you’ve read hundreds more of these books than I have, making you the true expert and me a mere amateur. And on the other hand you could be a complete newcomer, with only a few of these mysteries, or possibly none at all, already under your belt. In
that case, I must warn you that spoilers lie ahead: I couldn’t really summarize my cultural gleanings without giving away a few important plot points in the course of my discussion. If that disturbs you, then please feel free to skip to the appendix, where you will find an annotated list of recommended books that you can read right now, before I have a chance to ruin the plots for you. Or, if you prefer, you can just continue to read onward here, hoping you’ll have forgotten my indiscretions by the time you get around to reading the mysteries. (That’s probably what I would do myself—rely on my own forgetfulness, I mean, since it’s proven itself so consistently in the past.)

  But whichever kind of Scandinavian mystery reader you are, a seasoned expert or a fresh-faced novice, your job from here on in will be the same. You’ll need to take in my cultural assertions with both a high degree of attention and a strong element of doubt. Remember, what is true and what is not true will not be apparent yet. My arguments may sound persuasive, but this is all untested theory so far. You yourself will be doing the actual testing when we get to the second half of the book—and I sense you’ll be up to the task, because I can already tell, based on our acquaintance thus far, that you too have a logical mind.