Crime in a cold climate: A reading list

 

Editor’s note: As the cold sets in, Devarsi Ghosh—our in-house connoisseur of the macabre—has drawn up a list of must-read Nordic crime novels. The genre peaked in popularity in the mid-aughts and has remained a pop culture draw for its unique world of brooding detectives, ice-cold environs, and a sharp focus on the corrupt nexus between corporate interests and the government. 

 

The picks, numbered at an unholy 13, also offer a chronology of Nordic crime’s evolution, doubling up as an excellent genre primer.

Written by: Devarsi Ghosh

 

*****

 

The Laughing Policeman by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö: Marxist writer-couple Wahlöö-Sjöwall wrote 10 ‘Martin Beck’ mysteries between 1965 and ’75. These serve as the foundational model for Nordic crime: sociological critique fused with the grime and grind of police procedural. Wahlöö was also a reporter, not unlike those who followed his footsteps, most famous being Stieg Larsson. 

 

The Laughing Policeman is the fourth and most popular of this series. A problem with looping in contemporaneous reportage and sociology into popular fiction is that, at some point, it will get dated. The characterisation of a 16-year-old Portuguese sex worker as a “nymphomaniac” here is an example—an attempt to address the sexual revolution/free love movement of the late ‘60s.

 

 

Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow by Peter Høeg: A clean break from the gritty Marxist procedurals of the ’60s and ’70s, Miss Smilla... marked an early feminist and postcolonial turn for the genre. Høeg’s novel shifts the centre of Nordic crime from the police station to the inner life of an outsider. Smilla, a mixed-race woman in Denmark with roots in Greenland, is the only person who believes that the death of her neighbour's child is not an accident because the only thing she is a hundred percent on is her feeling for snow.

 

Note: the novel is also widely known as Sense of Snow because of the film & television adaptations which are named after the US release of the translation; Feeling for Snow is the UK title which was published before the American version.

 

 

Blackwater by Kerstin Ekman: Ekman swerves further than Høeg. She is not interested in the city but the rural psyche and generational wounds at the heart of Scandinavia. Intertwined with this double-murder investigation in a remote Swedish commune is a matrix of national politics, environmental anxiety, and small-town claustrophobia. Høeg dragged the genre inward. Ekman expanded it outward.

 

 

The Return of the Dancing Master by Henning Mankell: Mankell is best-known for turbocharging the genre by infusing the Martin Beck-style fuss-free procedural with the malaise and brooding found in the films of his father-in-law, Ingmar Bergman.

 

But this book, contrarian as we are, is not from Mankell's popular Kurt Wallander series. This one dives head first into joining the dots between Sweden’s Nazi past and its present-day far-right networks. The protagonist? A policeman with mouth cancer, racing against time to unravel a metastasised ideology. It’s like calculating how far you can twist the knife into a genre to not go too far, just two steps further.

 

 

Jar City by Arnaldur Indriðason: Four steps further as we leave history and ideology and move into the deep, dark future. Iceland’s national DNA database and the ethical minefields around hereditary disease, privacy, and state-run benevolence are the rings of fire detective Erlendur has to navigate. When we have genetic data-gathering companies in Nordic crime, you obviously know where this is going.

 

 

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson: A brave new world calls for a new age detective. If the truth-seeker in the post-war Nordic crime novel was a police detective working from inside the Nordic welfare state, the truth-seekers at the turn of the millennium are a journalist and a hacker aiming to possibly detonate the corrupt state altogether. What would be a police case earlier is now an exposé.

 

The biggest hook of Larsson's millennium trilogy is, of course, the chilly punk-rock Lisbeth Salander, memorably played by Rooney Mara in David Fincher's 2011 adaptation.

 

 

Echoes from the Dead by Johan Theorin: The most refreshing and intimate element of this one is that there is no detective. It’s a grieving mother and a determined grandfather investigating the disappearance of a boy for two decades—and they are closing in on the culprit. There are no cops, computers, conspiracies. Only ghosts in the fog.

 

 

The Beast by Anders Roslund and Börge Hellström: Roslund is a journalist. Hellström, a former criminal turned activist. This duo was lab-created to write Nordic crime novels. Their first work, The Beast, is an extremely raw and violent confrontation with how the justice system and media works in Sweden. The villain is a killer of children. His hunter, the father of a murdered child.

 

So grounded and close to the truth is their work that the then-Prime Minister of Sweden, Fredrik Reinfeldt, invited Roslund after reading his books to have a chat about finding possible solutions to crime in his country. The duo's work came to a halt when Hellström died from cancer in 2017.

 

 

The Murder of Halland by Pia Juul: Surely you have noticed the direction in which Nordic crime has been evolving: a) temporal updating and cultural sophistication with inclusion of more heroines and digital-age crimes; b) the brute masculine detective receding into the background; and c), introducing postmodern twists.

 

Juul's book is an attempt to do all of these and more. It’s a first-person narration of a woman whose husband was just found murdered. But she appears to not give a f**k. The novel consistently bypasses or subverts every cliché. Significantly, the narrator is unreliable. Nothing is solved in the end.

Linda, as in the Linda Murder by Leif G W Persson: A hilarious update on the genre—can call it a parody, even. Unlike the previous entry, every cliché here is dialled up to 11. Persson, also a criminologist, has an insider’s view of police work. The detectives are drunker, meaner, lousier, and more misogynist than ever. The bad guys are no different. The prose has a swing and a sense of humour (right at the outset, cops at the crime scene have names like Adolfsson—”known as Adolf for reasons which are sadly not limited to his family name alone.”) Most brilliantly, Persson also delivers a solid mystery.

 

This is how he introduces his hero, detective Erik Bäckström:

 

Bäckström was short, fat and primitive, but when necessary he could be both sly and slow to forget things. He regarded himself as a wise man in the prime of life, an unfettered free spirit who preferred the quiet life of the city, and since a sufficient number of appetising and scantily clad ladies seemed to share the same view, he had no reason at all for complaint.

 

 

The Man Who Died by Antti Tuomainen: Tuomainen takes Persson’s humour and runs with it into Coen Brothers territory. The hero of this darkly comic pageturner is an affluent mushroom businessman who discovers he is dying from being slowly poisoned. He turns detective to find out who–-or what—is behind this plot. Enter the most absurd characters from the, well, mushroom industry, including men who want to kill him with giant swords!

 

 

The Girl Who Died by Ragnar Jónasson: Ghost story, meet crime novel. Crime novel, ghost story. A melancholic schoolteacher moves to the tip of Iceland to rebuild her life in a village with a population of just 10. Soon, she realises she is not alone in her rented house.

 

Her drinking spikes, as she cannot stop thinking of and comparing herself with her father, who died by suicide. With everyone in the village hiding things from her, the question is: is the fear and paranoia all in her head, or is she on to something?

 

 

The Kingdom by Jo Nesbø: Skipping a Harry Hole (the shoot-first-question-later Hollywood version of the classical Nordic brooder) novel must be criminal to some. No worries; got something better.

 

Jo Nesbø’s sharply observed and dramatically muscular The Kingdom is the story of two brothers, always looking out for each other. They have killed men on their way up in life. But now the cop investigating them is the son of the cop they murdered as kids. Ice-cold Nordic crime spiked with khoon-pasina-baap-ke-liye-badla mass appeal.

 

*****

 

Devarsi Ghosh is Consultant Editor at Advisory.