A Scandinavia of the Mind

After I attended Iceland Noir, I went looking for some scholarly work on crime fiction—particularly the Scandinavian variety. I wanted to answer the question hovering over the festival and most of its individual panels, namely, why we were there. Why is there so much interest in this specific genre of books? Why is there such a proliferation of titles with dark themes in these northern places?

As I mentioned in my musings on The Bridge, the answer I have been grasping towards is that Nordic Noir reflects back British and American crime stories in an intriguing way. Steeped as they are in the tropes and themes of fiction familiar to us, they can operate the same hooks, the same teasers, while filtering them through a different sensibility that keeps them interesting. At the festival, the answer many authors and presenters kept coming back to was that crime fascinates an Icelander, for example, because the rate of violent incidents in their country is so low. They are drawn to the genre precisely because its contents are unfamiliar. As several authors pointed out, if they lived in the middle of a war zone, they would not write the stories they do.

In looking for critical assessments of the genre, I stumbled across Wendy Lesser’s book, Scandinavian Noir. Lesser is a writer and critic who edits the arts journal The Threepenny Review. I read her book The Amateur a number of years ago, and was charmed by her attempt to recreate the lifestyle of an old school, independent man of letters. I fell upon her account of northern crime, but found her journey through it odder than I was expecting. Much of the book is about the possibly apocryphal impressions she formed of Sweden, Denmark, and Norway in all her reading of crime series set there.

Lesser notes how many stories feature alcohol: “Drink lies behind quite a few of the murders….” And: “Indeed, certain novels suggest that the main reason a Swede might take a ferry to Finland or Poland is to drink steadily at the bar on the way over and back.”

She points to the way bureaucracy hems in the investigators at the heart of the stories. Or the way that people being interviewed at home seem to offer the police coffee and cake in a way they never would in an American novel. One major difference between British/American procedurals and Scandinavian ones is how little the latter deals with the judicial system. Very few courtroom dramas exist in Nordic Noir.

In discussing The Bridge, I commented on the number of woman detectives populating Scandinavian crime. As Lesser points out, though, neither Sarah Lund of The Killing, nor Saga Norén of The Bridge are in charge of their respective investigations. Lesser’s extensive reading in this area also leads her to think that many of the stories exhibit a discomfort around women’s sexuality. And although Per Wahlöö and his partner Maj Sjöwall were a writing team, the books display a male point of view. So Lesser thinks that the vaunted feminism of the genre could be more full-throated or complete.

My favorite was her description of transport:

It made me wonder about the versions of these countries that live only in my head, and how they compare to the real thing. The ferries filled with drinkers reminded me of the huge number of Finnish businessmen in my Leningrad hotel on my teenage trip to the Soviet Union, who were obviously engaged in vodka tourism.

I’m picturing one of those idiosyncratic maps like the old New Yorker cartoon with Manhattan at the center of the world, only this distorted vision is filled with oversized airports and giant bottles of Absolut.