The Rise of Nordic Crime Fiction

The Nordic Crime Wave
a lecture on the characteristics and popularity of
Nordic crime fiction and its reworking and
renewal of American formats

NJC Kulturtræf, New York 2011
Kjetil Sandvik, MA, PH.D., associate professor, Dept. of Media, Cognition and Communication,
University of Copenhagen

Agenda
• A little something about the research project
Crime Fiction and Crime Journalism in
Scandinavia (putting this talk into context)
• The Nordic Crime Fiction: as part of a tradition
and as something with its own characteristics
• The Nordic Crime Fiction Wave: why is Nordic
crime fiction so populær at home and in
Germany, in UK… in USA
• Impacts from Nordic crime fictions: remakes –
from Insomnia and Nightwatch to The Girl with
the Dragon Tattoo and The Killing

In 1949 Chandler defined the
mystery novel as “a form which
has never really been licked”, and
proudly claimed: “Since its form
has never been perfected, it has
never become fixed. The
academicians have never got
their dead hands on it. It is still
fluid, still too various for easy
classification, still putting out
shoots in all directions.”

Crime fiction and crime
journalism in Scandinavia
• 3- year research project, extended to 4 years,
funded by the Danish Council for
Independent Research
• Participants: 6 senior researchers and 1
PH.D student + associated researchers in
Denmark, Sweden, Germany, Holland, Italy,
England, USA
• Output: 3 international conferences, two
anthologies, several conference papers and
articles, loads of interviews and media
appearances, final book series of 7 volumes

Nordic crime fiction
influencing the world…?
• Swedish crime fiction and eventually also
crime fiction from the other Nordic
countries have become increasingly
popular both in the rest of Europe
(especially Germany) and in the USA
• Millenniun trilogy occupied 1-3 on USA‟s
bestseller list in January
• Still it is good to remember that crime
fiction is not a Nordic invention: it evolves
from a British and an American tradition…

Ronald Knox (1888-1957), “Ten Commandments of
Detection”
1. The criminal must be mentioned in the early part of the
story, but must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader
has been allowed to know.
2. All supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as
a matter of course.
3. Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable.
4. No hitherto undiscovered poisons may be used, nor any
appliance which will need a long scientific explanation at
the end.
5. No Chinaman must figure in the story.
6. No accident must ever help the detective, nor must he ever
have an unaccountable intuition which proves to be right.
7. The detective himself must not commit the crime.
8. The detective is bound to declare any clues which he may
discover.
9. The stupid friend of the detective, the Watson, must not
conceal from the reader any thoughts which pass through
his mind: his intelligence must be slightly, but very slightly,
below that of the average reader.
10. Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear
unless we have been duly prepared for them.

Instead of the corporeal sensations that had
previously spiced up the narrative recipes of the
sensational and the gothic, readers were offered
intellectual enigmas that were associated with the
technique of fair play.

Clue-puzzle
Whodunit
Golden Age of Detective
Fiction

• Nordic crime fiction is
more influenced by the
American tradition than the
British
• Hard-boiled detective
stories
• (troubled chararcters such as
Spade and Marlow are
mirrored in Martin Beck, Kurt
Wallander, Annika Bengtzon,
Sarah Lund…)
• Police procedurals
• (focus on investigation
processes in the tradition of
e.g. Ed McBain‟s stories from
87th precinct)
• The thriller as format

Dashiell Hammett, Red Harvest
(1929), The Maltese Falcon
(1930; film 1931, 1941)

Raymond Chandler, “The Simple
Art of Murder” (1944)
It is the ladies and gentlemen of
what Mr. Howard Haycraft […]
calls the Golden Age of detective
fiction that really get me down. This
age is not remote. […] Two-thirds or
three-quarters of all the detective
stories published still adhere to the
formula the giants of this era
created, perfected, polished and sold
to the world as problems in logic
and deduction.

Heirs
 Contemporary crime fiction with a social
conscience: Maj Sjöwahl and Per Wahlöö (1965-
75): ‟The story of crime‟ (ten novels featuring
Martin Beck)
 1990 - 2008:
 In Sweden: Henning Mankell and Liza Marklund;
Arne Dahl, Haakan Nesser, Jan Guillou, Inger
Frimansson, Karin Alvtegen, and Åsa Nilsson
 In Norway: Gunnar Staalesen, Jo Nesboe, Karin
Fossum, Kim Smaage and Anne Holt
 Genre development: the historical and mythical
crime novel, mixtures between historical and
contemporary forms, existential and psychological
types, feminist types, metafictions

© Gunhild Agger

Film and TV drama
 Beck: based on characters created by
Sjöwahl and Wahlöö.
 Wallander: based on characters created by
Henning Mankell.
 Varg Veum: based on characters created by
Gunnar Staalesen
 Danish exceptions: Unit One and The Eagle,
both TV crime series: Emmy awards in 2002
and 2005 (best foreign productions). The
Killing nominated 2007 & 2008.
 Computer game industry, e.g. Lisa
Marklund´s Dollar – The Game (PAN Vision
Studio 2006). But games are primarily tied to
the cross-media production of TV series.

© Gunhild Agger

Users want to solve the crime mystery themselves

Gender and crime fiction
• Major characteristica: feminist point of
view  ‟femi krimi‟
• Anne Holt‟s novels featuring detective
Hanne Willumsen and Lisa Marklunds
novels featuring crime journalist Annika
Bengtson are major exponents of this
specific ‟trade-mark‟ within Nordic crime
fiction.

Gender and crime fiction
• Crime fictions TV series built around strong female
figures developing after the 1990s:
• Major inspiration: Jane Tennison in Prime Suspect
1991-2006
• SE: Anna Holt
• SE: Eva Höök
• DK: Anna Pihl
• Or featuring strong female major characters:
• SE: Lisbeth Salander in The Millennium-trilogy
• DK: Ingrid Dahl in Unit One, Sarah Lund in The
Killing, Katrine Ries Jensen in Den som dræber

The female character
• Troubled characters
• Personality problems
• Family problems
• Love problems
• Problems with authorities
• complex characters, complex stories
• “Take a fictional female detective who
inspects crime scenes in the morning,
interrogates her suspects at noon and picks
up her three-year old at daycare after work.
Now call it Nordic noir and await the
accolades” (Reuters)

Real crime
• In Denmark 50-80 homicides a year
• The detection rate is more than 90 %
• The risk of being exposed to crime (theft,
malicious damage or violence) in Denmark
has fallen about 20 % during the period
from 1987 to 2005
• A peaceful part of the world creating a
huge interest in fictitious crime as well as in
crime journalism
• Studies by Karen Klitgaard Povlsen show that the
interest in crime fiction, crime documentaries and
crime journalism is opposite propotional with the
actual crime rate: more peaceful = more interest in
crime stuff

Social criticism
• Criminals in paradise
• The darker side of the wellfare-state
• The decay of the wellfare-state:
individualism, nationalism, globalization
• The wellfare-model turn the blind eye to
deviating individuals and groupings, e.g.
extremists…
• Nordic crime fiction portaits a darker, more
violent and sinister version of the Nordic
contries

The joy of crime fiction
• Main assumption: we read to uncover and reveal
the plot
• When it comes to crime fictions the joy and
excitement in reading (watching, playing) are
fueled by our attempts to reveal and solve the
crime (the core of the crime fiction‟s plot) which
are being carried out along side and in
„competition‟ with the with the protagonist (the
detective, the investigator).
• We do not just read for the plot on the level of the
story, we also do it on the level of the characters
of the story and thus we engaged ourselves in
playing the plot.
• We submit to an investigative reading in which the
exploration of both events (the crime) and place
(the crime scene) are at play

The joy of crime fiction
• A well-working crime fiction facilitates a double plot-reading by
enabling a certain form of agency and embodiment:
• - by putting out traces and clues and leaving possibilities for
interpretations and solutions open to us, the structure of the
crime fiction grants us the possibility of carrying out the tasks
of investigation.
• The crime fiction creates a structure and space for actions
into which we not just project ourselves in the act of reading
but in which we also may participate actively.
• A classic „who-dunnit‟ novel or movie is an invitation to the
reader/viewer to deliver the answer before Poirot, Marple,
Barnaby does it
• An American-modeled crime fiction (the police procedural
fiction) with its emphasis on the investigation more than on
who-did-it is an invitation to the reader/viewer to engage in the
work of crime investigation along side the detectives and the
CSI-team

The realism contract
• The crime scene as a cultural concept, which is connected to
a certain historical and criminological heritage as well as to
popular culture.
• A strong sense of place and high degree of realism is crucial
to crime stories.
• Fictional crime stories do not unfold in fantastic worlds (or
they do so very seldom): they may take place in the past or in
the future, but they always carry a contract of realism even
when it comes to a sci-fi film noir movie like Ridley Scott‟s
Blade Runner.
• And the most popular crime series in Scandinavia at the time
uses actual places as its narrative setting.
• The characteristics of these places, which are described in
detail, play a crucial role in the way these crime stories are
told:
• It is e.g. of great importance to the stories told in novels by the
Norwegian author Anne Holt that they take place not in some
fictional big city, but in a specific part of Oslo (Grenland), with
its very own demographical and historical conditions.

The importance of place
• Crime fictions are (often) set in actual places
– Simenon‟s Paris
– Hammet‟s San Francisco
– Chandler‟s or Connelly‟s Los Angeles, Burke‟s New
Orleans,
– Rankin‟s Edinburgh
– Staalesen‟s Bergen
– Larsson‟s or Marklund‟s Stockholm
– Mankell‟s Ystad
• By using these places as location for their crime
stories, as their ‟scene of the crime‟ these authors
(and the film and TV producers using the same
locations), are plotting this places in ways that may be
used also for more playable murder-plots such as
murder tours/walks.

When tourists embark on one of this tours, they are taken on a guided
walk through parts of the actual towns working as „scenes of the crime‟
in Stieg Larsson‟s or Henning Mankel‟s novels, but following the trails
laid out not by some historical person or chain of historical events
(like in the case of Jack the Ripper-tour s in London) but by fictional characters
(Blomqvist/Salander or Wallander) and their actions and thus the actual
places have become partly fiction.

The crime scene as a plottted
place
• Crime scenes are constituted by a
combination of a plot and a place.
• The place that has been in a certain state
at a certain moment in time, i.e. the
moment at which the place constituted the
scene for some kind of physical activity,
which has changed its nature.
• Thus the place carries a plot (a narrative),
which at first is hidden and scattered and
has to be revealed and pieced together
through a process of investigation and
exploration with the aid of different forensic
methods, eye-witnesses and so on; -
through reading and interpretation.

• By rearranging the furniture she changes the scene from one
of passionate actions to one of torture and execution:
• The victim has been tied to a chair and tortured to make her
say something and then she has been stabbed to death.
• And as a result of this operation and Lund‟s ability to perform
logical reasoning and deductive thinking, a specific clue – the
cellophane wrapping of a video cassette found on the floor –
can now be fitted into the narrative:
• The murder is not about passion and rage, it is about making
a statement and therefore the murderer(s) has/have
videotaped the event.
• Due to her way of performing her investigative action – and
actually altering the place – Sarah Lund can suggest a
narrative of a political motivated murder which also explains
the specific finding site: the murderer(s) is/are sending a
political message (which proves to be true when the recording
of the murder turns up in the shape of (what appears to be) an
Islamic fundamentalist video file on the Internet at the end of
the episode).

Why is it so popular?
• Strong and realistic plots and use of
places
• Complex and realistic characters
• Social criticism: the dark side of the
peaceful Nordic wellfare-state
• (e.g. in The Killing 2:
• extremism
• corruption
• war crimes)
• All set in exotic landscapes

Narrative setting in BBC’s Wallander

Impact and influences
• The import from UK and the USA still prevails (important when the
question is who is influencing who)
• Scandinavian books as well as films and TV series (both originals
and formats) are produced and screened domestically as well as
exported to other countries
• Millennium-trilogy sells 35 mill. copies world-wide, Mankell out-classes Rowling on the
German language market...)
• In 2008, Wallander was adapted by BBC and produced using Ystad
as location with Kenneth Branagh as Kurt Wallander.
• The story still takes place in Ystad (with no attempt on hiding the fact that this is a
Sweedish town).
• Same production company (Yellow Bird)
• 2010: remake of The Killing for the US marked:
• story is moved to Seattle but both plot, characters and scenery are very close to the
Danish original
• 2011: remake of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
• Shot partly on location in Stockholm, co-production with the company who made the
Swedish version (Yellow Bird).
• Very little footage released – but the aesthetics seem to resemble the Swedish version.
• Striking resemblance between Rooney Myra‟s and Noomi Rapace‟s Salander-
character.

US remakes: The Girl with the
Dragon Tattoo

Noomi Rapace Not Noomi Rapace

US remakes: The Killing

Same hair-do, same sweather

Use of same types of lighting

The blue filter trademark
used in Unit One, The Eagle
and The Killing

Use of same type of set-
design

Use of the similar looking
characters

Use of same cross-media
strategy

• The remake is being so true to the Danish
original‟s plot, characters and atmosphere
that it almost looks like a perfectly dubbed
foreign language movie.
» Alessandra Stanley, New York Times

• The Killing is soaked in atmosphere and
steeped in the stark realism of Scandinavian
crime novelists Henning Mankell and Stieg
Larsson. The Killing is not as much about a
young girl's murder as it is a psychological
study of what happens afterward, how a
tightknit community tries to recover and how
a dead child's mother, father and siblings
learn to deal with their pain in their own
private ways.
» Alex Strachan, Postmedia News March 25th 2011

Closing questions
• Are we witnessing with the remake of
Nordic crime fictions a ‟Nordification‟ of
American crime fiction – the introduction of
a ‟Nordicness‟ in the adaptation and
adjustment of non-American fiction to the
American market?
• Or are we just witnessing the easy
implementation of a brand of crime fiction
which in basic is American regarding plot,
characters and aesthetics?

The Rise of Nordic Crime Fiction

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