Scandinavian Crime Wave - in novels, tv and cinema

I had never sought out fictional crime writing from Scandinavia. Instead I typically focused on crime novels coming from Britain in general, and Scotland in particul­ar. But the emergence of Nordic Noir, in cinemas and on television, changed all that for many fans of crime fiction.

Before I examine my own cautious experience with Scand­inavian crime films, let me start with Nathaniel Rich’s article about Scandinavian murder novels, Why the most peaceful people on earth write the greatest homicide thrillers. Rich concluded that Scandinavia must have been a bleak, ungodly, violent place to live. In Oslo, a serial killer tortured his victims (The Devil's Star), while in Stockholm a stalker terrorised young girls in public parks (The Man on the Balcony). In Henning Mankell novels, the small fishing village of Ystad on Sweden's southern shore suffered: torture and execution of an elderly farming couple (Faceless Kill­ers); bodies floating off the coast in a lifeboat (The Dogs of Riga); impalement of a retired bird-watcher (The Fifth Woman); and a teenager’s self-immolation (Sidetracked).

Fortunately there were more fictional characters murdered every year in the pages of Nordic crime novels than were real people murdered in Scand­inavia itself. The Global Peace Index ranks Denmark and Norway as the most peaceful countries re homicides, with Sweden shortly behind. The Nordic countries also consist­ently rank as the happiest countries in the world. So why do such peace-loving soc­ieties produce best-selling authors like Henning Mankell and Stieg Larsson, authors who wallow in a relentlessly bleak view of their world?

The Swedish-speaking version of Wallender

starring Krister Henrik­sson (left)

Rich’s ultimate explanation was simple - crime novels sell. Before 2006, the only contemporary Scandinavian novelist to enjoy major international success was the Dane Peter Høeg eg his book Smilla's Sense of Snow 1997. If Scandin­avian writers wanted their novel to be read abroad, they had to have at least one murder.

The head of drama at DR (Denmark’s public broadcaster) made another point that may not seem intuitively correct. “For much of the world, Scandinavia is a far-off, exotic region experienced only through stories and photographs. From child­hood, we develop a mental image of these frozen countries that blends Vikings, reindeer, saunas, super hero Thor. We’ve been selling the Scandinavian countries as the place where there is light 24 hours a day, blonde girls with blue eyes and Hans Christian Andersen – but we wanted to show the other side, the underbelly. Nordic noir shatters these illusions”.

The better quest­ion for me was: why did non-Scandinavian readers admire these writers? What distinguished them was their evocation of an almost sub­lime tranquillity. When a crime occurred, it was shocking to out­siders specifically because it disrupted a world that seemed utopian in its happiness and peace. Note that Mankell's corpses tended to turn up in serene, bucolic settings. A dark bloodstain in a Swedish field of pure, white snow was far creepier than a body in a rubbish-littered alley in Los Angeles.

In 2004, Stieg Larsson completed the first three novels of a planned group (just before he died). Larsson was even more adept than Mankell at heightening the contrast between con­temporary Stockholm and the tawdriness of his fictional crimes. His Stockholm managed to be both cosmopolitan and charmingly quaint. Larsson’s characters used modern technology yet the main character, Mikael Blomkvist, was a hard-charging investigative journalist left over from the print age. Dirty corruption in the world of glossy magazines and clean cut Ikea!

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo 2011, 
the film based on Stieg Larsson's book of the same name.

The editors of these crime novels loved the new direction for Scan­­d­inavian fiction. On the cover of 2016 book In the Month of the Mid­night Sun by Cecilia Ekbäck, the publishers wrote “From the acclaimed author of Wolf Winter comes a second brilliantly written and gripping historical Nordic Noir thriller with all the intrigue and atmosphere of Burial Rites, the pent-up passion of The Piano and the suspense of The Tenderness of Wolves”. No noir reference was omitted.

**

The first films in this genre that I saw were Stieg Larsson’s group of crime novels, later made into full length feature films: The Girl Who Played with Fire (2009), The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest (2010) and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011).

The film The Girl Who Played with Fire followed Lisbeth Salander, a brilliant but damaged surveillance agent, as she return­ed to Sweden from abroad. She may have murdered a journalist and his girlfriend, as well as her own legal guardian, Nils Bjurman. Magazine publisher Mikael Blomk­vist had to find her, before the authorities did. In Granada, Salander used her conn­ections among the hackers' network to investigate a corrupt and brutal American, Dr Forbes. Salander saw Dr Forbes on the beach with his wife and realised that the American was going to kill his wife for her in­heritance. Salander attacked Forbes and left him to die in a vicious hurricane. As the mur­d­ers continued, I spent half of this film hiding under the cinema seat.

The plot of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo will clarify how very dark Larsson’s books were. In Dec 2002 the publisher Mikael Blomkvist lost a libel case involving allegations he published about a billion­aire financier. He was sentenced to gaol and a hefty fine. Lisbeth Salan­der was hired by the patriarch of the wealthy Vanger family, to investigate Blomkvist. Vanger then hired Blomkvist to investigate the disap­pear­ance and possible murder of his niece back in 1966.

Sal­an­der, who was rul­ed mentally incompetent as a child, was given a new legal guard­ian, Nils Bjurman. Bjurman was a sexual sadist who beat and raped his charge. Having used a hidden camera to record Bjurman raping her, Salander returned to take her revenge, torturing Bjurman. While watching this film, I spent most of the time hiding under the cinema seat :( It was too brutal to watch.

The Bridge

Bodies were found on the bridge linking Sweden and Denmark

The Bridge (2011) was a crime television series created as a joint Swedish-Danish production, moving largely between Malmö and Copen­hagen. The three series of the show starred Sofia Helin as the Swedish police detective Saga Norén, and her Danish equivalent Martin Rohde (Kim Bodnia). Part of the darkness in this programme came from Saga’s Aspergers. She lived alone, picked up sex partners in bars, couldn't empathise with others and appeared cold and blunt. Dead bodies were found on the bridge, in the water and in boats, the results of suicides, murders and terrorism.

The first crime series on tv that I truly enjoyed in Swedish was Wallender. Adapted from Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander novels, Krister Henrik­sson starred as the Swedish policeman. The stories were set in Ystad where the murders were still grisly and sadistic, but the tv programme wasn’t as ugly as Larsson’s films had been.

Wallander soon became a British television series, also adapted from Swedish Henning Mankell's novels. But the British vers­ion star­red the British actor Kenneth Branagh as the Swedish police­man based in Ystad. I did not think having an entirely English-speaking cast would work since the series was full of Swedish arch­itecture, police cars and uniforms, food, weather and landscapes. But it did.

The most recent tv murder mystery series I loved was the BBC production called Shetland (2011), written by Anne Cleeves. I included it in a discussion of Scandinavian Noir because these Scottish islands had been colonised by the Norwegians for hundreds of years, the land­scapes and brooding skies looked Scandinavian and the characters under-acted as they did in The Bridge. Douglas Henshall was wonderful as the lonely, isolated Detect­ive Inspector Jimmy Perez, as was Alison O'Donnell as Detective Sergeant Alison Tosh MacIntosh.

Shetland

Detect­ive Inspector Jimmy Perez and Detective Sergeant Alison MacIntosh

The Finnish series Tellus (2015) debuted successfully at home and was immediately exported abroad. With a classic Nordic-Noir feel, the series revolved around a group of young activists who executed a series of eco-motivated sabotages over the past four years. Their first mistake accidentally killed someone and the group needed to make a decision: to stop or become more effective by doing selective murders. The police did not have a single lead.