a few bits and bobs for the ScandiFan

Thanks to Urbanomic’s Yarnwork podcast series there’s a really wonderful in-deph interview with Norwegian crime writer Gunnar Staalesen, whose Varg Veum series is a long-running and much-beloved private detective series that gives the American PI tradition a Nordic twist. Though there were not a lot of private eyes at work in Norway when the series started in the 1970s, this character was able to solve the kinds of crimes that fit Norwegian society from then to the present, winning a pasionate audience. It’s delightful to hear from the author and also to hear him read from his books. Brilliant.

Jørn Lier Horst is joining the group blog, Murder is Everywhere, where he will join a number of writers who take us to various interesting parts of the world.

Novelist and reviewer Sarah Ward of Crimepieces compiles a good list of Scandinavian crime novels in translation for W.H. Smith booksellers.

Another novelist and reviewer, Margot Kinberg, takes a spotlight to Carin Gerhardsen’s The Gingerbread House, giving it a thorough and thoughtful analysis.

In other not-really-news, I’m still very slowly updating my site. So happy that there are people who are more on top of new things like Karen Meek of Euro Crime and the dynamic duo, Lucinda Suber and Stan Ulrich, who are behind the Stop You’re Killing Me Site. I don’t know what avid readers would do without you and other Internet-based forms of perpetual motion.

Norman Rockwell Popular Science image courtesy of Wikipedia.

Petrona Award and more

It’s official: The Petrona Award for the best Scandinavian crime novel of the year has announced its very first shortlist and judges. The finalist will be announced at Crimefest.  From the press release:

The Petrona Award has been established to celebrate the work of Maxine Clarke, one of the first online crime fiction reviewers and bloggers, who died in December 2012. Maxine, whose online persona and blog was called Petrona, was passionate about translated crime fiction but in particular that from the Scandinavian countries.

The shortlist for the 2013 award, which is based on Maxine’s reviews and ratings is as follows:

PIERCED by Thomas Enger, tr. Charlotte Barslund (Faber and Faber)

BLACK SKIES by Arnaldur Indridason, tr. Victoria Cribb (Harvill Secker)
LAST WILL by Liza Marklund, tr. Neil Smith (Corgi)
ANOTHER TIME, ANOTHER LIFE by Leif GW Persson tr. Paul Norlen (Doubleday)

The judges are an erudite and very well-read group – Barry Forshaw, Kat Hall (aka Mrs. Peabody), and Sarah Ward. Find more about the award at Petrona Remembered.

Sarah Ward reviews Sjowall and Wahloo’s The Locked Room at Crimepieces. It’s the eighth in the series and perhaps not the strongest, but Sarah enjoyed the sly ending. She also reviews Leif G. W. Persson’s Linda, as in the Linda Murder, which features Evert Backstrom, who is “compelling and abhorrent. Sexist, racist, homophobic, facetious, work-shy, dismissive of his team . . . and very, very funny,” making her predict readers will either love or loathe this unusual novel.

Jose Ignacio Escribano offers a bilingual review of Anne Holt’s The Blind Goddess, which was the first in the Hanne Wilhelmsen series, though he points out there really are multiple protagonists, rather like the Martin Beck series (a very interesting parallel). Originally published in 1993, this novel won the Riverton prize as best Norwegian crime novel of the year.

Glenn Harper has some good things to say about Lars Kepler’s The Hypnotist, and some criticism, particularly of the flashbacks that bog down the pacing and some cliched characters.

Bernadette reviews Mons Kallentoft’s second seasonally-themed procedural, Summertime Death, and reports that the weather is frightful – hot, muggy, and very well-depicted, as was the cold in the first book. However the novel doesn’t score as well on plot, character development, or plausibility and the inclusion (once again) of voices from beyond the grave doesn’t help.

She fares better with Arnaldur Indridason’s Black Skies, which uses the sidekick Sigurdur Oli as its main character, with Erlendur off somewhere for reasons unclear. Though Sigurdur Oli is a pretty average bloke, he turns out to be quite complex – as does that plot, which appears fairly straightforward until you try to summarize it, at which point the author’s narrative skills in layering lots of material without cluttering things up becomes apparent. (I so want to read this book!)

Col (who has decided to review at least on Scandinavian mystery a month – hurrah) has high praise for an earlier book in the series, The Draining Lake, which does a good job of layering stories from different time periods.  

Col adds Stieg Larsson’s The Girl Who Played With Fire to his criminal library and gives it mixed marks, with the action-packed second-half making up for a slow and plodding start. He liked it enough to read the third.

NancyO reviews Helene Tursten’s The Golden Calf, which she felt was a bit disappointing in the end, though the pacing and the character of Sana, a spoilt child-woman who doesn’t help the police figure things out, was well drawn.

Raven Crime Reads also has review of the book, and now plans to catch up on the earlier volumes, having found it a well-crafted procedural that is less gloomy than many Nordic novels.

Harry Hole gets around. There’s a review of The Phantom in the Philippine Daily Inquirer by Ruel S. De Vera, who finds it darkly intoxicating.

Marilyn Stasio of the New York Times was not terribly impressed by Alexander Soderberg’s The Andalusian Friend, which she thinks might have been amusing if written by Donald Westlake rather than treated seriously.

The New York Public Library has a roundup of the usual suspects of Nordic crime fiction, with links to audio pronouncing names that I know I mangle often enough. Especially Sjowall and Wahloo! (Hat tip to Sarah Ward.)

The Guardian reports that a series based on Arne Dahl’s Intercrime series will be broadcast in the UK by the BBC. Let’s hope this will spur on translations. It took years and years for Misterioso to finally appear in English.

Bitch Magazine has an interesting article by Soraya Roberts on the Scandinavian-feminist take on the standard tropes of film noir, including in her analysis the Millennium Trilogy, Forbrydelsen (The Killing), Borgen, and Bron/Broen (The Bridge).  She concludes

The importance of noir heroines like Lisbeth Salander, Sarah Lund, Saga Norén, and Birgitte Nyborg Christensen is not only to put women on an equal footing with men—we can be just as work obsessed and as socially inept as you—but, more important, to change the traditional view of women as victims. By updating the women in noir from sex objects and victims to protectors—of both women and men—Nordic noir series are setting a precedent for other genres to accept. If the trench coat fits, a hero is a hero regardless of gender.

An article in Slate by techno-skeptic EvgenyMorozov tipped me off to an intriguing website that eschews algorithms and instead asks various prominent folks for their book recommendations, humanizing curation and perhaps doing it better. FiveBooks asks Jo Nesbo which novels he recommends and the answers are interesting (and not what one might expect. Or perhaps even find particularly rewarding in every case. Rivington, for example, is … well, for example may be exactly how to put it, as an important historical contributor to Norwegian crime whose stories, according to Nesbo, very much reflect the tastes of his time. (NB: quite a few of us use humans as curators. I suspect most readers are far more responsive to and satisfied by “you might also like” statements when they come from friends.)

… and more accumulated links

As a sign of how terribly behind I am, Peter announced way back on November 22nd that Lief G. W. Persson’s Den döende detektiven won the prize for the best work of Swedish crime fiction, the third time Persson has won the prize. (Obviously, if you want to know what’s going on with Scandinavian crime fiction, keep an eye on Peter’s Nordic Bookblog.

Publishers Weekly covered the wave of interest in Scandinavian crime fiction following on the Larsson tsunami.

Peter Rozovsky comments on a Wall Street Journal article recounting e-mails between Stieg Larsson and his editor; as always, the conversation Peter starts is always entertaining.

University College, London’s Scandinavian Studies department has started a book club with its own blog. Quite a book club – Hakan Nesser is dropping by in February.

BBC4 aired a documentary titled Nordic Noir featuring interviews with Maj Sjowall and Hakan Nesser as well as commentary by Barry Forshaw (Stieg Larsson’s biographer) and smart analysis by Val Mcdermid (a Scottish crime writer who is herself very good, indeed). If you missed the show, you can at least read reports by Martin Edwards, Norm (aka Uriah),  (Norm gets the “best comeback” award for a FriendFeed Crime and Mystery room comment, recalling the program’s coverage of Smilla’s Sense of Snow: “We have several words for snow here in Devon, but not all are suitable for posting.” It has been an unusually Nordic winter in the UK.) Move coverage of the television program at The Scotsman.

The Guardian looks at three actors who have played Wallander in two Swedish and one British television series. Each has something slightly different to offer and (like the denizens of Lake Wobegon) all are above average. Norm takes a closer look at one of them, Rolf Lassgard, who he thinks is probably the closest in resemblance to the fictional character and whose work is supported by a strong cast and good cinematography.

Also in the Guardian, Norwegian author Anne Holt offers her top ten female detectives, which include Lizbeth Salander, Annika Bengtzon, and (a new one to me) Anne-kin Halvorsen, from a series by Kim Småge, featuring a character whom Holt calls “the foremother of all Scandinavian female detectives.”

The Black Sheep Dances wraps up her Scandinavian Fiction Challenge, which attracted 78 participants. She promises an even harder challenge for the new year. Jose Ignacio Escribano reports on how he met the challenge. And Bernadette has found another Scandinavian challenge for 2011 to keep her slimming her bank account and mining Mount TBR in the coming year.

Peter brings news that Eva Gabrielsson will be publishing a biography of her famous partner, Steig Larsson. It will be published in the US by Seven Stories Press.

AM New York has recommendations for those whose only acquaintance with Scandinavian crime fiction is Larsson’s trilogy. So does The Bookreporter.

Rolling Stone has an article (available to subscribers only) on the “Stieg Larsson industries” by Nathaniel Rich; an interview with him can be read online. He concludes that the Millennium Trilogy was Larsson’s way of supporting his true passion – his impassioned journalism and his publication, Expo‘s, attack on racism – by writing a savvy bestseller. “He was a great student of the crime novel. He knew the formula exactly and he knew what worked,” according to Rich, and he needed money to keep the neo-Nazis on notice.

It’s the season of lists, bests, and tops, and Stieg Larsson’s Girl is everywhere. The Bookreporter names The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest the book of the year and the three books the trilogy of the decade. Also on their tops for the year were Camilla Lackberg and Lars Keppler. The Metro’s tops list includes Yrsa Sigurdardottir’s Ashes to Dust, Hakan Nesser’s The Inspector and Silence, and Jo Nesbo’s The Snowman. No doubt there are many others on many more tops lists that have escaped my notice.

But the blog with the intriguing title A Huge Spider for Daddy offers a different ending for the Girl Who Played With Fire, provided by a six year old who hasn’t read it yet, but knows how it must end. The girl, you see, smokes “stigarettes” – and you know those are bad for your health.

reviews, recipes, and tours

After being too busy at work to post, I have lots of links backed up to share …

Barry Forshaw reviews Jo Nesbo’s The Snowman for The Independent and calls it his most ambitious book.

What sort of issues do you expect your crime fiction to cover? If you feel that personal responsibility, cracks in the welfare state and the problems of parenthood are fair game for the crime novel, then Jo Nesbø is your man. All of these (and many more) are crammed into his weighty latest book, The Snowman.

If, however, your taste is for tough and gritty narratives with a relentlessly page-turning quality, well… Jo Nesbø is still your man. That he is able to combine the urgency of the best storytellers with a keen and intelligent engagement with social issues may well be the reason why Nesbø is shaping up to be the next big name in Scandinavian crime fiction, now that Mankell is on the point of retiring Kurt Wallander and Stieg Larsson is hors de combat.

NancyO, who blogs at The Year in Books, Reviews Box 21 and finds it a great read, but nothing like Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy (as it is being marketed in the US) – rather it’s “a dark book all the way through to the last page, which actually made my blood run cold. There are no feel-good or warm fuzzy moments here, no happy endings, and you will definitely have food for thought after you’ve finished.”

The Globe and Mail has a review of Henning Mankell’s Man from Beijing. The crimes that open the book turn out to be less important to the story than “the history of Chinese enslavement in America, the course of communism in China and, in the grand scheme of things, the relationship between East and West. And in those terms, it’s a great read.”

Mack captures Camilla Lackberg’s Ice Princess and pronounces it gripping and written in a style that he enjoys.

Peter reviews Liza Marklund’s Paradise and recommends it highly. He also finds The Stonecutter by Camilla Lackberg very entertaining. And at another blog (Peter gets around) he also has some words of praise for Kirsten Ekman’s Blackwater.

Camilla Lackberg names her five favorite mysteries by Scandinavian writers.

Norman (aka Uriah) is intrigued by the regional accents that define differences in Scandinavian mysteries. He also has a handy list of Harry Hole videos.  And announces an award for The Leopard which, one hopes, will be translated into English eventually.

Cathy of Kittling Books is underwhelmed by Yrsa Sigurdardottir’s Last Rituals but likes the lead character.

Skye isn’t reading much lately, but she enjoyed the Branagh version of Wallander is looking forward (a bit nervously) to the film version of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. She writes of the BBC series

…the three mysteries that make up the mini-series all take place around midsummer, so instead of suffering from a lack of light like so much Swedish crime fiction, they suffer from an, assumedly, intentional overabundance. The films seems hyper-saturated with light, and the irony, that even at the height of midsummer with light radiating from every crack, crime still abounds, is not lost.

Nicholas Wroe profiles Henning Mankell in The Guardian.

WETA has an interview with him.

J. Sydney Jones interviews Norwegian author K. O. Dahl at the “Scene of the Crime.”

At Euro Crime, Maxine reviews Lackberg’s The Stonecutter;  she also reviews Sjowall and Wahloo’s The Locked Room, and Michelle Peckham reviews Mankell’s The Man Who Smiled.

As she nears the end of the “alphabet of crime fiction,” Maxine discusses James Thompson’s Snow Angels finding things to like, but a denouement that didn’t hold up.

The Hypercrime blog rounds up several stories about Scandinavian crime fiction.

Ian MacDougal writes a lengthy review and analysis of the Millennium Trilogy for n+1, “The Man Who Blew Up the Welfare State,” (prompting the FriendFeed room to wonder when the fascination with Larsson will blow over). He writes that the trilogy has two themes: “the failure of the welfare state to do right by its people and the failure of men to do right by women.” And he tackles them with a kind of optimistic idealism.

The typical Swedish detective solves the crime but leaves intact what facilitates it—the broken institutions of the welfare state. The castle in the air, the delusion of a perfect progressive utopia, persists after the case is closed. For Larsson the story’s not over until the state’s blown up, if only in the reader’s mind.

Although there is an obvious analogy to recent American forays into the crime genre, like the HBO series The Wire, this only points to what sets Larsson apart—a particularly Scandinavian optimism that insists it’s never too late to effect real change. Larsson, unlike David Simon, doesn’t see institutional dysfunction as a tragic wheel driven around by some essential human flaw. Larsson the idealist believes that an opposing force, if applied strongly enough, can slow that wheel, if not bring it to a grinding halt.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel suggests some enticing recipes to go with Scandinavian crime fiction, in which too many of its heroes live on a diet of pizza.

The Times takes a Larssonized view of Stockholm. A Swedish website offers a crime-flavored tour of Sweden. And this link dates back to the blizzards that have long since melted away. A writer for the Washington Post took the Millennium Trilogy tour of Stockholm, had to buy boots for a bit of snow. Then returned home to a blizzard.

a snow-covered god jul post

Having gotten distracted by work, here’s a catch-up post of things that have accumulated over the past few weeks…

A blogger who “never stops reading – no matter what” has added Kjell Eriksson’s The Cruel Stars of Night to her Year in Books blog. She says “I love the way Eriksson writes and I love the slow and methodical pacing of this novel” though she takes issue with a plot turn that required the protagonist to be momentarily dimwitted. But she forgives the lapse and says she can “definitely recommend Cruel Stars of the Night to those who enjoy a really good police procedural, and to those who also enjoy psychological suspense.”

She also reviews a book from Finland written by an American who lives there (and first was published in Finnish) –James Thompson’s Snow Angels. There are some coincidences in the plot, she feels, and some of the characters are not as fleshed-out as she would like, but it has its strong points. “I was drawn in by the author’s ability to set the tone of the bleakness of life above the Arctic Circle in Finland, where it’s dark and cold and to pass the time, people have little to do other than drink. The atmosphere was so well laid out for the reader that for a time you can imagine yourself there.” This one is in my TBR so I will be reporting my reaction here before long.

Peter broods over the meaning of the brooding detective while recommending Arnaldur Indridason’s Erlendur series at Detectives Beyond Borders. As always, his blog is really a salon with many interesting comments on Scandinavians, Italians, families, and more.

The Nekkidblogger (brrrr!) predicts that The Hypnotist by “Lars Keppler” will be the next Stieg Larsson-like sensation even though Lars Keppler is actually a collaboration of two literary authors.

Lars Kepler does not exist. Huge sensation. Lars Kepler turned out to be a pseudonym for two literary authors, husband-and-wife Alexandra Coelho Ahndoril and Alexander Ahndoril, now writing under the pseudonym Lars Kepler. They have so far barely been able to sustain themselves economically by their writing. Now they wanted to make money. And in Sweden, crime fiction writers make big money. And, of course, when in Sweden, do as the Swedes. So they decided to write crime fiction, using a cool name.

The Nordic Book Blog reviews Ake Edwardson’s Death Angels which he finds a “well constructed police procedural” though less polished than the later books in the series. This was the first, though the most recent to be translated into English.

Naomi of The Drowning Machine reviews Asa Larsson’s The Black Path which she feels suffers from excessive exposition and draggy pacing. “The Black Path has atmosphere to spare, a hallmark of Swedish crime fic, and the characters are thoroughly developed. When I say thoroughly I mean to the point that the details of every character’s life, past and present, drag the pace down to NASCAR (National Association of Snail Crawling and Roundaboutation) speed. . . . An unlikely blood bath as the climax combined with what seemed a brief and pointless interjection of romance at novel’s end, all left me unmoved.” In the comment thread that follows she points out that others who read the book felt differently, but I had many of the same reservations though I was not quite so … em, expressive.

Several bloggers participating in the ABC of crime fiction meme have highlighted Scandinavian crime fiction including

• F is for Fossum (Maxine at Petrona)
• H is for Hakan Nesser (Norm aka Uriah at Crime Scraps)
• I is for Indridason (Dorte on The Draining Lake – I won’t quibble that A should be for Arnaldur, as Icelanders don’t actually have last names)
• J is for Jungstedt (Maxine at Petrona who has reviewed Unseen, Unspoken, and Unknown)
• L is for Lackberg (Dorte again, who offers an appetizer of a book that hasn’t yet made it into English)
• L is also for Asa Larsson (Maxine at Petrona)
• L is furthermore for Leif Davidson (Norm aka Uriah at Crime Scraps)

I have not been playing along, but I might propose A is for Alvtegen, B for Burman, C for Camilla Lackberg,  D for K.O. Dahl, and E for Edwardson … maybe I’ll have enough time to play in the new year. Or maybe not.

Maxine at Petrona points out that Ake Edwardson’s Sun and Shadow, Arnaldur Indridason’s Voices, and Liza Marklund’s The Bomber qualifies for Christmas Crime. Kerrie, who started both memes at her Mysteries in Paradise, scored both with Voices, using it for both the letter I and for Christmas Crime.

More BBC Wallander is on the way.

Those in the UK NZ get to see the Girl on film starting on boxing day, or so this site claims (when I read it properly). Ali has already gotten a sneak peek as well he should, being the world number one fan (GiRl WiTh ThE dRaGoN tAtToO GiRl WiTh ThE dRaGoN tAtToO GiRl WiTh ThE dRaGoN tAtToO GiRl WiTh ThE dRaGoN tAtToO GiRl WiTh ThE dRaGoN tAtToO GiRl WiTh ThE dRaGoN tAtToO GiRl WiTh ThE dRaGoN tAtToO GiRl WiTh ThE dRaGoN tAtToO GiRl WiTh ThE dRaGoN tAtToO GiRl WiTh ThE dRaGoN tAtToO GiRl WiTh ThE dRaGoN tAtToO GiRl WiTh ThE dRaGoN tAtToO GiRl WiTh ThE dRaGoN tAtToO). So did Craig Sisterton in New Zealand. Those of us in the US can twiddle our thumbs. We’re used to it.

Americans, however, will be resposible for a remake. This is not a very good form of revenge.

A Danish film journal has an analysis of the gender roles in the films which, fortunately for us unschooled yanks, is in English. The authors contrast the treatment of gender in the books with the depiction in the films.

Our main argument is that the adaptation from novel to film involves an alteration of the gender representations in the two main characters, and that this alteration corresponds to the genre-specific and media-specific conditions associated respectively with the genre thriller versus crime fiction and with the format of the film versus that of the novel. In examining these differences in relation to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, we draw on the fact that gender is a central issue in Nordic crime fiction as bestseller and cultural commodity.

Basically, the authors argue that the gender relationships are simplified in the film as it is condensed for the shorter storytelling format. When I finally get a chance to see the films, I’ll see if I agree.

Finally, glædelig jul, Hyvää joulua ja onnellista uutta vuotta, gleðileg jól og farsælt komandi ár, god jul og godt nytt år, and god jul och gott nytt år! I leave you with a photo from Minnesota of King Gustav Adolph enjoying our white Christmas….

"... I seem to have something in my eye..."

two for the road

Allison Flood of the Guardian points out that Scandinavian crime fiction is making waves (does her surname lead to nautical metaphors?), topping European bestseller lists.  Stieg Larsson, not too surprisingly, takes first place. Micheal Carlson finds the study an Irresistible Target. The number of Swedes on the list is striking; so is the paucity of English (UK and US) titles, but Carlson points out that both J.K. Rowling and Stephanie Meyer would have vied for second place except they’re not writing for adults.  Peter also comments at his Nordic Bookblog.

Two Scandinavian mysteries are included on Booklist’s list of best debuts of the year – Tim Davys’s Amberville (“everything works in Davys’ surprisingly metaphysical take on some classic crime-fiction tropes. The publisher describes it as The Big Sleep meets Animal Farm, and frankly, we can’t do any better than that”) and Johann Theorin’s Echoes from the Dead (“Theorin skillfully uses dramatic irony to draw the reader into the story. Sweden landed on the crime-fiction map with Henning Mankell’s procedurals, but Marie Jungstedt, Asa  Larsson, and now Theorin have added psychological thrillers to the mix. “) There’s also a hard-boiled gazeteer entry – this time for Latin America.

Mari Jungstedt and Kerrie’s best lists

Glen Harper reviews Mari Jungstedt’s The Inner Circle (apparently published in the UK under the title A Lonely Place – shades of Dorothy Hughes) finding the setting and the straightforward style to overcome what might be a melodramatic plot. In a comment, Maxine mentions she found it the weakest of the three books in the series because of the cliched plotline. I’ll link to her Euro Crime review here when it’s published.

While I’m at it, I’ll mention that many Scandinavian writers were mentioned by readers who took up Kerrie’s challenge at Mysteries in Paradise to list their top crime fiction reads of 2008. It’s a wonderfully international list of people’s favorites.When Kerrie totted up the results, Stieg Larsson topped the list with The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Also mentioned by more than one blogger: Arnaldur Indridason (Arctic Chill and The Draining Lake), Jo Nesbo (The Redbreast, The Devil’s Star, Nemesis), and Karen Fossum (Black Seconds). Also mentioned by readers were Faceless Killers by Henning Mankell, Kjell Eriksson’s Demon of Dakar, Asa Larsson’s Sun Storm / Savage Altar, Johan Theorin’s Echoes from the Dead, Yrsa Siggarddottir’s Last Rituals, and Hakan Nesser’s The Mind’s Eye.

What strikes me, reading this list, is that though we tend to think of “Scandinavian crime fiction” as if it’s a unitary thing, there’s a great deal of variety.  Perhaps there are gloomy detectives (Erlendur and Wallander qualify) but Van Veeteren isn’t – and though Nesbo’s Harry Hole has his problems and makes a few extra in case he runs short, gloom isn’t part of his character. They are realistic and deal with social issues, but there’s a touch of a Gothic element in Johan Theorin’s work, and some wildly inventive dramatics in that of Asa Larsson – not to mention a greater incidence of ritual murder and bizarre behavior than is generally found in real life. One generalization that I think can be made fairly is that there’s a lot of crime fiction being written, and a lot of it is extraordinarily good. Maybe that’s the only commonality we really need.