The Nordic Mystery Boom - Los Angeles Times
Forget Holmes, Marple and Poirot. The Scandinavians have a clue.
By Joe Queenan
May 25, 2008
Americans are often unaware of major cultural trends developing just slightly off the beaten path. Take the Scandinavian Whodunit Boom. A month ago, Karin Fossum’s novel, “The Indian Bride,” won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for best mystery. Fossum, a glum Norwegian, beat out a moody Swede and a German who writes about a severe Finnish cop. Yes, there also were two Irish writers in the running, but there was not a Yank or a Brit in the bunch.
I first became aware of the Nordic Mystery Boom two years ago while dawdling in a bookstore in Philadelphia, my downbeat hometown. Informing the manager that I was tired of the French, the Italians, the Aussies, the Scots and those coy mysteries set in Botswana, I asked if she could recommend something a bit more exotic.
“Try ‘The Dogs of Riga,’ ” she suggested. “It’s Swedish.” And a first-class mystery it was, the latest in a series by Swedish novelist Henning Mankell featuring the chronically depressed detective Kurt Wallander. Wallander is a divorced, middle-aged man whose daughter is a mess, who has a difficult relationship with his elderly father and who is not in great health. He is a patient, plodding gumshoe who often needs some lucky break to crack a case. Based on this description, it is hard to see how Mankell’s books would in any way stand out from the herd.
But Mankell is a deceptively gifted writer who uses the plebian mystery format to address the disintegration of Swedish society, the horrors of old age, the very meaning of police work. In this he resembles, without equaling, the great Belgian novelist Georges Simenon, whose Inspector Maigret series stands second only to Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes saga in the mystery canon. (Some may argue for Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple, but Christie is a conventional mystery writer whose work never even vaguely approaches the level of art.)
I was so taken by “The Dogs of Riga” that I went out and bought eight other Mankell books and within weeks had polished off his entire chilly oeuvre. After that, I read his formidable antecedents, Mag Sjowall and Per Wahloo, whose forlorn 1968 novel, “The Laughing Policeman,” was made into a dispiriting movie starring Walter Matthau. Then I began gobbling up Mankell’s numerous proteges and imitators. God, were they glum.
Finally, I began giving Swedish murder mysteries to fellow mystery lovers as anomalous Christmas presents. Everyone found the morbid atmosphere oddly beguiling. Everyone liked the way Mankell and Fossum told part of the story from the point of view of the murderer. The anomic prose, the obsession with society’s moral collapse, the general avoidance of gangland motifs and the absence of wisecracking that characterizes so much contemporary American crime fiction was a nice change of pace. Wallander did not wear cool clothes and did not have a cool record collection and did not have any cool friends and was not an oenophile. He was an old-fashioned copper trying to figure out why scalped corpses kept turning up all over town. This was true of his peers as well. None of their characters were cool. They were glum.
Mystery lovers are a finicky breed; we share a love of the genre but do not love all its practitioners equally. One of my friends adores Harlan Coben but doesn’t think much of Michael Connelly. This is like admiring Barnum but disliking Bailey. My sister Agnes has read all of Christie, who leaves me cold, while I have devoured 100 books by Simenon, whose charms remain elusive to most Americans. The only other hard-core Maigret fan I know is an ex-Marine who flies corporate jets, does not speak French and has no use for most other mystery writers. But he has read every Simenon book ever translated into English and traveled to Paris just to visit Maigret’s fictional home on the Boulevard Richard Lenoir. cont….
