This is an interesting BBC documentary explaining where Nordic Noir came from. The same team have also done a documentary on Italian noir. Hopefully they'll realise soon that the magnetic pole in world crime writing is gradually shifting across the Irish Sea...
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A S Byatt discussed her preference for Norse tales over Greek myths on Radio 4 this morning. It helps to explain the relative darkeness of much of her own work for me.
Here's wishing you and yours every success for 2012.
Tales
I agree with Jonathan Meades that we should stop looking for archetypes in the sunny Mediterranean when there are more appropriate ones in Scandinavia or even at home in the rich folklore of the British Isles. I wish more people would read The Golden Bough.
Happy New Year to you too!
I wonder where Americans should look for our archetypes?
I really enjoyed that BBC show, so thanks for that, Adrian. I had forgotten about Smilla, which I liked a lot at the time.
Funny, I was talking about Larsson, Nesbo, and Sjowall/Wahloo with my young coworkers this very day. It was fun to see all or nearly all of them in the video.
Happy 2012 to all who pass this way.
Seana
I'm still not convinced Sweden is this hotbed of vice: this is the country that arrests the Johns and lets the hookers go free and judging from Dragon Tattoo their prisons seem quite lovely. Just the other day a friend told me that its illegal to own one guinea pig in Sweden because its considered to be animal cruelty. Guinea pigs are social animals so you have to own two.
Well, I do love that about the guinea pigs. But I think that whole thing about having one's prime minister killed as he walked down the common streets could make anyone feel that the halcyon days were over. If they ever were.
I think this is more or less what happened in the U.S. with the assassination of JFK, though I was in 2nd grade so I wasn't up for much political analysis at the time.
Seana
I have to admit that I quite enjoyed the movie version of Dragon Tattoo although it was still a little too violent for my tastes.
Isn't it too violent for anyone's tastes?
And I'll admit that I am a bit intrigued by the Fincher version, if only because this is a very different idea of Lisbeth than the Swedish movie, which seemed more or less what I pictured Salander being.
Though I still say she may be a novel figure in Sweden, but I meet her every day in downtown Santa Cruz.
Seana
I'll probably see the Fincher version too. I've seen every Fincher movie even when I havent really wanted to. There's always something interesting in them.
I don't really know his movies, except for Panic Room, which I watched by accident fairly recently. It was good for what it was trying to do.
Just finished Collusion by Stuart Neville. Very impressed. Will continue with Irish noir, next is Orchid Blue. Best wishes for your writing in 2012 and beyond.
Some of the best crime fiction of recent times is about appalling exploitation of the vulnerable by the powerful, but it comes from France, and it's written by Dominique Manotti and Jean-Patrick Manchette.
Their stories are just as shocking as Larsson's but they manage to tell them without hitting the reader over the head with statistics.
And no, I don't think Sweden is quite the hotbed of vice it might like to think it is. But if it agreed with me, would we work ourselves into this much of a froth about their crime fiction?
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Detectives Beyond Borders
"Because Murder Is More Fun Away From Home"
http://www.detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com
I am happy for French crime fiction to get a nod, but I want Irish crime fiction to get the recognition first. It seems long overdue in the English speaking world.
Of the Nordic crime writers in that documentary who I haven't gotten around to yet, I found Hakan Nessur very appealing. He doesn't have much of that brooding Scandinavian outlook in him.
Seana, I’ve met and interviewed a number of the people in that documentary, Nesser included. He’s a bit of a wise-cracker, as you can guess, and more comfortable in English than some of his fellow authors. (He lived in New York for a few years.)
I may put up a post that will link to the documentary and discuss the weirdness of the Nordic phenomenon, along with bits from some of my own interviews that address the phenomena discussed in the documentary.
I tended to talk more about features of their books other than the heavy, serious ones.
====================================
Detectives Beyond Borders
"Because Murder Is More Fun Away From Home"
http://www.detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com/
Wisecracker? Then I probably wouldn't like him at all...
Well, wisecracker by comparison with his solid Nordic brothers and sisters. He was not averse to a joke or two.
And as you know, neither am I.
The expression "a mischievous twinkle in his eye" might have been coined for him. Maybe that's why he fled Sweden for New York. And his books have lots of deadpan jokes.
My first meeting with him was at a group event that included four Swedish crime writers. The question of what these four authors have in common came up, and one of them said, a concern more for the individual than with, say, police procedure.
Jo Nesbo expressed caution about the suggestion that he and all the other crime writers from his part of the world have all that much in common, so I'll be especially interested in what he has to say in the documentary.
Peter, Seana
I havent actually read most of the writers in the doc but it certainly makes me want to which is job done as far as I'm concerned.
I listened to just bits and pieces of the doc earlier. After work clears out, I'll watch and listen to the whole thing.
I did catch Val McDermid's comment that Larsson read voluminously in crime fiction and combined features of the different sub-genres in unprecedented ways. If she means revenge thriller plus locked-room mystery in the first book, I'm not impressed.
I have to admit that "The Golden Bough" has never been on my list, probably thanks to an overdose of T S Eliot years ago.
Also, its worth thinking about the stereotypes that myths sink into our unconscious views of the world.
It's often sweltering hot in the Nordic countries in Summer.
And thanks to this discussion I've just looked up the Greek goddess of snow, Khione.
One of Jo Nesbo's novels opens during a sweltering Oslo summer. I took this as a bit on fun on Nesbo's part, defying the stereotype. The opening will certainly have that effect on many readers outside Nesbo's part of the world.
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