scandinavia -a place of haunting natural beauty, a utopian society wherebeautiful people lead idyllic lives. it's the perfect place for murder. over the past decade,scandinavian crime fiction has become a global phenomenon,and the story of its success contains all the ingredientsof a thriller. an atmospheric setting,where the nights can last for days and there are manylonely places to hide a body. they're grey,they're gloomy, they're cold.
all these thingscreate the kind of atmosphere where bad things can happen. a cast of writers as enigmaticas their fictional creations. the man with many enemies,who died before any of his books hadeven been published. the woman who experienced a murderfirst-hand. this was not justa note in the paper. i knew the killer. a plot that asks whether somethinghas gone wrong with the scandinaviandream of a perfect society. it's the light that failed,scandinavian crime fiction.
it's the basis of it all. it's the fact thateverything goes wrong. and at its heart is an unsolvedmurder that traumatised a nation. reporter: a man approached the coupleand shot olof palme at close range. the prime minister is shotin the middle of stockholm, right in the centre ofthe city and it's like 9/11. from denmark and swedento norway and iceland, it's a shadowy worldpeopled with memorable characters - kurt wallander and martin beck,
harry hole and lisbeth salander. this is an investigation intothe mysterious success of scandinavian crime fiction and why it exerts sucha powerful hold on our imagination. stockholm, sweden - it's a capitalcity with a cool exterior, where citizens enjoy a life offreedom and prosperity built on the foundations ofthe post-war welfare state. clean, safe, orderly - andthe setting for a dark and violent thriller that put scandinaviancrime fiction on the global map.
i started reading it at night and it was the firstswedish manuscript definitely in many years i actually readthrough the night, finishing atabout four in the morning. to date, 45 million readers have been gripped bythe girl with the dragon tattoo, the first part of themillennium trilogy, a series written by an author who revitalised thecrime story with an injection of hollywood blockbuster thrills,
stieg larsson. the key to the success ofstieg larsson novels is in a way very similar tothe reason for the success of the harry potter novels. stieg larsson knew thegenre of crime writing inside out. he'd read it for years. he read widely, across the genre. what he did was pull aspects ofdifferent styles, different writerstogether to come up with something quite different from whatanybody else had done.
the success of the series owesmuch to the mystique that surrounds author stieg larsson and his moststriking creation, lisbeth salander. he died at 50 without seeinghis success and he createdan utterly original heroine. she had a wasp tattoo abouttwo centimetres long on her neck, a tattooed loop around the biceps ofher left arm and another around her left ankle. on those occasions when she hadbeen wearing a tank top, armansky also saw that she hada dragon tattoo onher left shoulder blade.
she was a natural redhead,but she dyed her hair raven black. she looked as though she had justemerged from a week-long orgy with a gang of hard rockers. to make her utterly sociopathic,to make this sort-of tattooed, bisexual, pierced goth -that was really a difficult sell. a gifted computer hacker,lisbeth salander teams up with journalist mikael blomkvist toexpose the ugly secrets that fester behind sweden's elegant facade, starting with an unsolved murder ina wealthy family with a murky past.
as salander and blomkvist dig deeperinto the vanger family's affairs, they discover connectionsto the swedish nazi movement. it was quite clear thatthe brothers all joined per engdahl's fascist movement,the new sweden. harald continued to be a memberuntil engdahl died in the '90s, and for certain periods, he was one of the key contributors to the hibernatingswedish fascist movement. just like mikael blomkvist,stieg larsson was in real life
an investigative journalist, butthe nazis he was seeking to exposewere part of sweden's present. in full uniform, in broad daylight, 110 nazis marched through stockholm, shouting slogans like"smash democracy! smash the jews!" although they're shoutingracist abuse, which is illegal, although they are inciting racialhatred, which is also illegal, and although the wholedemonstration was actually illegal,the police just let them march. if stieg larsson had died withoutwriting the millennium trilogy, he would probably be rememberedas a brave investigative journalist.
he was the swedish correspondent forsearchlight magazine in this country, which deals with the far right. and he came to britain and lecturedscotland yard on extremist groups. he was quite an interesting figure. the brazen activities ofsweden's far right in the 1990s prompted larsson to set up a journalcalled expo, the inspiration for his fictional millennium magazine, and still being publishedin stockholm today. expo foundation hasa very specific aim, to investigate
right-wing extremism inall different forms, like organised right-wing extremism, xenophobia,different forms of intolerance. larsson's work madehim many enemies. he was working one night at the offices of the magazine he worked on and saw a group of skinheads gathering in the street below
with baseball bats, who were waiting for him. he saved his life by getting out through another exit. like the old gunfighters inthe west, he would sit with his back to the wall,his face to the front ofcoffee shops he frequented. a life lived on the edge tookits toll on stieg larsson's health. he smoked all the timewhen i met him. you could see that hedidn't look healthy.
he was fat - corpulent, you say? he looked tired. but he had an energy about him. that energywas the product of a desire to fight injustice that larssonhad nurtured since his youth. gradually his political interest became more focused on fighting what he felt as the basic evilsof the world,
which to his mindwere fascism in all forms, but more basically racism, sexism, or the very idea that other peopleare inferior because of some chance of their birth. larsson used journalism to shinea light on prejudice in sweden and he set out to dramatisethe issue in his novels through the characterof lisbeth salander, a volatile rebel on the marginsof society. she's ferociously bright.
she understand thingsthat you almost wonderhow she understands them, because in some respectsher empathy is non-existent. she has a very distinctive wayof viewing the world, but she doesn't fit into the world. in the only interview he ever gaveabout his books, larsson revealedthe unlikely source of inspiration for lisbeth salander - a children's book by swedish authorastrid lindgren. he reads: 'it was an old idea fromthe first half of the '90s.
'i picked up pippi longstocking,eight years old. 'what would happen to her? 'a sociopath? wrong,' he said. 'she has another different take onsociety from the rest of us. 'i'll do her 25 years old. 'she has this outsider perspective, 'or she has this outsider situation,doesn't know anybody.' he has no scale whatsoeverwhen it comes to social competence. 'that was the ideafrom the beginning,' he says.
an outsiderwith a troubled upbringing, salander is abused and eventually raped by her legal guardian, portrayed in the film of the bookby peter andersson, an actor who plays the role witha cold menace that emphasises his perversion ofthe father-daughter relationship. the abuse of women is aconstant theme in a novel punctuated with statisticsabout domestic violence, an issue larsson even raised inthe original swedish title
of the girl with the dragon tattoo. this is the first one.man som hatar kvinnor. men who hate women is the title. i think it's a good front page of the book, since it was a magazineand it looks like a magazine. very smart. he initially intended this to bethe overall title of the series of ten novels,because they're all about men who hate women. and he would havebeen aghast that the title has been
changed in so many languages becausehe thought this was important. lisbeth salander might be a victimof the men who hate women, but she is also larsson'savenging angel. you've got this messed-up womanwho's been sexually abused, who's been damaged profoundlyby the things that have happened in her life, but somehow clings on to the kind ofhumanity that can move her forward. she's ruthless, andyou would have to say some of the routes by which she takesher revenge are appalling,
but at the same time you findyourself behind her all the way, you want her to succeed. in this scene, the perspective ofvictim and abuser is reversed as the director usesunsettling camera angles to put us in the position oflisbeth's guardian, now at the mercy of his charge and her tattoo needle. is stieg larsson a feminist? that's the 64,000 question. some women writers have said to me
those are gloatinglyexploitative books, in which all the sexual violenceis there for us to enjoy, and then we're given this writerto say, "it's ok, she gets her own back." they feel that doesn't buystieg larsson a ticket out of that. there are people who believeshe's a psychopath, an antisocial personagewho should be maybe put away, and that if people acted this way it would be disastrous.
we did have the same discussionin sweden 50 or 60 years ago when the pippi longstockingnovels were published. lisbeth salander might be a violent sociopath, but she has much in common with the strong-willed heroine ofa danish novel by peter hoeg that first introduced scandinaviancrime fiction to a wider audience. i'm not perfect. i think more highly of snow and icethan of love.
it's easier for me to be interestedin mathematics than to have affectionfor my fellow human beings. but i am anchored to somethingin life that is constant. you could say that the two mostsignificant scandinavian novels are published by christophermaclehose - he published miss smilla back thenand the girl with the dragon tattoo and the heroines of bothdon't belong to any one society, they can't quite functionin any one society, because they've got tugsfrom different parts of
their past,and the way they were brought up and the things that have happenedto them in their lives. published in 1992,peter hoeg's novel follows smilla's mission to provethat the death of isaiah, a young greenlandic boy she hadbefriended, was no accident. now, smilla is known for,as the title suggests, her knowledge of snow,or her feeling for snow. at one point she is a researcher doing research intosnow and crystals,
and she of course has a pastin greenland where knowing snow conditionscan be matter of life and death. now, at the outset of thecrime novel, the little boy, isaiah, is found dead after a leapfrom roof of the apartment block. smilla jaspersen finds that thisis not an accident. she can read the footsteps in thesnow and these footsteps suggest he's been chased off the roofand has fallen to his death. an award-winning literary novelist,hoeg's precise descriptions of winter landscapes seta benchmark in scandinavian fiction.
it is freezing, an extraordinaryminus 18 degrees, and it's snowing, and in the language which isno longer mine, the snow is qanik. big, almost weightless crystalsfalling in stacks and covering the ground witha layer of pulverised white frost. december darkness rises upfrom the grave, seeming as limitlessas the sky above us. it's a beautifully written book,it's a book of great colour, great atmospherewith a great sense of place. what's so clever about itis the fact it's a kind ofdisquisition on language,
about the different nuances of snow,of different kinds of snow which we don't have in britain.but that's also the key to mystery. smilla's journey ends inthe frozen wastes of greenland, a bleak backdrop typical ofthe scandinavian crime novel. a lot of scandinavian landscapesare imposing, they're impressive, they make you feel likea small person on a big landscape. they're grey, they're gloomy,they're cold. all of these things create the kindof atmosphere where bad, difficult thingscan happen,
and i think a lot of scandinavianwriters use this to great effect. the climate reflects the minds of the people. i had an english friend,he had a woman in finland and he spent ten years in finland, and the woman left himafter the first year. he said, "i'm getting so depressed,what's wrong?" and i said "the wrong thing isthat you're in finland." then he eventually went back tolondon and he was fine in two weeks.
you need to be fromthe nordic countries to stay alive happily here, i think. of all the landscapes that mightchallenge humankind'sinstinct for survival, few are bleaker than iceland, home to the broodingweather-obsessed crime novels of arnaldur indridason. indridason writes for peoplewho recognise the locales, who understand the terrors anddangers of the wilderness of iceland. it's a place wherepeople can disappear.
it was still raining. the low-pressure fronts that movedin from deep in the atlantic at that time of year headed eastacross iceland in succession, bringing wind,wet and dark winter gloom. little wonder that indridason'smain character, detective erlendur,is so depressed. and it's the long dark nights, which in those books becomethe long dark night of the soul, usually for the detective, who isusually going through a bad time.
there are very few detectives whohave good happy personal lives, certainly inscandinavian crime fiction. erlendur's cheerless personal life is portrayed with a hint ofpitch-black humour by director baltasar kormakur in the film jar city, with actoringvar eggert sigurdsson delivering a bone-dry performance as he tucks into an icelandicdelicacy of sheep's head while babysittinghis junkie daughter.
when you read a writerlike indridason from iceland, those books are really quite darkand grim and difficult, but they're shot through with dark and awful bits of humour. people laugh atthe worst sort of things, but that also reflectsa kind of reality. when life is grim and dark,people find something to laugh at. laughs are at a premium in jar city, a macabre story about missing organsand genetic manipulation,
inspired by a controversialreal-life plan to createa dna database of every icelander. jar city is one of the very bestscandinavian modern crime novels, and one ofthe best modern crime novels. it's interesting that that's a bookdriven by the hatred and fear of the surveillance society. it's based on a true life caseof the availability of genetic material to one company. the jar cityof the title is human organs in jars.
it's a horrific novel. and you keep all these secrets. old family secrets. tragedies, sorrows and death, allcarefully classified in computers. family stories andstories of individuals. stories about me and you. you keep the whole secret and cancall it up whenever you want. a jar city for the whole nation. dark secrets,bleak landscapes, grim weather
and famously long winter nights. it's a world where the first chinkof light comes as a blessed relief. the longing for the summer, thelonging for the returning of light, of course it's a pagan tradition, butsomething that is deeply ingrained inall scandinavians. midsummer in sweden. if you'd been here in the '60s, you could be forgiven forthinking you were in paradise. anyone in this permissive society canbuy contraceptives in the street or pornographic magazines.
a liberal utopia of free loveand welfare for all. or was it? i came to london for thefirst time in '66 and '67. '67 was the flower power summer,and then they said, "oh you're fromsweden, the country of free love." "what?"i was 17 and i had no experience of free love in sweden whatsoever,so that was definitely a myth. we made one or two films withsome naked bodies and that was it, but we were never the countryof free love, i can tell you. there was even a feeling insome quarters thatthe fabled welfare state,
designed to use sweden'spost-war prosperityto fund healthcare and benefits, had failed to live up toexpectations. that sense of disillusionmentprompted two left-wing reporters, maj sjowall and per wahloo, to beginwork on a series of ten crime novels that pioneered the idea ofusing detective fiction toanalyse the state of the nation. the templatefor scandinavian crime fiction. they began it all. they began itall in the sense of taking the police procedural of ed mcbain and puttingit down in modern scandinavia. they also added this socialdimension, they gave ita marxist perspective
and that's unfashionable now,but that political perspectiveis what's lived on from their work. in 1965, sjowall and wahloobegan to write crime stories about a unit of the stockholm police led by inspector martin beck, stories with a hidden agendathey called "the project". for the fact of the matter is thatthe so-called welfare state abounds with sick, poor, and lonely people, living at best on dog food,who are left uncared for until they waste away and diein their rat hole tenements.
their novels were subtitled asthe story of a crime, the crime of the social democrats leaving the working class behind. the welfare state doesn't seem tolive up to its socialist ideals from the left perspective. maybe that is what all scandinaviancrime fiction is about,the death of the dreamers. it is the light that failed,scandinavian crime fiction,that is the basis of it all. it was quite surprising readingthose books because the image ofsweden that we had in this country was that it was this socialistparadise, and that althoughthe taxes were high, they had found
this marvellous golden mean,where everything was lovely. then you read the martin becknovels, and you think, "wait a minute, this is quitea different picturewe're seeing here." the overtly political subtext ofthe books marked a radical firstin swedish crime fiction, and martin beck becamethe prototype forthe classic scandinavian detective. 'martin beck sat on the green benchin the subway car and looked out 'through the rain-blurred window. 'he thought abouthis marriage apathetically, 'but when he realised that he wassitting there feeling sorryfor himself,
'he took his newspaper out of histrench-coat pocket and tried toconcentrate on the editorial page. 'he disliked the subway, 'but since he cared even lessfor bumper to bumper traffic,and that "dream apartment" 'in the centre of the citywas still only a dream,he had no choice at the moment.' beck is very much a human character. he's flawed,he has a difficult relationshipwith his wife, and with his family. some of his relationships withhis colleagues are difficult. he's kind of dyspeptic and gloomy,and he's not in any sense heroic, but he's a man who thinks abouthis place in the world, and hethinks very carefully about his job.
he's thoughtfuland he's compassionate. i think he's very modern. he's rather cool in the sense ofbeing you're never quite sure whathe is thinking at any given time. slightly existential approach to the problems around him, and completely in touch with what is happening in society. he knows his society inside out, which not every copper does.
it was realistic,it was not romantic, it was a hard-working police officer, easy to like, not very happy,not very lucky with women. i believed in him, you can't believein agatha christie the same way. the realism of the novels wasconsidered shocking for the time. looking back morethan 40 years later, maj sjowall still fondly recallsthe long nights she spent with perwahloo putting the world to rights. per wahloo died in 1975,
just as the final book inthe series was published. the terrorists would be his epitaph, and its plot about a politicalassassination in stockholm would prove eerily prophetic. shocked stockholmerswho heard the news of the tragedyhurried to the scene of the crime... as he and his wife, lisbet,walked home from the cinemaentirely on their own, the murderer simply walked up tothe prime minister and shot himtwice in the stomach... olof palme had taken an evening offto go to the cinema with his wife. a couple of hundred yards from thecinema, a man approached the coupleand shot olof palme at close range.
mr palme collapsedin a pool of blood. the killing of swedishprime minister olof palme on february 28th 1986,sent shockwaves across scandinavia. they used to say that we lost ourinnocence when palme was shot, and of course in a way it's truebecause the prime minister was shotin middle of stockholm, right in the centre of the city. it's like 9/11 - you know whereyou were, how you heard the news the first time,and we were in shock after that. swedes perceived the state
as a benevolent entity,which is their hopeand their father figure, in a sense. and obviously the prime ministerthen symbolises the state, regardless of which party he happens to come from, so killingthe prime was an attack on... ..the benevolent mainstay ofsociety. despite a lengthy manhuntand countless conspiracy theories, the murder of olof palmehas never been solved. the inability of the police tosolve the murder has become a wound that cannot heal in sweden,
and something most crime writers more or less explicitly return to. it was the end of the dream ofthis harmonious, happy, just, controlled society. it's a mystery that continues tocast a shadow over swedish society. there was the sense that thesethings, these kind of arbitrary, brutal political assassinations,couldn't happen in sweden. swedes suddenly had to realise thatthe world was a dangerous place. it was kind of the scalesfalling from the eyes,
it was that kind of moment, but itled to all kinds of reassessments of that social democrat ideal -how intact was it? it made swedes realise they werekind of like the rest of the world. then it seemed that all the othertroubles of the rest of the worldflooded in. with borders crumbling after thecollapse of communism and membership of the eu ratified in 1994,a new wave of migrants sought refuge and opportunity in countries likesweden, creating tensions in whathad once been homogeneous societies. there was in scandinavia fromthe beginning of the '80s a growingsense of insecurity towards the outside world, what will becomeof our countries with the pressures
of globalisation and neoliberalism. those anxieties are at the heart ofa series of acclaimed crime storiesset in the small port of ystad and written by an author whohad grown up with the radicalpolitics of sjowall and wahloo, but now found a country strugglingto open up to the world... henning mankell. it was 1988 and i realised thatthe problem with xenophobia and racism was growingheavily and very fast in sweden. i decided that i wantedto write about that. and since these kinds of expressions,xenophobic reactions
to certain things,is to me a criminal gesture, i decided to use the crime plotand to write about that. i wanted to describe how difficultit is to be a good police officer. mankell's creation, an angst-riddendetective in the martin beck mould,would go on to become the a tv staple - the definitivescandinavian detective, inspector kurt wallander. 'maybe the times require anotherkind of policeman, he thought. 'policemen who aren't distressedwhen they're forced to gointo a human slaughterhouse 'in the swedish countrysideearly on a january morning.
'policemen who don't sufferfrom my uncertainty and anguish.' conveying wallander's inner turmoilon screen presents the kind ofchallenge that actors relish. kenneth branagh plays himwith theatrical intensity, but it takes a swede like kristerhenriksson to channel the melancholyspirit of ingmar bergman, as we see in a scene where operamusic is used to emphasisewallander's solitude in the swedish tv version. the swedish prototype for a detectiveis that - wallander is, even - you're tired, depressed,you're almost suicidal, but that'salso the ingmar bergman type.
we are not supposed to talk like ido, we are supposed to sit there andstare blankly out into the darkness. that is the picture you have of a swede, isn't it? wallander's gift for police workhas come at a price, something theswedish tv series explores through his awkward relationshipwith his daughter, linda,a junior police officer. the off-screen dynamicbetween actors krister henriksson and johanna sallstrom brings anintimate realism to this scene aboutlinda's decision to become a cop. henriksson brings an air ofworld-weary disenchantment to a character weighed down bythe horrors he has witnessed.
krister henriksson's performancesare very subtle and understated, andwe study him intensely when we know he's had a bad emotional experience,it's not going to be on the surface. we have to read itin the crinkle of an eye. in this scene from an episodecalled the container, we seewallander's reaction of mute shock when he arrives at the final restingplace of a group of refugees whodied on their way into the country. all the evils of the worldwash up on the shores of ystad in mankell's novelsand the 26 stories he createdspecially for swedish tv. the problem with immigration,that's now a kind of sore point. swedes prided themselveson their liberalism,but they had to admit that
it's a problem for them, the way it'sa problem for the rest of the world. what we're watching now, accordingto henning mankell for instance, issweden's fall from grace, isn't it? there must be something rottenin the state of sweden. mankell's bid to explorenational anxieties through the prism of murder in a small townhas taken its toll onthe fictional citizens of ystad. in mankell's novels i suppose therehave been a couple hundred murders in last 20 years or so,whereas in reality i can't think ofa single one. don't go to ystad,you'll get killed before tomorrow. so, yeah. no.
that's where realism ends. ystad might be a town under siegefrom external forces, but furtherwest among norway's mountains and fjords, it is the evilwithin tiny communities that fascinates poet turnedcrime writer karin fossum. 'the village lay in the bottom ofa valley, at the end of a fjord, 'at the foot of a mountain. 'like a pool in a river,where the water was much too still. 'and everyone knowsthat only running water is fresh. well, i live ina small community myself.
it's a small village, it's a church, it's a school, it's a lake,it's a mountain. if someone getskilled i will probably know either the person itself or some of the familyor the relatives. the pressures that can build up ina small community are at the heart ofnovels steeped in the psychological intensityof norway's national playwrighthenrik ibsen. ibsen is one of the great purveyorsof this kind of thinking, that social situations,the social environment
can create social outcasts who mayact irrationally and in karin fossum's novelsviolently. karin fossum isa very interesting writer because she understandsthe relationship between killer and victim, she understands thatthese things generally don't happen in an accidental kind of way, thatthere are connections and reasons, and i think she writes with greatcompassion for both sides of the equation, if you like,for the personwho finds themself killing and the personwho ends up being killed.
fossum brings a poet's sensitivityto stories that deal with emotionrather than mystery. many crime stories, they startwith a picture of the dead body. if you don't know the dead bodyyou won't be moved by the story, you won't feel anything, and mypassion as a writer, sometimes evenmy problem as a writer, is that i'm trying to make you feelsomething. i want to move you. i'm not trying to beclever or to make clever plots. i don't care too much about the plot,it's not important to me, but iwould like to move you emotionally. karin fossum's empathyfor both killer and victim
is rooted in her personalexperience of a traumatic crime. someone i knew very wellcommitted a murder many years ago. i had known this person for 18 years, and suddenly this was not justa note in paper. i knew the killer, i knewthe victim - the victim was a child. i knew the flat, i had been there many times. i knew the exact specific room. and i thought, "but this isa good person, it can't be!"
it was a very, very strong experiencefor a writer, and suddenly i understood this canhappen to anyone, it could have been my father or mybrother, and every time i read about a murder, i think, "he has a mother,he has a brother, he has children." up until this date,he was a good guy. 'why did you hit her? 'why? 'i was holdingthe dumb-bell in my hand. 'she was curled up with her handsover her head waiting for the blow.
'couldn't you haveturned around and left? 'no. 'i need to know why. 'because i'd reacheda boiling point. 'i could hardly breathe. 'could you breathe againafter she collapsed? 'yes. 'i could breathe again.' i'm writing about death, not murder,not killing,
not psychopaths, but death itselfand how it affects us. the remote communities inkarin fossum's books are in sharpcontrast to the bustling cities that flaunt norway's status as oneof the world's wealthiest nations. the discovery of oil in the 1970stransformed the fortunes of acountry of just four million people, and it continues to shapethe norway of today, as chronicledin the thrillers of jo nesbo. after the second world war,norway was a poor country. if you go back to '20s, norway wasone of poorest countries in europe, together with portugal, northernireland and greece. but in the '70s, the norwegians, or actuallythe americans found oil outsidethe norwegian west coast,
and suddenly overnight,norway became a very rich country. and, yes, i think it certainlychanged the soul of the country. in nesbo's world,the battle for norway's soul has left a moral vacuum filled withcrooked cops and serial killers. you would think that more money wouldgive us more space and betteropportunities to feel solidarity with the rest ofthe world, but actually it seemsthe other way around - that money hasto some degree corrupted us. 'the afternoon sun angled across thetown and came to rest in bjorvika, 'an area of oslo containinga motorway, a deposit for shippingcontainers and a refuge for junkies,
'but it was soon to havean opera house, hotelsand millionaires' apartments. 'wealth was beginning totake the whole city by storm. 'it made harry think ofthe catfish in the rivers in africa, 'the large, black fish that didn'thave the sense to swim into deeper 'waters when the drought came,and in the end were trapped in 'one of the muddy poolsthat slowly dried up.' nesbo gave up lucrative careersas a stockbroker and member of one of norway'smost famous rock bandsto write crime fiction. his protagonist isdetective harry hole,
a norwegian take onthe maverick american style of cop. it's clear that jo nesbohas read raymond chandler, and harry holemay be in scandinavia, but there's an american hard-boiledsardonic quality to him. the fact that he's loneressentially and he's not particularlygood at relating to people. that may be somethingin the norwegian way ofthinking and our culture. we don't want to be part ofbig things, we want to have our own farm, our own small fishing boatand get by doing our own thing.
in nesbo's dark thrillers,harry hole is driven by the desire to understandthe killers he is hunting. harry has been fascinatedwith evil for a long time, and that has of course to do with the writer's fascination with evil. i think for me,it started when i was a young boy, i can remember in the classroom there was a guy whowas sitting on the window row and he would catch fliesin the windowsill,
and then he would start picking,using tweezers to pick off one legand then the wings. of course this is not unusual, butwhat fascinated me was the tweezer. it was the idea ofthis boy being at home, and planning what he would dowhen he'd get to the classroom. but, anyway, the fascination forwhat goes on in the human mindprobably started there and then. he's very much in a hollywoodtradition, and that sets him apart,and also makes him interesting in a scandinavian context becausehe still writes from within a norwegian cultural context.
for nesbo, even the innocent snowmanbecomes the stuff of nightmares. it's a woman who's coming homein the evening, and shecomes into kitchen where her husband and son is making dinner for her,and she will say, "how nice, "you're making dinner for me,and what a nice snowmanyou've built in the garden." they sort of stopand look up at her and say,"we haven't built the snowman." so they go into the living roomand they look at this big snowmanstanding in the garden. it's too big, and it's too close tothe house and it's turnedthe wrong way because it's looking directly intothe living room, looking at them. that was sort of...you know, i didn't know how
this scene would connect to therest of the story, but i knew thatwas the starting point for a story. '"cordon off the whole area," 'harry said. 'his throat felt dry, rough. '"i'm calling in the troops." '"what's happened?""there's a snowman here." "so?" 'harry explained. '"i didn't catch the last bit," 'holm shouted. "poor coverage."
'"the head," harry repeated,"it belongs to sylvia ottersen."' jo nesbo is part of another trendin scandinavian crime fiction thatdoes turn for the more bloody. where do you go in scandinaviancrime fiction after you've tornapart the welfare system, you have asked all the questionsabout why people are so violent, what is happening to our societies?where do you go after that? and one of the answers in morerecent scandinavian crime is you gointo more blood and more violence. jo nesbo isn't the first norwegianto use gruesome imagery in his work. this is the country that produced anextreme genre of satanic rock music known as black metal, once norway'smost gory and violent export.
they didn't only talk aboutbeing anti-christ,they actually burned churches. i think that people throughout theworld, they were impressed with that. i can remember going to mexicomany years ago, and i went to thispunk market and you would have stands there selling norwegian black metal, and they would havewritten on the cassettes "guaranteed norwegian"! jo nesbo is just one of many writerscarrying the hopes of publishers eager to replicatethe multimillion-selling success that began in europewith henning mankell and reachedthe world with stieg larsson.
it's something that has to do withmarketing. i mean, we were successfulin germany and we had a few goodwriters and these books are selling. stieg larsson's, for instance,enormously well, but it will pass. we used to have good tennis playerstoo, some years ago. stieg larsson might have donefor scandinavian crimewhat bjorn borg did for tennis, but he was destined never toenjoy the fruits of his success. he died in 2004, not in a right-wingplot but on his way to work. it's the case of the journalistwho doesn't look after his body. hold the front page! it'sa man who lives on junk food,
who smokes prodigiously,has a phenomenal nicotine intake, an awful lot of coffee, whichis certainly reflected in the book. if he'd died at the hands of thefar right, it would have been withbaseball bats outside his office. it wasn't... he diedbecause he came to the office, the lift was broken, he had to go upsix flights of stairs, and his bodyfinally gave out. it's that prosaic. the whole situation is extremelysad, stieg lived to be 50 years old and a couple of months, andnever in his life had any money. not that he ever wanted any money, but he would have liked tohave had a fair amount of money
so that he could maybe hireone or two more people at expo and so do more of his own writing. that's about what he was hoping forwhen he sold his novels. he never saw anythingof the, by now, hundreds of millions involvedin the millennium franchise. larsson did bequeath the worldone final mystery. there is the mystery of thefourth book, what exists of it, it changes on a daily basis. it's like the plotof a stieg larsson novel.
recently, an email has come to lightwhich seems to suggest that two-thirds of it were written,which wasn't what we heard before. a beginning was written,an end was written, it needs something in the middle. it has a canadian setting,a bleak canadian setting. i personally can't see the valueof it being completed by anyone, because there is such a senseof the three millennium books being this perfect entity. larsson's heroes aren'tthe only ones whose adventures
appear to have come to an end. even wallander is about tohang up his badge, and henning mankell felt unableto continue a planned series about linda wallander followingthe suicide of johanna sallstrom, the actress whose charismalit up the screen and the setof the swedish tv series. much-loved characters might havereached the final chapter, but the kind of fictional heroeswho follow in their footsteps will be determined as muchby scandinavia's future as its past.
what will come, what kind of crime fiction will bepopular in the future, is hard to say but i think the sort ofwallander-type of crime novels will still have a place andinspiration for new crime writers. what we see in the younger generation is that yes, they are stillreflecting on particular landscapes, particular social situations, they are not so much engaged in thedirections of their own societies. they are much more interested
in finding out what happensin a globalised world. there might not be manyhappy endings, but in societiesthat tend to crave order, there'll always be someone willingto stare out into the darkness and make sense of a turbulentand ever-changing world. there is a sensethat right is done at the end of most scandinaviancrime novels, but never in a resounding way. there is always a sensethat there is someone out there,
he may have put down one particularnasty piece of work or corruption, but out there are people-traffickinggangs, out there are sexual abusers, but at least for the durationof that one novel, justice has been seen to be done. maybe imperfectly,but it's been done. subtitles by red bee media email subtitling@bbc.co.uk
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