Very cool cases: Scandinavian crime novels are exceptionally hot properties

Very cool cases: Scandinavian crime novels are exceptionally hot properties

By Neely Tucker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 17, 2010; C01

So you know about the insanely popular Scandinavian crime novelist, right, the author who has sold 3 million books in Sweden (pop. 9 million)? The one published in 40 languages? The crime-writing legend with more than 30 million books in print worldwide?

If you said the late Stieg Larsson, the publishing phenom who has sold more than 500,000 copies of his latest book, "The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest," in the month since it was released, who currently has the No. 1 book in hardcover fiction, trade paperback and mass-market paperback -- well, get a clue.

Camilla Läckberg is the Swedish crime writer whose seven books have dominated Stockholm bestseller lists (she makes her American debut this week). Norwegian Jo Nesbø is the guy published in 40 languages. And Sweden's Henning Mankell, the godfather of the Swedish crime thriller genre, has been moving millions of books the world over since creating police detective Kurt Wallander nearly two decades ago.

With Larsson now leading the charge -- 1.8 million hardcover and e-book copies of his "Millennium" trilogy have been sold in the United States in past 16 months, with another 2.8 million paperbacks in print -- more than half a dozen Swedes, Danes, Norwegians and Icelanders have become international crime-writing stars, churning out wildly popular tales of law and disorder from nations with some of the lowest crime rates on the planet. It's become so ingrained in the popular culture that Läckberg got her start in an all-female crime-writing class 10 years ago.

"Twenty-five years ago you had Björn Borg and very few other tennis players in Sweden," Mankell says in a telephone interview from his home in Gothenburg, giving his explanation for the explosion in popularity of his peers. "Then he had success and then there came Stefan Edberg and Mats Wilander and all of a sudden we had a lot of them. . . . In that way, I might be sort of a locomotive that started the train."

Läckberg, 35, mother of three and stepmother of two, published her debut novel, "The Ice Princess," in Sweden in 2003, but it's finally reaching U.S. readers. It's a highly touted, moody tale of a long-ago murder in a tiny resort town of Fjällbacka. It's a monstrous bestseller in Europe (a British trade magazine ranked her as the continent's sixth-most-popular author last year) and Pegasus Books, her American publisher, is hoping for similar success here.

She says that Scandinavian crime writers "owe a lot to Stieg Larsson" for their international success since his trilogy began conquering the world in 2005. She recounts a story about how "Princess" was snatched up by a French publisher eager to ride Larsson's popularity after his first book, "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo." Her book has since sold 300,000 copies in France, she says, and there's a movie deal already signed there.

"People don't usually perceive Swedes as action heroes," she says in a telephone interview from her home in Stockholm. "But a real window has opened up. It's sort of thrilling and sort of surreal. . . . I was at a book festival in Madrid and the schedule had me booked to sign autographs for three hours. Three hours! I thought it was a mistake. I got there, and it wasn't. I could barely move my right hand afterwards."

The 'Snow' storm

If there was a beginning to the Scandinavian international crime novel, it was likely "Smilla's Sense of Snow," Danish author Peter Høeg's 1992 book about an attractive, antisocial woman from Greenland who had an obsession with snow and with the death of a child in her apartment building. It was a huge international hit, fueled by a riveting plot and by Smilla's lyrical insights into the forbidding realm of ice:

"Now the ice will stay," she thinks to herself at one point in early winter, "now the crystals have formed bridges and enclosed the salt water in pockets that have a structure like the veins of a tree through which the liquid slowly seeps; not many who look over toward Holmen think about this, but it's one reason for believing that ice and life are related in many ways."

It was about this time that Mankell, across the water in Sweden, began a series of novels about a morose, alcohol-swilling police detective who was disillusioned, divorced and diabetic. This was Wallander, the star of 10 books and, recently, a British television series starring Kenneth Branagh (it has been aired in the United States on PBS).

He's as iconic a figure in Scandinavian pop literature as, say, Philip Marlowe is in the United States.

Mankell became a major star in Europe before first being published in the United States in 2003. He has since sold 750,000 books here, 88 percent of those involving the 10 Wallander titles. His newest, "The Man From Beijing," which does not involve the detective, has sold 75,000 copies in hardcover and e-book since being published by Knopf this spring.

Mankell's dark tones, his concern with development of character over relentless plot, the weight of the subarctic cold and gloom, became the model for the next generation of Scandinavian authors. Typically covered in frost and a sense of foreboding, the Scandinavian thrillers eschew some of the bang-bang-shoot-'em-up of their American contemporaries for a more stately pace through bloody homicide. There was racism with recent immigrants, the collapse of the neighboring Eastern Bloc countries and the corruption of the state to be concerned with, these writers found, not just a serial killer skinning people alive.

"The success of Mankell opened the door to a lot of Scandinavian writers," says Otto Penzler, owner of the Mysterious Bookshop in New York and editor of the seminal "The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps," a collection of early detective fiction. "People liked it, and he was only doing one book a year, so it didn't really fill the appetite. People would ask, 'Do you have someone else like that?' Well, yeah, we did, because it's all so similar."

Writers like Nesbø, Iceland's Arnalder Indridason and Norway's Karin Fossum put together series of books, often focusing on one recurring character and often playing along the familiar lines of the standard noir thriller, the kind of thing created in the United States by titans such as Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett.

"They're all usually placed in cold, dark, wintry settings, with people drinking a lot to keep warm," Penzler says. "There's the general gloominess of the people, who seem resigned to the worst thing happening. There's not much humor. There certainly are no Carl Hiaasens or Elmore Leonards."

Into this brew came Larsson. A former Swedish wire service reporter and graphic designer, by his late 40s he was running a magazine called Expo, dedicated to exposing racist and fascist groups. He noodled around with a crime thriller idea for several years, and eventually based his two main characters on two icons of Swedish children's literature: Pippi Longstocking, the adventure-seeking red-haired girl in pigtails; and Kalle Blomkvist, the boy detective.

Misfit grownups

In October 2004, months before the first of his books was published, he gave a somewhat cranky interview to Lasse Winkler, editor of a Swedish book trade magazine. He said that he imagined those two fictional characters as misfit grownups. Pippi morphed into Lisbeth Salander, the bisexual computer-hacking punk who is the title character in "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" and the two subsequent books of the trilogy. Kalle morphed into Mikael Blomkvist, a troubled, 40-something journalist stung by a libel conviction. The two work together in sorting through mysteries of corporate corruption, family secrets, violent death and various forms of abuse against women. (Misogyny is such a part of the first book that its title in Sweden is "Men Who Hate Women.")

He wrote all three books before submitting them to a publisher. He had no doubts he was about to become a rich man.

"I know they're good," Winkler quotes him as saying. "I knew that someone would want to publish them. This is my retirement fund."

A chain-smoking workaholic, he died of a heart attack three weeks later. He was 50.

The books have become a worldwide publishing phenomenon -- more than 30 million copies are in print, a number that rises by the hour -- and has pulled along the rest of the Scandinavian crime-writing crowd in their wake.

Sonny Mehta, the publisher and editor in chief of Knopf, publishes Mankell, Larsson and some of Nesbø's titles, almost cornering the market for subarctic crime thrillers in the United States.

"It is extraordinary, this strain of crime writing appears to be persistent in all the Scandinavian countries," he says. "They don't zip along, these things. They're brooding. It's not plot-driven in the way that many of their American contemporaries are. . . . Part of the appeal is you're being introduced to something that should be familiar, that seems familiar, but it's not."

Post a Comment

June Books

Congratulations ... we've completed the first cycle of BLBC.  Let's keep the same alphabetical rotation and just nominate the book of the month somewhere around the time of the month.

So, here are June's books.

Main Selection:

Lincoln Lawyer by Michael Connelly

Michael Connelly is part of the genre I call "loner guys who go around beating up people".  I started reading these books when I was a workaholic and very stressed out.  Connelly has a long series with the character Harry Bosch, an LA cop with issues.  The Lincoln Lawyer started as a standalone book but he has since added one more with the same character, Mickey Haller (a lawyer with issues).

I think Connelly tells a good story, develops good characters and shows you LA.

http://www.michaelconnelly.com/Book_Collection/Lincoln/lincoln.html

Alternate Selection:

Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert

I know, I know ... either you've already read this or everyone has told you to read it.  It it my favorite charming book.  When I finished this book I turned to the beginning and read it again. 

http://www.elizabethgilbert.com/eatpraylove.htm


Next up for July books is Bethie.

The Girl Who Loaned Her Book to Strangers...

Let’s start out with a confession about how much I resist following the madding crowd, often irrationally. A lifetime rebel without a cause.

When a book (or a restaurant or a museum exhibit or whatever) is very popular before I personally discover it, I develop a resistance to whatever is being blessed by the majority—this means that, for example, I never saw E.T. or read The DaVinci Code or saw the King Tut’s tomb exhibit or ate at Postrio or The French Laundry.

So it’s a really good thing that the P-Town Library book group read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo more than a year ago, right after it was released in the US. At that time, I knew nothing about Stieg Larsson or the Millenium Trilogy. That allowed me to read Volume I without feeling like I was a lemming, following the crowd. Because in this instance--and probably in many others--the madding crowd was right. Stieg Larsson, with no prior fiction-writing experience at all, created a set of characters in situations that are more compelling than almost anything I’ve ever read in my long life as a compulsive reader!

I can’t separate this book from the two that followed and, according to our Research Director, Ms. Brenda, who heard a lecture from the guy who translated all 3 books from Swedish into English, they really were for the most part intended to be 3 parts of a single story, except that no one would publish a 1500-page novel. That being said, to me, the first book was the most conventional of the 3, with a structure similar to a traditional mystery novel: establish characters, establish antagonists and protagonists, get main character(s) somehow involved in the mystery, unravel the mystery, tie up issues, end book. That fact didn’t make me dislike the book in any way, by the way. On its own, it was one of the most gripping mysteries I’ve ever read, but by the 2nd book, Larsson seemed to find his footing, and removed the need for an external mystery to set events in motion. His main cast of characters is interesting enough that they can carry an entire book simply by interacting with each other, in both good and very bad ways. The protagonists are Mikael, Lisbeth, Erika, the staff at Millenium, Annika, the few political characters with some integrity. The antagonists are the Swedish government and financial operatives, kingpins and worker bees in the sex trade, and Lisbeth’s father and brother, whom she first meets (and then kills) during the course of the 3 books.

In the first book, Lisbeth and Mikael interact personally, work together to solve the Vanger mystery, and have a brief affair. By the second book, their characters are so established and distinct that the need for them to interact directly is gone. They can contact and assist each other by communicating almost entirely through email and, when necessary, by hacking into each other’s hard-drives or by sending coded messages to each other through a world-wide band of above-the-law techno-outlaws.

Mikael is a character we can instantly like and identify with. He is a left-winger whose radicalism hasn’t softened over time. I think for the 4 of us, his causes make sense to us and we mostly land firmly on his side in any pressing social or political issues. What I’m most curious about is why so many people, including all of us, LOVE Lisbeth. On paper, she is antisocial, mentally unstable, capable of shocking acts of violence in order to right what she personally sees as a wrong. She can’t sustain relationships. She sometimes acts with remarkable kindness, mostly toward other lost souls like herself, but for the most part, she’s a confirmed loner who trusts nearly no one. She commits acts of horrible cruelty toward those who have been cruel to her or cruel to people to with whom she’s had some kind of positive connection. When she can, she steals from the rich to help the underdogs but also allows herself to benefit personally from her thefts. She is completely unapologetic about any of her actions.

So what makes us identify with her and love her?

I turn this question over to you, my beloved little band of bitter kittens!

And on the question of buy it, borrow it or skip it: I am firmly on the side of: BUY IT AND DON’T LOAN IT OUT! These are books I can see re-reading regularly. Now, my Volume 1 is in the hands of a friend of a friend, Book 2 is on my Kindle, and the librarian who runs the P-Town book group loaned all of us, in sequence, the copy of Book 3 her husband got her from Amazon.com.UK, before it was available in the US. So I will have to buy another copy of Volume 1 and grab Volume 3 off the Ethernet.

Buy, baby, buy is my advice!

Attending Hay Festival could be one of our goals!

As Ann recently said to me ... "hours you will never get back" and so I want you to be in the same boat. I have become totally hooked on following the Hay Festival . Held in that town in Wales filled with book stores. Here are the dates for 2011: May 26 - June 5. I have read most of the RSS feed supported by The Guardian newspaper, watched many minutes of author interviews and now trying to determine if there is a Hulu for the UK so I can watch every episode of The Book Show. The RSS feeds were so wonderful and when I got to this one today about the "little book club", had to share. This could be us next year!

This little book club went to the Hay festival

by Patrick Barkham; May 31, 2010

How one book club expands its repertoire by going on an annual tour to the Hay festival

In a cottage outside Hay there is the clink of car keys dropping into a bowl on the coffee table as a group of teachers, architects, housing managers and IT officers in 1970s shirts and dresses take turns to read from the "lost" Booker prize novels of 1970.

The car keys and the background music – Wuthering Heights by Kate Bush, of course – are little jokes to add an extra dash of that decade to the opening night of this book club's annual trip to the Hay festival. The 10 university friends set up the group five years ago and every year head to Hay for a special session of the club, where they mix nightly discussions of their set texts with a daily trawl of undiscovered and familiar authors at the festival.

Caroline Chatwin, 32, a criminology lecturer based in Canterbury, set up the club so the old friends could expand their reading. Despite being dispersed across Britain, the 10 meet every two months to discuss their chosen book, ending the night by giving it their mark out of 10 – by simultaneously closing their eyes and holding out their fingers.

The highlight, however, is "book club on tour" at Hay. "It's become a staple of the calendar," says Jon Twemlow, a teacher from Sheffield. "It's been really good to see authors we've discussed and discovering authors we wouldn't have otherwise known about," says Rhona Griffiths, who is also a teacher.

If that does not sound very rock'n'roll, the group don't start formal discussions of Muriel Spark's The Driver's Seat until 11.30pm, when IT officer Mike Brophy stands up and announces: "I really like this book but I'm too drunk to explain why." But debate is sparked up and continues until the small hours when they mark Spark with a 7.5/10. At Hay the next day, the group heads off en masse to see Andrea Levy. Members so far have loved Kazuo Ishiguro ("very self-possessed"), Quentin Blake and Grayson Perry. Each year, Hay offers up surprises. Jan Morris was their big discovery last year, and members are already buying armfuls of books, which they will nominate for discussions. But Hay does not always turn them on to their favourites. Three years ago, they were persuaded to pick up Martin Amis's Yellow Dog. Its final score? 0.64/10, the lowest ever.

How to Add a Picture to a Posting

Adding pictures to your posting is easy ... and yes, that's what I say about all of the posting stuff.   These instructions are for adding a picture to your post ... not to your account (which shows up on comments).

Step 1.  have the picture stored somewhere on your computer storage (hard drive, flash drive, etc).  If you're using a picture from the internet (i.e. book cover) you need to copy and paste it to your computer first.

Step 2.  open a NEW POST and add your text (it's easier to manipulate the picture if there is text in the posting first)

Step 3.  click on the INSERT IMAGE icon (looks like a little picture)

Step 4.  click on BROWSE and find your picture

Step 5.  when you see your picture in the pop-up box, click OKAY

Steo 6.  once the picture is in your posting, it will have a bar that lets you re-size and move it;  if the bar disappears, click on the picture to get it back.

Voila, you have a picture in your posting.  BTW, that's me with my mother and brother, Bob.

Another BTW, about "tags" ... you do not have to use tags ... posting and adding pictures work without tags.

OK, Set for May Books...Oh, Wait, It's June...

Are we set for treating The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (just found spell-check on the "New Post" toolbar!)for "May" (aka, June)?

I am feeling a tiny bit hampered because I loaned my copy to a friend who first hated it and then LOVED LOVED LOVED it, so much so that she loaned it to a person I don't know at all, and I have a sinking feeling that my copy will never be seen again, so I will be forced to do my comments based on being 15 months out from having read the book.

I will pull an initiating comment (see, I made up a new book club term) later this week, after I finish Olive Kitteridge for the P-Town Library Book Group and have 5 social lunches out (it's either feast or famine with me) and prepare myself mentally for having my lumbar MRI done. But any of you who are chomping at the bit to comment, please go ahead. We've all read the book and love it, I think, so it doesn't much matter who starts.

And I swear that someday, I'll figure out how to format my posts. Until then...

Susan, Techno-phobe

Noah's Compass - Anne Tyler

First, I must admit that I am a big Anne Tyler fan. Others may get bogged down with the slow pace, but I found it oddly comforting. Probably because I am usually going full bore and I appreciate reading about people who live another life.

Anyway, this story follows Liam Pennywell, whose life just didn't turn out the way he expected. This fact surprises him which is odd because he is pretty passive. I thought that I wouldn't like him - that I would just want to shake him, but he was compelling in an odd way. His relationships with his children and ex-wife are complicated and he does stumble. No major life revelations or Hollywood ending. Just a deep look into someone who, although multi-layered, you'd probably just walk by on the street.

Recommend: Hard to say - I like to have her hardbacks in my collection, but I suppose borrowing it would work for everyone else.