Review: Michael Robbins on Nordic Noir

A thriller-reader goes out in the cold

The Nordic countries—Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden—have some of the lowest homicide rates in the world. This is not the impression one receives from the detective fiction that seems to be their leading export. Just going from the novels I’ve read, I’d estimate that serial killers make up about a fifth of the population of these nations. Maybe more in Sweden.

This is a commonly noted irony—there’s so little murder that the Scandinavians perversely long for it. (Scandinavia technically includes only Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, but I believe leeway with usage is granted to Americans, notoriously ignorant of geography.) It doesn’t surprise me. It’s dark and cold all the time, which is why black metal was invented in Norway. I would start thinking about serial murder if I had to live there, too. Free health care, though.

Anyway, for decades I avoided “Nordic noir,” my reading limited to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (terrible), a Jo Nesbø novel (fine), and Smilla’s Sense of Snow (remember literally nothing about it). This had little to do with geography and everything to do with cops. These novels are mostly police procedurals and I think the police should be abolished. I don’t usually read police procedurals. There’s always a surly detective, probably alcoholic, who plays by his own rules, and his superiors don’t like it, but he sure gets results. Yawn.

Last summer, however, I stumbled on the Joona Linna series, written by a Swedish couple under the pseudonym Lars Kepler, I think after googling something like “scary novels.” I started The Sandman, the fifth book in the series, which introduces Jurek Walter, a serial killer who makes Hannibal Lecter look like Mr. Darcy. He’s like something out of Sade. I read all nine novels of the series in succession, something I almost never do. Suddenly I was twelve again, having just discovered Stephen King, reading novel after novel as if they might expire if I didn’t finish them soon enough.

Joona Linna is a surly detective, not alcoholic but addicted to opium. He plays by his own rules, which his superiors hate, but they can’t deny he gets results. The borrowings, from Conan Doyle and Thomas Harris, are obvious but affectionate. The prose is overheated: “She walks through the swirling snow as if she is isolated in a tunnel of grief with only the winter light and her memories of herself as a little girl.” Jurek Walter—Linna’s Moriarty—is a preposterous personification of evil, as implausible as any comic-book supervillain. I loved all nine books and impatiently await the English translation of the tenth.

After Kepler, I decided to revisit my obviously flawed assumptions regarding Nordic crime fiction, and read several other authors with delight: The Martin Beck novels of Sweden’s Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö are often held to have kicked off the Nordic crime-fiction boom in 1965. I read a few of their books, some of Henning Mankell’s, several by the Icelander Ragnar Jónasson, and a smattering of others. My main takeaway from these novels wasn’t about killers or cops (although I did learn from some desultory googling that Stieg Larsson was a leftist activist, Mankell an outspoken supporter of Palestinian liberation, Sjöwall and Wahlöö basically Marxists). It was that the weather really is simply dreadful. The average high temperature of Stockholm in July is 64°F. Just, no.

The first Martin Beck novel, Roseanna, begins deceptively: “the weather was warm and beautiful with mild temperate winds and idly moving summer clouds.” Of course, this fine day is marred by the discovery of the corpse of a woman in a lake. Within a few pages the daylight is “gray and soupy,” and on the last page snow is falling on Beck’s hat, though he’s singing. The first pages of The Legacy, by Iceland’s Yrsa Sigurdardóttir, give us a “fierce gust of wind” and “a blanket of snow.” Jónasson’s The Darkness begins with “rain and more rain” and ends up on the “bleak, wintry” fjords. The Mist by Jónasson takes place entirely in a blizzard. It’s “freezing cold,” a “white wall,” “teeming white flakes in every direction.” And just look at the American covers of Kepler’s series—the first shows snow falling; the third shows a frozen corpse in the snow; the fourth shows snow falling; the eighth shows snow-covered ground; the ninth shows snow-covered forest. “Everything is swirling snow and enveloping darkness,” Kepler writes at the beginning of The Sandman, and twenty pages later: “Beyond the illuminated hospital precinct the winter darkness has settled.” The word “darkness” appears fifty-two times in this five-hundred-page novel, once for each week of the year.

The weather is a main character in this fiction. Of course, the weather is now, with the onslaught of global warming, a main character for us all, altering our lives, sometimes ending them. I began to think of weather as a serial killer. I thought of Wallace Stevens, who was preoccupied in several poems with “major weather”:
To discover winter and know it well, to find,
Not to impose, not to have reasoned at all,
Out of nothing to have come on major weather.

Indeed, the weather is so prominent in Nordic noir that I started to wonder whether the obsession with murder comes less from the cold and dark and more from the attraction of balmy Los Angeles, where detective fiction begins. Noir is born in hot neon nights. Indeed, Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett appear in the index of any academic study of Scandinavian crime fiction. Their influence on Sjöwall and Wahlöö is well documented.

Chandler’s The Big Sleep, the first Philip Marlowe novel, opens: “It was about eleven o’clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills.” Wet rain, mind you, the worst kind. Later Marlowe says to Vivian, “I don’t mind if you don’t like my manners. They’re pretty bad. I grieve over them during the long winter evenings.” A lot has been written about the Angelenos’ influence on Nordic noir, but my simple thesis is that it was principally a case of sunshine envy.

An Angeleno can afford to crack wise about long winter evenings. According to The Mist, in Iceland’s far east in December, it doesn’t get light out until a Chandleresque eleven in the morning. A farmer’s wife peers “out into the darkness. It was snowing. But then she knew that. It always snowed here in winter. What else could she expect in Iceland? … She smiled a little wryly: this was no place for people, not at this time of year.”

She gets murdered, obviously.

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Michael Robbins is the author of three books of poems, most recently Walkman, and a book of essays, Equipment for Living: On Poetry and Pop Music. He has written for Book Post on Rilke, Marcel Proust, translating Ovid, Paul Muldoon, Allen Ginsberg, apocaplypse by fire, “Nancy,” the destruction of animals, and cheesy reading.

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