Nordic noir
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"They were influenced and inspired by the American writer Ed McBain. They realized that there was a huge unexplored territory in which crime novels could form the framework for stories containing social criticism.", Henning Mankell, 2006, introduction to Roseanna |
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Nordic noir, also known as Scandinavian noir, is a genre of crime fiction usually written from a police point of view and set in Scandinavia or one of the other Nordic countries. Plain language avoiding metaphor and set in bleak landscapes results in a dark and morally complex mood, depicting a tension between the apparently still and bland social surface and the murder, misogyny, rape, and racism it depicts as lying underneath. It contrasts with the whodunit style such as the English country house murder mystery. The popularity of Nordic noir has extended to film and television, such as The Killing, The Bridge and Bordertown.
Origins
There are differing views on the origins but most commentators agree that the genre had become well established as a literary genre by the 1990s; Swedish writer Henning Mankell who has sometimes been referred to as "the father of Nordic noir" notes that the Martin Beck series of novels by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö "broke with the previous trends in crime fiction" and pioneered a new style: "They were influenced and inspired by the American writer Ed McBain. They realized that there was a huge unexplored territory in which crime novels could form the framework for stories containing social criticism." Kerstin Bergman notes that "what made Sjöwall and Wahlöö's novels stand out from previous crime fiction – and what made it so influential in the following decades – was, above all, the conscious inclusion of a critical perspective on Swedish society."
Henning Mankell's books on "Kurt Wallander" made the genre a mass phenomenon in the 1990s. Norwegian author Karin Fossum's books on "Inspector Sejer" were also highly influential and widely translated. British author Barry Forshaw suggested that Peter Høeg's atmospheric novel Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow was "massively influential" as the true progenitor of the "Scandinavian New Wave" and, by setting its counter-intuitive heroine in Copenhagen and Greenland, that it inaugurated the current Scandinavian crime wave.
One critic opines, "Nordic crime fiction carries a more respectable cachet... than similar genre fiction produced in Britain or the US". Language, heroes and settings are three commonalities in the genre, which features plain, direct writing style without metaphor. The novels are often police procedural, focusing on the monotonous, day-to-day work of police, though not always involving the simultaneous investigation of several crimes. Examples include The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and its sequels by Stieg Larsson, Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander detective series, and Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö's Martin Beck novels.
Until the 2010s, the genre had no particular name, but was sometimes referred to descriptively as "Nordic crime fiction" or "Scandinavian crime fiction". Within the Nordic countries themselves, this is still the case. The terms "Nordic noir" and "Scandinavian noir" are used largely interchangeably in English; whereas Scandinavia consists of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, North Germanic-speaking countries that are linguistically, ethnically and culturally closely related to one another while the Nordic countries are a broader group that also include countries in the traditional Scandinavian sphere of political and cultural influence, such as Finland, which is mainly Finnish-speaking and culturally distinct from Scandinavia.
In the English-speaking world, the term "Nordic noir" was coined by the Scandinavian Department at the University College of London and gained further usage in the British media in the 2010s beginning with the airing of the BBC documentary called the Nordic Noir: the Story of Scandinavian Crime Fiction. The Guardian also referred to The Killing as Nordic noir. These factors underscore that the term is considered typical of a phenomenon seen as uniting the viewpoint of foreign eye towards recognizable Nordic context. Nordic noir remains a foreign term, as it is not used in the Nordic countries.
