The cold heart of crime fiction

Scandinavian writers are the new cool of the crime genre. Arminta Wallace asks why northern Europe is an ideal setting for murder.

It started with jazz - or maybe furniture design. Now the craze for all things Scandinavian has spread to the world of crime fiction. The coolest crime scenes these days are to be found, not on the streets of American cities, but in the forests of northern Europe; once-peaceful places which are now fairly bristling with crazed killers and world-weary detectives. And readers are lapping it up as fast as publishers can translate it.

Every volume of Henning Mankell's Inspector Kurt Wallander series sells almost a million copies in Germany alone - a good enough reason, perhaps, for even the most upmarket publishers to quietly drop their objections to a form of fiction once regarded as either irredeemably vulgar or impossibly staid.

Mankell - who published his first crime novel, Faceless Killers, in 1991, and has been dubbed "the most successful Swedish writer since Strindberg" - insists that it is only a matter of time before a crime novelist is awarded a Nobel Prize for Literature. More sci-fi than crime-file? Perhaps. Nevertheless the most influential northern crime novel of recent years wasn't a crime novel at all - but a work of literary fiction.

Miss Smilla's Feeling For Snow, by the Danish writer Peter Høeg, was the Da Vinci Code of the early 1990s. At one point everybody seemed to be reading the story which began with a six-year-old boy falling to his death from the roof of an apartment block in Copenhagen. "It was a pastiche of a crime novel which, if truth be told, went really badly off the rails at the end," says Christopher McLehose, Høeg's editor at Harvill Press. "But it was a huge success - and it's still selling."

Harvill Press had carved a reputation as a publisher of high-quality fiction in translation. After the runaway success of Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow, the publisher - which had also given the world Martin Cruz Smith's stylish Gorky Park - realised it could make a new, and considerably more lucrative, specialism out of an old one.

"After Miss Smilla, we were offered the complete works of maybe 30 Danish writers," says McLehose. They didn't find another Miss Smilla, but they're now leading the charge with a list which includes crime fiction from Iceland and Norway as well as Sweden.

Much of the appeal of Høeg's novel lies in the way it juxtaposes the plight of Greenlanders living in inner-city ex-patriate misery in Copenhagen with idealised memories of the Arctic. Both themes remain central to much crime fiction from the north - a strong sense of place allied to a keen interest in social democracy. The former is a staple ingredient of quality contemporary crime writing - think of Ian Rankin's Edinburgh, or Michael Connelly's Los Angeles - but for Scandinavians, landscape is more than just an added extra. It's part of their emotional and cultural make-up.

"We have this special, very cold climate with very dark winters - and we have big geographical areas with few people," says the Norwegian writer Karin Fossum. "Because of the climate we stay a lot inside our houses; we don't mingle like people do in Italy and France. Which gives us, I suppose, a certain kind of character. A journalist from England once said to me that in Scandinavian novels there is a kind of tristesse - you can feel the cold, the darkness."

In Fossum's novels the darkness takes a psychological form as she gets up close and personal with her killers. "I'm not very interested in a smart plot or a clever intrigue, but I'm very much interested in the drama that is murder," she says. "It often strikes me when I see crime on television - I mean, from the real world - that the killer can admit to having committed the murder, but doesn't accept the idea of punishment, because he feels like a victim of himself and the situation."

For the Icelandic novelist Arnaldur Indridason, who has written a series of police procedurals featuring a detective called Erlendur, crime writing is a form of social realism. "I try to use the crime story as a way to say something about the society I live in," he says.

Icelandic society underwent enormous change after the second World War, when people began to move out of the countryside and into Reykjavik. "Erlendur also moves to Reykjavik, and it's a foreign place for him. He is kind of lost - he doesn't have any roots any more." At one level Erlendur is the archetypal gloomy northerner.

"It's amazing", as Christopher McLehose puts it, "how many Scandinavian detectives are divorced and alcoholic and don't sleep well and occasionally punch innocent bystanders." But Indridason, a film historian and former journalist, has given the character a highly appealing spin. Erlendur shuns fast food and worries about the future of the Icelandic language; but he also has a wry sense of humour and an ability to empathise with criminals as well as victims.

The new Erlendur book, Silence of the Grave, will be published in English this summer, and Indridason is currently at work on another. At one point last year the Erlendur books occupied six out of the top 10 slots on the Icelandic bestseller lists, and a slew of favourable reviews suggests that he is set to acquire a similarly enthusiastic international following.

Does his creator have any idea why this should be? "It could be Iceland," says Indridason modestly. "Reykjavik is marketed as a very exotic place nowadays."

But he admits that Erlendur travels very well. "Wherever I go, I'm asked the same questions about him. In Germany they ask, will he ever meet a woman? In France, what about his daughter, who is a drug addict, will she be OK? It's the same all over the world: family problems, and problems of loneliness and loss."

Karin Fossum, who also has a new book due out in English translation this summer, suggests that Scandinavian crime writers are particularly sensitive to such matters. A poet and short story writer who also writes non-crime novels, she likes to preface her Inspector Sejer series with powerful quotes from Norwegian poets.

"As a Scandinavian reader," she says, "when I read American crime stories, I often feel that they are bit noisy. There's a great deal of action - driving in fast cars, shooting and so on. Maybe Scandinavian books are a quieter, more psychological type of literature."

Christopher McLehose is at a loss to explain the international demand for Nordic crime fiction, but welcomes the fact that, for the present at least, it's here to stay.

"I think it's dangerously good for people," he says. "These are highly intelligent writers who could earn their living as psychologists, sociologists or playwrights - and they are telling stories about their societies which are as interesting to readers in our world as anything Ian McEwan might say about the Hampstead intelligentsia in London. They are opening a window on to a different reality."

Chilling tales - Five Nordic novels to try

Miss Smilla's Feeling For Snow by Peter Høeg, Flamingo. The original and, in some ways, the best. As an Arctic tale, it has been compared to Conrad and Melville, it hasn't dated in the least, and the indomitable Smilla is a joy.

He Who Fears The Wolf by Karin Fossum (left), Vintage. A body in the woods; a boy with a bow and arrow; a schizophrenic misfit. One of the Inspector Sejer series, the story is spread with a sense of unease. The title says it all. "He who fears the wolf should not go into the forest."

Tainted Blood by Arnaldur Indridasson (left), Harvill. Set in the new suburbs of Reykjavik, this novel featuring the detective Erlendur is bettered only by its successor, Silence of the Grave, which is due out in May. Pacing and dialogue are superb, and though Indridasson's style is all his own, there are some delightful Ed McBain and Ian Rankin moments.

Missing by Karin Alvtegen, Canongate. Hovering between crime novel and thriller, this tale narrated by a homeless woman who becomes the most wanted person in Sweden is gripping in the extreme - and proves that social conscience doesn't have to be a dull business.

The Dogs of Riga by Henning Mankell (right), Vintage. The inimitable Inspector Wallander goes to Latvia in a typically elegiac page-turner which contains Mankell's potent mix of drug-related nastiness, racism and social dysfunction. But then any Mankell is good Mankell. (Sidetracked, The White Lioness and The Return of the Dancing Master)