More about The Swedish Crime Story

I mentioned recently The Swedish Crime Story by Bo Lundin, which provides a concise but useful account of the genre’s highpoints up to 1980. It’s a short survey, and the book contains both the Swedish text and an English translation (which reads oddly in one or two small respects, but is otherwise okay.) Bo Lundin does not exactly have the critical or literary skills of Julian Symons, but all the same, I’ve found Lundin’s account very interesting.

Lundin highlights two distinctively Swedish elements of crime fiction. One is called ‘the Trenter Syndrome’, named after its foremost proponent. Stockholm’s Stieg Trenter wrote books in which the atmosphere of his home city was as central to the book as the mystery itself.

‘The Ulcer Syndrome’ (named after Inspector Martin Beck’s troublesome ulcer in the books by Sjowall and Wahloo describes books with a strong sociological, although sometimes far from socialist, element. Lundin says: ‘There is a typical Swedish disappointment to be found in these books, an injured idealism...the big disappointment has its basis in a dream which once seemed close to fulfilment.’ In these books, settings are not so much used for local colour as for casting light on the characters.

Lundin identifies the first real Swedish crime story as The Stockholm Detective, by Prins Pirre, published in 1893. I found it interesting that early Swedish crime writers studied Sherlock Holmes, Arsene Lupin, and Agatha Christie. Indeed, if Lundin is right, two books by Major Samuel August Duse anticipated The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. We already know that Anton Chekhov, no less, used an ‘acroidal’ plot in The Shooting Party. So perhaps The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was not quite as ground-breaking as everyone in the English-speaking world seemed to think at the time. Though I very much doubt that Christie knew the Pirre book, and probably not Chekhov's, either.

The Swedish Crime Story

Widespread enthusiasm among British (and, I suspect, American) readers for Scandinavian crime fiction is a relatively new phenomenon. I’m pretty sure that before Sjowall and Wahloo created Martin Beck in their remarkable ten-book series in the 60s, hardly any Scandinavian crime fiction was translated into English, but even until the last ten years or so, there was not much Swedish, Norwegian or Danish (let alone Icelandic) fiction to be found in translation.

All that has changed now. Stieg Larsson may be dead, having never published a crime novel in his lifetime, but his name is everywhere. In recent weeks there have been not one but two very good series featuring Kurt Wallander, albeit in different ways, on British television. And names like Fossum, Nesbo and Nesser are prominent on the shelves of the bookshops.

So it’s tempting to assume that there was really very little Scandinavian crime fiction being written until quite recently. Tempting, but wrong. As ever, with fiction, the real difficulty was that publishers saw no demand for translated Scandinavian fiction, and so made no attempt to provide it for English-speaking readers. But there was material in abundance, even so.

Because I am fascinated by the history of the genre, I am keen to know more about Eurocrime (and crime fiction written outside Europe and the US) of the past. With this in mind, I’ve just acquired a short, privately printed book produced by Bo Lundin in 1981. It is called The Swedish Crime Story, and it is full of information that I find really interesting. So I will be posting again soon about the Swedish crime books you never get to hear about.