Nordic Noir: The Story of Scandinavian Crime Fiction Timeshift

Scandinavia - a place of haunting natural beauty,

a Utopian society where beautiful people lead idyllic lives.

It's the perfect place for murder.

Over the past decade, Scandinavian crime fiction has become

a global phenomenon, and the story of its success

contains all the ingredients of a thriller.

An atmospheric setting, where the nights can last for days

and there are many lonely places to hide a body.

They're grey, they're gloomy, they're cold.

All these things create the kind of atmosphere

where bad things can happen.

A cast of writers as enigmatic as their fictional creations.

The man with many enemies, who died before any of his books had even been published.

The woman who experienced a murder first-hand.

This was not just a note in the paper.

I knew the killer.

A plot that asks whether something has gone wrong with the Scandinavian dream of a perfect society.

It's the light that failed, Scandinavian crime fiction.

It's the basis of it all.

It's the fact that everything goes wrong.

And at its heart is an unsolved murder that traumatised a nation.

REPORTER: A man approached the couple and shot Olof Palme at close range.

The prime minister is shot in the middle of Stockholm,

right in the centre of the city and it's like 9/11.

From Denmark and Sweden to Norway and Iceland,

it's a shadowy world peopled with memorable characters -

Kurt Wallander and Martin Beck,

Harry Hole and Lisbeth Salander.

This is an investigation into the mysterious success

of Scandinavian crime fiction

and why it exerts such a powerful hold on our imagination.

Stockholm, Sweden - it's a capital city with a cool exterior,

where citizens enjoy a life of freedom and prosperity

built on the foundations of the post-War welfare state.

Clean, safe, orderly - and the setting for a dark and violent

thriller that put Scandinavian crime fiction on the global map.

I started reading it at night

and it was the first Swedish manuscript definitely in

many years I actually read through the night,

finishing at about four in the morning.

To date, 45 million readers

have been gripped by The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo,

the first part of the Millennium Trilogy, a series written

by an author who revitalised the crime story with an injection of

Hollywood blockbuster thrills,

Stieg Larsson.

The key to the success of Stieg Larsson novels

is in a way very similar to the reason for the success

of the Harry Potter novels.

Stieg Larsson knew the genre of crime writing inside out.

He'd read it for years.

He read widely, across the genre.

What he did was pull aspects of different styles, different writers together to come up with something

quite different from what anybody else had done.

The success of the series owes much to the mystique that surrounds

author Stieg Larsson and his most striking creation, Lisbeth Salander.

He died at 50 without seeing his success

and he created an utterly original heroine.

She had a wasp tattoo about two centimetres long on her neck,

a tattooed loop around the biceps of her left arm

and another around her left ankle.

On those occasions when she had been wearing a tank top,

Armansky also saw that she had a dragon tattoo on her left shoulder blade.

She was a natural redhead, but she dyed her hair raven black.

She looked as though she had just emerged from a week-long orgy

with a gang of hard rockers.

To make her utterly sociopathic, to make this sort-of tattooed,

bisexual, pierced Goth - that was really a difficult sell.

A gifted computer hacker, Lisbeth Salander teams up

with journalist Mikael Blomkvist to expose the ugly secrets that fester

behind Sweden's elegant facade,

starting with an unsolved murder in a wealthy family with a murky past.

As Salander and Blomkvist dig deeper into the Vanger family's affairs,

they discover connections to the Swedish Nazi movement.

It was quite clear that the brothers all joined

Per Engdahl's fascist movement, the New Sweden.

Harald continued to be a member until Engdahl died in the '90s,

and for certain periods,

he was one of the key contributors

to the hibernating Swedish fascist movement.

Just like Mikael Blomkvist, Stieg Larsson was in real life

an investigative journalist, but the Nazis he was seeking to expose were part of Sweden's present.

In full uniform, in broad daylight,

110 Nazis marched through Stockholm,

shouting slogans like "Smash democracy! Smash the Jews!"

Although they're shouting racist abuse, which is illegal,

although they are inciting racial hatred, which is also illegal,

and although the whole demonstration was actually illegal, the police just let them march.

If Stieg Larsson had died without writing the Millennium trilogy,

he would probably be remembered as a brave investigative journalist.

He was the Swedish correspondent for Searchlight magazine in this country,

which deals with the far right.

And he came to Britain and lectured Scotland Yard on extremist groups.

He was quite an interesting figure.

The brazen activities of Sweden's far right in the 1990s

prompted Larsson to set up a journal called Expo, the inspiration for

his fictional Millennium magazine,

and still being published in Stockholm today.

Expo Foundation has a very specific aim, to investigate

right-wing extremism in all different forms,

like organised right-wing extremism,

xenophobia, different forms of intolerance.

Larsson's work made him many enemies.

He was working one night

at the offices of the magazine

he worked on

and saw a group of skinheads

gathering in the street below

with baseball bats,

who were waiting for him.

He saved his life by getting out

through another exit.

Like the old gunfighters in the West, he would sit with

his back to the wall, his face to the front of coffee shops he frequented.

A life lived on the edge took its toll on Stieg Larsson's health.

He smoked all the time when I met him.

You could see that he didn't look healthy.

He was fat -

corpulent, you say?

He looked tired.

But he had an energy about him.

That energy was the product of a desire

to fight injustice that Larsson had nurtured since his youth.

Gradually his political interest

became more focused on fighting

what he felt as the basic evils of the world,

which to his mind were fascism in all forms,

but more basically racism, sexism,

or the very idea that other people are inferior because of

some chance of their birth.

Larsson used journalism to shine a light on prejudice in Sweden

and he set out to dramatise the issue

in his novels through the character of Lisbeth Salander,

a volatile rebel on the margins of society.

She's ferociously bright.

She understand things that you almost wonder how she understands them,

because in some respects her empathy is non-existent.

She has a very distinctive way of viewing the world,

but she doesn't fit into the world.

In the only interview he ever gave about his books,

Larsson revealed the unlikely source of inspiration

for Lisbeth Salander -

a children's book by Swedish author Astrid Lindgren.

HE READS: 'It was an old idea from the first half of the '90s.

'I picked up Pippi Longstocking, eight years old.

'What would happen to her?

'A sociopath? Wrong,' he said.

'She has another different take on society from the rest of us.

'I'll do her 25 years old.

'She has this outsider perspective,

'or she has this outsider situation, doesn't know anybody.'

He has no scale whatsoever when it comes to social competence.

'That was the idea from the beginning,' he says.

An outsider with a troubled upbringing,

Salander is abused and eventually

raped by her legal guardian,

portrayed in the film of the book by Peter Andersson,

an actor who plays the role with a cold menace that emphasises

his perversion of the father-daughter relationship.

The abuse of women is a constant theme in a novel punctuated

with statistics about domestic violence,

an issue Larsson even raised in the original Swedish title

of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.

This is the first one. Man som hatar kvinnor.

Men Who Hate Women is the title.

I think it's a good front page

of the book, since it was a magazine and it looks like a magazine.

Very smart.

He initially intended this to be the overall title of the series

of ten novels, because they're all about

men who hate women. And he would have been aghast that the title has been

changed in so many languages because he thought this was important.

Lisbeth Salander might be a victim of the men who hate women,

but she is also Larsson's avenging angel.

You've got this messed-up woman who's been sexually abused,

who's been damaged profoundly by the things

that have happened in her life,

but somehow clings on to the kind of humanity that can move her forward.

She's ruthless, and you would have to say some of

the routes by which she takes her revenge are appalling,

but at the same time you find yourself behind her all the way,

you want her to succeed.

In this scene, the perspective of victim and abuser is reversed

as the director uses unsettling camera angles

to put us in the position of Lisbeth's guardian, now at the mercy

of his charge and her tattoo needle.

Is Stieg Larsson a feminist?

That's the 64,000 question.

Some women writers have said to me

those are gloatingly exploitative books,

in which all the sexual violence is there for us to enjoy,

and then we're given this writer to say,

"It's OK, she gets her own back."

They feel that doesn't buy Stieg Larsson a ticket out of that.

There are people who believe she's a psychopath,

an antisocial personage who should be maybe put away,

and that if people acted this way

it would be disastrous.

We did have the same discussion in Sweden 50 or 60 years ago

when the Pippi Longstocking novels were published.

Lisbeth Salander might be

a violent sociopath,

but she has much in common with

the strong-willed heroine of a Danish novel by Peter Hoeg

that first introduced Scandinavian crime fiction to a wider audience.

I'm not perfect.

I think more highly of snow and ice than of love.

It's easier for me to be interested in mathematics

than to have affection for my fellow human beings.

But I am anchored to something in life that is constant.

You could say that the two most significant Scandinavian novels

are published by Christopher MacLehose -

he published Miss Smilla back then and The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

and the heroines of both don't belong to any one society,

they can't quite function in any one society,

because they've got tugs from different parts of

their past, and the way they were brought up

and the things that have happened to them in their lives.

Published in 1992, Peter Hoeg's novel

follows Smilla's mission to prove that the death of Isaiah,

a young Greenlandic boy she had befriended, was no accident.

Now, Smilla is known for, as the title suggests,

her knowledge of snow, or her feeling for snow.

At one point she is a researcher

doing research into snow and crystals,

and she of course has a past in Greenland

where knowing snow conditions can be matter of life and death.

Now, at the outset of the crime novel, the little boy, Isaiah,

is found dead after a leap from roof of the apartment block.

Smilla Jaspersen finds that this is not an accident.

She can read the footsteps in the snow and these footsteps suggest

he's been chased off the roof and has fallen to his death.

An award-winning literary novelist, Hoeg's precise descriptions of

winter landscapes set a benchmark in Scandinavian fiction.

It is freezing, an extraordinary minus 18 degrees, and it's snowing,

and in the language which is no longer mine, the snow is qanik.

Big, almost weightless crystals falling in stacks

and covering the ground with a layer of pulverised white frost.

December darkness rises up from the grave,

seeming as limitless as the sky above us.

It's a beautifully written book, it's a book of great colour,

great atmosphere with a great sense of place.

What's so clever about it is the fact it's a kind of disquisition on language,

about the different nuances of snow, of different kinds of snow

which we don't have in Britain. But that's also the key to mystery.

Smilla's journey ends in the frozen wastes of Greenland,

a bleak backdrop typical of the Scandinavian crime novel.

A lot of Scandinavian landscapes are imposing, they're impressive,

they make you feel like a small person on a big landscape.

They're grey, they're gloomy, they're cold.

All of these things create the kind of atmosphere

where bad, difficult things can happen,

and I think a lot of Scandinavian writers use this to great effect.

The climate reflects

the minds of the people.

I had an English friend, he had a woman in Finland

and he spent ten years in Finland,

and the woman left him after the first year.

He said, "I'm getting so depressed, what's wrong?"

And I said "The wrong thing is that you're in Finland."

Then he eventually went back to London and he was fine in two weeks.

You need to be from the Nordic countries

to stay alive happily here, I think.

Of all the landscapes that might challenge humankind's instinct for survival,

few are bleaker than Iceland,

home to the brooding weather-obsessed crime novels

of Arnaldur Indridason.

Indridason writes for people who recognise the locales,

who understand the terrors and dangers of the wilderness of Iceland.

It's a place where people can disappear.

It was still raining.

The low-pressure fronts that moved in from deep in the Atlantic

at that time of year headed east across Iceland in succession,

bringing wind, wet and dark winter gloom.

Little wonder that Indridason's main character,

Detective Erlendur, is so depressed.

And it's the long dark nights,

which in those books become the long dark night of the soul,

usually for the detective, who is usually going through a bad time.

There are very few detectives who have good happy personal lives,

certainly in Scandinavian crime fiction.

Erlendur's cheerless personal life

is portrayed with a hint of pitch-black humour

by director Baltasar Kormakur

in the film Jar City, with actor Ingvar Eggert Sigurdsson

delivering a bone-dry performance

as he tucks into an Icelandic delicacy of sheep's head

while babysitting his junkie daughter.

When you read a writer like Indridason from Iceland,

those books are really quite dark and grim and difficult,

but they're shot through with

dark and awful bits of humour.

People laugh at the worst sort of things,

but that also reflects a kind of reality.

When life is grim and dark, people find something to laugh at.

Laughs are at a premium in Jar City,

a macabre story about missing organs and genetic manipulation,

inspired by a controversial real-life plan

to create a DNA database of every Icelander.

Jar City is one of the very best Scandinavian modern crime novels,

and one of the best modern crime novels.

It's interesting that that's a book driven by the hatred and fear

of the surveillance society.

It's based on a true life case of the availability of

genetic material to one company.

The Jar City of the title is human organs in jars.

It's a horrific novel.

And you keep all these secrets.

Old family secrets.

Tragedies, sorrows and death, all carefully classified in computers.

Family stories and stories of individuals.

Stories about me and you.

You keep the whole secret and can call it up whenever you want.

A Jar City for the whole nation.

Dark secrets, bleak landscapes, grim weather

and famously long winter nights.

It's a world where the first chink of light comes as a blessed relief.

The longing for the summer, the longing for the returning of light,

of course it's a pagan tradition, but something that is deeply ingrained in all Scandinavians.

Midsummer in Sweden.

If you'd been here in the '60s,

you could be forgiven for thinking you were in paradise.

Anyone in this permissive society can buy contraceptives in the street

or pornographic magazines.

A liberal Utopia of free love and welfare for all.

Or was it?

I came to London for the first time in '66 and '67.

'67 was the flower power summer, and then they said, "Oh you're from Sweden, the country of free love."

"What?" I was 17 and I had no experience of

free love in Sweden whatsoever, so that was definitely a myth.

We made one or two films with some naked bodies and that was it,

but we were never the country of free love, I can tell you.

There was even a feeling in some quarters that the fabled welfare state,

designed to use Sweden's post-war prosperity to fund healthcare and benefits,

had failed to live up to expectations.

That sense of disillusionment prompted two left-wing reporters,

Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo, to begin work on a series of ten crime novels

that pioneered the idea of using detective fiction to analyse the state of the nation.

The template for Scandinavian crime fiction.

They began it all. They began it all in the sense of taking the police

procedural of Ed McBain and putting it down in modern Scandinavia.

They also added this social dimension, they gave it a Marxist perspective

and that's unfashionable now, but that political perspective is what's lived on from their work.

In 1965, Sjowall and Wahloo began to write crime stories

about a unit of the Stockholm police

led by Inspector Martin Beck,

stories with a hidden agenda they called "the project".

For the fact of the matter is that the so-called welfare state abounds

with sick, poor, and lonely people,

living at best on dog food, who are left uncared for

until they waste away and die in their rat hole tenements.

Their novels were subtitled as the story of a crime,

the crime of the social democrats

leaving the working class behind.

The welfare state doesn't seem to live up to its socialist ideals

from the left perspective.

Maybe that is what all Scandinavian crime fiction is about, the death of the dreamers.

It is the light that failed, Scandinavian crime fiction, that is the basis of it all.

It's the fact that everything goes wrong.

It was quite surprising reading those books because the image of Sweden that we had in this country

was that it was this socialist paradise, and that although the taxes were high, they had found

this marvellous golden mean, where everything was lovely.

Then you read the Martin Beck novels, and you think,

"Wait a minute, this is quite a different picture we're seeing here."

The overtly political subtext of the books marked a radical first in Swedish crime fiction,

and Martin Beck became the prototype for the classic Scandinavian detective.

'Martin Beck sat on the green bench in the subway car and looked out

'through the rain-blurred window.

'He thought about his marriage apathetically,

'but when he realised that he was sitting there feeling sorry for himself,

'he took his newspaper out of his trench-coat pocket and tried to concentrate on the editorial page.

'He disliked the subway,

'but since he cared even less for bumper to bumper traffic, and that "dream apartment"

'in the centre of the city was still only a dream, he had no choice at the moment.'

Beck is very much a human character.

He's flawed, he has a difficult relationship with his wife, and with his family.

Some of his relationships with his colleagues are difficult.

He's kind of dyspeptic and gloomy, and he's not in any sense heroic,

but he's a man who thinks about his place in the world, and he thinks very carefully about his job.

He's thoughtful and he's compassionate.

I think he's very modern.

He's rather cool in the sense of being you're never quite sure what he is thinking at any given time.

Slightly existential approach

to the problems around him,

and completely in touch with

what is happening in society.

He knows his society inside out,

which not every copper does.

It was realistic, it was not romantic,

it was a hard-working police officer,

easy to like,

not very happy, not very lucky with women.

I believed in him, you can't believe in Agatha Christie the same way.

The realism of the novels was considered shocking for the time.

Looking back more than 40 years later,

Maj Sjowall still fondly recalls the long nights she spent with Per Wahloo putting the world to rights.

Per Wahloo died in 1975,

just as the final book in the series was published.

The Terrorists would be his epitaph,

and its plot about a political assassination in Stockholm

would prove eerily prophetic.

Shocked Stockholmers who heard the news of the tragedy hurried to the scene of the crime...

As he and his wife, Lisbet, walked home from the cinema entirely on their own,

the murderer simply walked up to the Prime Minister and shot him twice in the stomach...

Olof Palme had taken an evening off to go to the cinema with his wife.

A couple of hundred yards from the cinema, a man approached the couple and shot Olof Palme at close range.

Mr Palme collapsed in a pool of blood.

The killing of Swedish prime minister Olof Palme

on February 28th 1986, sent shockwaves across Scandinavia.

They used to say that we lost our innocence when Palme was shot,

and of course in a way it's true because the Prime Minister was shot in middle of Stockholm,

right in the centre of the city.

It's like 9/11 - you know where you were, how you heard the news

the first time, and we were in shock after that.

Swedes perceived the state

as a benevolent entity, which is their hope and their father figure, in a sense.

And obviously the prime minister then symbolises the state,

regardless of which party

he happens to come from, so killing the prime was an attack on...

..the benevolent mainstay of society.

Despite a lengthy manhunt and countless conspiracy theories,

the murder of Olof Palme has never been solved.

The inability of the police to solve the murder has become

a wound that cannot heal in Sweden,

and something most crime writers

more or less explicitly return to.

It was the end of the dream of this harmonious, happy, just,

controlled society.

It's a mystery that continues to cast a shadow over Swedish society.

There was the sense that these things, these kind of arbitrary,

brutal political assassinations, couldn't happen in Sweden.

Swedes suddenly had to realise that the world was a dangerous place.

It was kind of the scales falling from the eyes,

it was that kind of moment, but it led to all kinds of reassessments

of that social democrat ideal - how intact was it?

It made Swedes realise they were kind of like the rest of the world.

Then it seemed that all the other troubles of the rest of the world flooded in.

With borders crumbling after the collapse of Communism and membership

of the EU ratified in 1994, a new wave of migrants sought refuge

and opportunity in countries like Sweden, creating tensions in what had once been homogeneous societies.

There was in Scandinavia from the beginning of the '80s a growing sense of insecurity towards

the outside world, what will become of our countries with the pressures

of globalisation and neoliberalism.

Those anxieties are at the heart of a series of acclaimed crime stories set in the small port of Ystad

and written by an author who had grown up with the radical politics of Sjowall and Wahloo,

but now found a country struggling to open up to the world...

Henning Mankell.

It was 1988 and I realised that the problem with xenophobia

and racism was growing heavily and very fast in Sweden.

I decided that I wanted to write about that.

And since these kinds of expressions, xenophobic reactions

to certain things, is to me a criminal gesture,

I decided to use the crime plot and to write about that.

I wanted to describe how difficult it is to be a good police officer.

Mankell's creation, an angst-ridden detective in the Martin Beck mould, would go on to become

the a TV staple - the definitive Scandinavian detective,

Inspector Kurt Wallander.

'Maybe the times require another kind of policeman, he thought.

'Policemen who aren't distressed when they're forced to go into a human slaughterhouse

'in the Swedish countryside early on a January morning.

'Policemen who don't suffer from my uncertainty and anguish.'

Conveying Wallander's inner turmoil on screen presents the kind of challenge that actors relish.

Kenneth Branagh plays him with theatrical intensity,

but it takes a Swede like Krister Henriksson to channel the melancholy spirit of Ingmar Bergman,

as we see in a scene where opera music is used to emphasise Wallander's solitude

in the Swedish TV version.

The Swedish prototype for a detective is that - Wallander is, even -

you're tired, depressed, you're almost suicidal,

but that's also the Ingmar Bergman type.

We are not supposed to talk like I do, we are supposed to sit there and stare blankly out into the darkness.

That is the picture you have

of a Swede, isn't it?

Wallander's gift for police work has come at a price, something the Swedish TV series explores through

his awkward relationship with his daughter, Linda, a junior police officer.

The off-screen dynamic between actors Krister Henriksson

and Johanna Sallstrom brings an intimate realism to this scene about Linda's decision to become a cop.

Henriksson brings an air of world-weary disenchantment

to a character weighed down by the horrors he has witnessed.

Krister Henriksson's performances are very subtle and understated, and we study him intensely when we know

he's had a bad emotional experience, it's not going to be on the surface.

We have to read it in the crinkle of an eye.

In this scene from an episode called The Container, we see Wallander's reaction of mute shock

when he arrives at the final resting place of a group of refugees who died on their way into the country.

All the evils of the world wash up on the shores of Ystad

in Mankell's novels and the 26 stories he created specially for Swedish TV.

The problem with immigration, that's now a kind of sore point.

Swedes prided themselves on their liberalism, but they had to admit that

it's a problem for them, the way it's a problem for the rest of the world.

What we're watching now, according to Henning Mankell for instance, is Sweden's fall from grace, isn't it?

There must be something rotten in the state of Sweden.

Mankell's bid to explore national anxieties through

the prism of murder in a small town has taken its toll on the fictional citizens of Ystad.

In Mankell's novels I suppose there have been a couple hundred murders

in last 20 years or so, whereas in reality I can't think of a single one.

Don't go to Ystad, you'll get killed before tomorrow.

So, yeah. No.

That's where realism ends.

Ystad might be a town under siege from external forces, but further west among Norway's mountains

and fjords, it is the evil within tiny communities

that fascinates poet turned crime writer Karin Fossum.

'The village lay in the bottom of a valley, at the end of a fjord,

'at the foot of a mountain.

'Like a pool in a river, where the water was much too still.

'And everyone knows that only running water is fresh.

Well, I live in a small community myself.

It's a small village, it's a church,

it's a school, it's a lake, it's a mountain.

If someone gets killed I will probably know

either the person itself

or some of the family or the relatives.

The pressures that can build up in a small community are at the heart of novels steeped in

the psychological intensity of Norway's national playwright Henrik Ibsen.

Ibsen is one of the great purveyors of this kind of thinking,

that social situations, the social environment

can create social outcasts who may act irrationally

and in Karin Fossum's novels violently.

Karin Fossum is a very interesting writer

because she understands the relationship between killer

and victim, she understands that these things generally don't happen

in an accidental kind of way, that there are connections and reasons,

and I think she writes with great compassion for both sides

of the equation, if you like, for the person who finds themself killing

and the person who ends up being killed.

Fossum brings a poet's sensitivity to stories that deal with emotion rather than mystery.

Many crime stories, they start with a picture of the dead body.

If you don't know the dead body you won't be moved by the story,

you won't feel anything, and my passion as a writer, sometimes even my problem as a writer,

is that I'm trying to make you feel something.

I want to move you.

I'm not trying to be clever or to make clever plots.

I don't care too much about the plot, it's not important to me, but I would like to move you emotionally.

Karin Fossum's empathy for both killer and victim

is rooted in her personal experience of a traumatic crime.

Someone I knew very well committed a murder many years ago.

I had known this person for 18 years,

and suddenly this was not just a note in paper.

I knew the killer, I knew the victim - the victim was a child.

I knew the flat,

I had been there many times.

I knew the exact specific room.

And I thought, "But this is a good person, it can't be!"

It was a very, very strong experience for a writer,

and suddenly I understood this can happen to anyone,

it could have been my father or my brother, and every time I read about

a murder, I think, "He has a mother, he has a brother, he has children."

Up until this date, he was a good guy.

'Why did you hit her?

'Why?

'I was holding the dumb-bell in my hand.

'She was curled up with her hands over her head waiting for the blow.

'Couldn't you have turned around and left?

'No.

'I need to know why.

'Because I'd reached a boiling point.

'I could hardly breathe.

'Could you breathe again after she collapsed?

'Yes.

'I could breathe again.'

I'm writing about death, not murder, not killing,

not psychopaths, but death itself and how it affects us.

The remote communities in Karin Fossum's books are in sharp contrast to the bustling cities

that flaunt Norway's status as one of the world's wealthiest nations.

The discovery of oil in the 1970s transformed the fortunes of a country of just four million people,

and it continues to shape the Norway of today, as chronicled in the thrillers of Jo Nesbo.

After the Second World War, Norway was a poor country.

If you go back to '20s, Norway was one of poorest countries in Europe,

together with Portugal, Northern Ireland and Greece. But in the '70s,

the Norwegians, or actually the Americans found oil outside the Norwegian west coast,

and suddenly overnight, Norway became a very rich country.

And, yes, I think it certainly changed the soul of the country.

In Nesbo's world, the battle for Norway's soul

has left a moral vacuum filled with crooked cops and serial killers.

You would think that more money would give us more space and better opportunities

to feel solidarity with the rest of the world, but actually it seems the other way around -

that money has to some degree corrupted us.

'The afternoon sun angled across the town and came to rest in Bjorvika,

'an area of Oslo containing a motorway, a deposit for shipping containers and a refuge for junkies,

'but it was soon to have an opera house, hotels and millionaires' apartments.

'Wealth was beginning to take the whole city by storm.

'It made Harry think of the catfish in the rivers in Africa,

'the large, black fish that didn't have the sense to swim into deeper

'waters when the drought came, and in the end were trapped in

'one of the muddy pools that slowly dried up.'

Nesbo gave up lucrative careers as a stockbroker

and member of one of Norway's most famous rock bands to write crime fiction.

His protagonist is Detective Harry Hole,

a Norwegian take on the maverick American style of cop.

It's clear that Jo Nesbo has read Raymond Chandler,

and Harry Hole may be in Scandinavia,

but there's an American hard-boiled sardonic quality to him.

The fact that he's loner essentially and he's not particularly good at relating to people.

That may be something in the Norwegian way of thinking and our culture.

We don't want to be part of big things, we want to have

our own farm,

our own small fishing boat and get by doing our own thing.

In Nesbo's dark thrillers, Harry Hole is driven by

the desire to understand the killers he is hunting.

Harry has been fascinated with evil for a long time,

and that has of course to do with

the writer's fascination with evil.

I think for me, it started when I was a young boy,

I can remember in the classroom

there was a guy who was sitting on the window row

and he would catch flies in the windowsill,

and then he would start picking, using tweezers

to pick off one leg and then the wings.

Of course this is not unusual, but what fascinated me was the tweezer.

It was the idea of this boy being at home,

and planning what he would do when he'd get to the classroom.

But, anyway, the fascination for what goes on in the human mind probably started there and then.

He's very much in a Hollywood tradition, and that sets him apart, and also makes him interesting in

a Scandinavian context because he still writes from within

a Norwegian cultural context.

For Nesbo, even the innocent snowman becomes the stuff of nightmares.

It's a woman who's coming home in the evening, and she comes into kitchen where her husband

and son is making dinner for her, and she will say, "How nice,

"you're making dinner for me, and what a nice snowman you've built in the garden."

They sort of stop and look up at her and say, "We haven't built the snowman."

So they go into the living room and they look at this big snowman standing in the garden.

It's too big, and it's too close to the house and it's turned the wrong way

because it's looking directly into the living room, looking at them.

That was sort of... You know, I didn't know how

this scene would connect to the rest of the story, but I knew that was the starting point for a story.

'"Cordon off the whole area,"

'Harry said.

'His throat felt dry, rough.

'"I'm calling in the troops."

'"What's happened?" "There's a snowman here." "So?"

'Harry explained.

'"I didn't catch the last bit,"

'Holm shouted. "Poor coverage."

'"The head," Harry repeated, "it belongs to Sylvia Ottersen."'

Jo Nesbo is part of another trend in Scandinavian crime fiction that does turn for the more bloody.

Where do you go in Scandinavian crime fiction after you've torn apart the welfare system,

you have asked all the questions about why people are so violent,

what is happening to our societies? Where do you go after that?

And one of the answers in more recent Scandinavian crime is you go into more blood and more violence.

Jo Nesbo isn't the first Norwegian to use gruesome imagery in his work.

This is the country that produced an extreme genre of Satanic rock music

known as black metal, once Norway's most gory and violent export.

They didn't only talk about being anti-Christ, they actually burned churches.

I think that people throughout the world, they were impressed with that.

I can remember going to Mexico many years ago, and I went to this punk market and you would have stands

there selling Norwegian black metal,

and they would have written on the cassettes

"guaranteed Norwegian"!

Jo Nesbo is just one of many writers carrying the hopes of publishers

eager to replicate the multimillion-selling success

that began in Europe with Henning Mankell and reached the world with Stieg Larsson.

It's something that has to do with marketing.

I mean, we were successful in Germany and we had a few good writers and these books are selling.

Stieg Larsson's, for instance, enormously well, but it will pass.

We used to have good tennis players too, some years ago.

Stieg Larsson might have done for Scandinavian crime what Bjorn Borg did for tennis,

but he was destined never to enjoy the fruits of his success.

He died in 2004, not in a right-wing plot but on his way to work.

It's the case of the journalist who doesn't look after his body.

Hold the front page! It's a man who lives on junk food,

who smokes prodigiously, has a phenomenal nicotine intake,

an awful lot of coffee, which is certainly reflected in the book.

If he'd died at the hands of the far right, it would have been with baseball bats outside his office.

It wasn't... He died because he came to the office,

the lift was broken, he had to go up six flights of stairs, and his body finally gave out. It's that prosaic.

The whole situation is extremely sad, Stieg lived to be 50 years old

and a couple of months, and never in his life had any money.

Not that he ever wanted any money,

but he would have liked to have had a fair amount of money

so that he could maybe hire one or two more people at Expo

and so do more of his own writing.

That's about what he was hoping for when he sold his novels.

He never saw anything of the, by now,

hundreds of millions involved in the Millennium franchise.

Larsson did bequeath the world one final mystery.

There is the mystery of the fourth book, what exists of it,

it changes on a daily basis.

It's like the plot of a Stieg Larsson novel.

Recently, an email has come to light which seems to suggest

that two-thirds of it were written, which wasn't what we heard before.

A beginning was written, an end was written,

it needs something in the middle.

It has a Canadian setting, a bleak Canadian setting.

I personally can't see the value of it being completed by anyone,

because there is such a sense of the three Millennium books

being this perfect entity.

Larsson's heroes aren't the only ones whose adventures

appear to have come to an end.

Even Wallander is about to hang up his badge,

and Henning Mankell felt unable to continue a planned series

about Linda Wallander following the suicide of Johanna Sallstrom,

the actress whose charisma lit up the screen

and the set of the Swedish TV series.

Much-loved characters might have reached the final chapter,

but the kind of fictional heroes who follow in their footsteps

will be determined as much by Scandinavia's future as its past.

What will come,

what kind of crime fiction will be popular in the future, is hard to say

but I think the sort of Wallander-type of crime novels

will still have a place and inspiration for new crime writers.

What we see in the younger generation

is that yes, they are still reflecting on particular landscapes,

particular social situations,

they are not so much engaged in the directions of their own societies.

They are much more interested

in finding out what happens in a globalised world.

There might not be many happy endings,

but in societies that tend to crave order,

there'll always be someone willing to stare out into the darkness

and make sense of a turbulent and ever-changing world.

There is a sense that right is done

at the end of most Scandinavian crime novels,

but never in a resounding way.

There is always a sense that there is someone out there,

he may have put down one particular nasty piece of work or corruption,

but out there are people-trafficking gangs, out there are sexual abusers,

but at least for the duration of that one novel,

justice has been seen to be done.

Maybe imperfectly, but it's been done.

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