Episode 1: Sweden and the Beginnings of Nordic Noir

Here more stories in your language by visiting ispiers.com.au Welcome to Noir here this one of the first podcast series dedicated to Nordic Noir is popular crime fiction genre. In each episode we will travel to a Scandinavian country to meet the people behind the famous TV shows and converse with some of the genre's most prolific writers. My name is Johan Gobrelsson. But first what is the definition of Nordic Noir? It has been defined as the language is simple, it excuse metaphor, the settings have bleak landscapes, the mood is dark and morally complex, the genre depicts a tension between the apparently still and planned social surface in Scandinavia and the murder, misogyny, rape and racism it depicts as lying underneath. In today's program we begin in Sweden with the Swedish writers Chéval Val, the couple who many believed invented Nordic Noir. We meet Kristoffie Carlson, writer and criminologist. Kristoffer will explain why Chéval Val had such an immense impact on crime writing. Not only in Scandinavia but also around the world and we get to meet one of Sweden's most successful crime writer, James Lapidus, on how Chéval Val inspired his writings about the gang wars and drug trades in Stockholm. And finally we meet Beverly Allen who gives lectures on Nordic Noir at Stanford University in California. But we begin with Chéval Val, their first book Rosanna introduced the world to the detective Martin Beck, Rosanna was first published in 1965. And this book Chéval presented a new kind of crime writing not seen before. It reflected Sweden far from an idyllic Akeia catalogue. Martin Beck's world was filled with corruption and violence and revealed the underbelly of a failed welfare state. The main character Martin Beck was also very far away from the glamorous detectives seen in many North American cop shows all the time. Here is a taste of Martin Beck in an excerpt from Chéval Val's book, The Abdominal Man, first published in 1971. In his mind's eyes, Martin Beck suddenly saw a picture of Neymann's mutilated body. He thought about what Colberg had told him, about how Neymann had told him to kill. Martin Beck had never killed another human being. He tried to imagine what it would feel like. Not shooting someone. He didn't think that would be hard, maybe because the force it takes to pull the trigger was out of all propositions to the force of the bullets that it does the killing. Killing with a firearm didn't require any great physical effort and a distance to the victim ought to make the act feel less immediate, but killing someone directly with your hands with a piece of rope or a knife or a bayonet. That was another matter. He thought of the body on the marble floor of the hospital, the gapping wound in the throat, the blood, the entrails welling out of the belly and he knew he would never be able to kill that way. Christopher Carlson is the youngest person in Sweden ever named the country's crime writer of the year. He has a PhD in criminology and is an expert on the writings of Khröval Wall. "Oh, you cannot underestimate their influence. I mean, you have to understand. You have to understand that before Khröval Wall, there was nothing in terms of a modern police procedural novel. There were guys like Steeck Trandstert and Maria Lang who wrote cozy detective stories. So when my Khröval and Pair Hall are when they introduce Speck, Colby and the rest in Rosanna, it's like a genesis moment. Something is being created. I knew something entirely new is created. Everything we think about today, when we think about Nordic now, when we think about the social issues that we tend to touch on when we think about the police as a collective force, when we think about the different characters with their different characteristics and their relations between each other, when we think about the way we tend to follow the perpetrator and certain chapters in the book, we see his or her point of view of the world, we understand his or her perspective. All of that comes from Khröval Wall at the very beginning. They were first. And they of course were influenced by people like Ed McBain. When you look at their library, much of their influences are Anglo-Saxon nature. So they were very well read, they were very well read in sociology and the sociology of policing and so on. But when it came to Swedish fiction, they did something entirely new. The Sweden they write about, does Sweden as a society take a place in their books do you think? Oh yeah, absolutely. In the Martin Bechtier, you have, first of all, what they do in a fantastic way is that they turn the city, almost the city of Stockholm and the country of Sweden, almost it's almost turned into a character itself. It is described in the way you would normally describe a character as its own breathing kind of entity. The whole idea behind the Martin Becht series, as I understand it now from what I've read about it and from having read the books of course, is that their task was to write a series of ten books about contemporary Sweden, the Sweden that they saw. The problems it had, the potential it had, promising aspects of Swedish society but predominantly the more harrowing aspect of Swedish society. And to tell that story using the lens of the contemporary police officer. So yes, social criticism that we have come accustomed to when we look at Nordic New York, you know, this has been done by people like any man, killing Lisa Mark, and then speak large of course and so on. That begins with Kvalval. They did it more explicitly than most of us do, especially as you come towards the last of the series, the Obama novel man, the police killer, a cop killer and the terrorists. There you have quite lengthy excursions on the terrible state of Swedish society. And when we write today, people like me and Jans La Piedus and Camila Leff and other people, when we deal with troubling issues, we tend to do it less explicitly. We tend to sort of show it rather than to tell it. Kvalval did both. They showed and they told because they thought that the social critique is actually the most important part of the book. What is that critique? What was it about Swedish society that they were writing about? That's a good question. So you have to remember, they published these series of books between 1965 and 1975. Sweden at that time is undergoing major social, economic and political changes. So it is a country that has been modernized. But by that, I mean that it has gone through the process of modernity. But it is still in a quite early phase. So you have, for example, you have the idea of the people's home, Swedish idea called "Folkämit." That is the million program, which was a very famous program in Sweden where the task was to create a million new households. The housing situation in Sweden was terrible. They see a drug problem emerging in Sweden. The Swedish drug problem is only about 60 years old. It enters Sweden in the beginning of the 60s before that. There is really a Swedish drug problem. The Swedish drug policy is introduced at that time. The Swedish police become a matter of the state. Previously, the Swedish police had been tied to the municipalities. But now you get a state police, one police agency. So all of these things are happening. You mentioned that they wrote books over quite a long period. What would you say happen in the writing of their books? Because I'm sure you could discern like a change in the way you do. they wrote to books. So are they really the kind of same and have the same kind of quality in your view? Christopher. Oh, that's a great question. No, you can absolutely discern distinct differences as the series progresses. First of all, the books tend to become longer. The first four or five books, each and every one of them, I would say it's almost under 200 pages. The first half of the series, they're quick and tense, very deadly written, very coolly written crime stories over 180, 190 pages. Then the books turn longer. One reason for this, I think, is that Pat Valer, who did much of the editing, he got ill toward the end of the series. I mean, he died right as the final book was about to come out. So that's one reason for I think the books becoming longer. He didn't have the stamina, the power to work on them as much. Another thing which you can see as you read the series is that in the first two, three books, there isn't really much explicit social political critique. If there is, it's more shown than told. And I've heard, I don't know if this is true, but I sort of hope that it's true because it's sneaky in a way that I sort of like. Even though I don't agree with much of their politics, they say that we need to lure the reader in and gradually as we move through the series, the political implications of the books, the critique against the police, against the state, against the contemporary Swedish society, against capitalism, that will become a more integral part of the book, a more explicit part of the book. We are going to hear more from Christopher Carlson in another episode of Noir here this. And the way Khevalval has inspired Christopher Carlson's own award-winning crime notes. Many critics have praised Khevalval's insight into police procedures. Swedish writer James Lapidus caused a sensation in Sweden, with his books Easy Money, Never Screw Up and Life Deluxe. His novels tell tales of gang wars, going on underneath the surface of apparently peaceful Stockholm. James many years working as a defense lawyer and spied him to write his first book Easy Money. It was the first book in his so-called Stockholm Noir trilogy. The books have since become highly praised films. Well, I think all of my books deal to a certain extent with the underworld of Stockholm. And many people certainly foreign journalists have quite a romantic view of Swedish society. Having said that, I still think Sweden is comparatively speaking a very safe and secure society. But we do have organized crime just as any other large European or city in the world. So there is a lot of drug dealing and prostitution and gang violence and stuff like that going on. So most of the stuff in my books reflect either real cases that I've come across as a defense lawyer or things that could happen. When you wrote those books, is that how you felt about crime, fiction in Sweden as you were implying that there was this kind of more romantic writing about Sweden, but it didn't show the reality that you had come across. Yeah, I think that's true. I worked in the court and I came across a part of Stockholm, a part of Sweden that never ever had been reflected in crime fiction in Sweden. Usually there's a very set format for Scandinavian crime fiction. There's a murder, there's an investigator coming in, a police, man or woman or a prosecutor or someone investigating the murder, and then at the end of the book, you will have the solution. Now I write in most of my books, I write about, so to speak, the real crime, so Sweden. Sometimes murder, but also bank robberies, track dealings, frauds, all kinds of crimes like that. So when I said that to write my first book, I took all the vital, founding aspects of a Scandinavian crime thriller that is murder investigation solution. And also you add to that a parallel historical storyline, plotline, and I turned it 180 degrees, but sat down and did exactly the opposite. So I will not have a policeman investigating a murder in my books. I will have the criminals themselves as main characters, and I will not have historical plotlines. All my books are very contemporary. How did you come up with this idea though? Well, it was not something I planned. It was I was working in the court and I felt that the door was open up and that I could peek into a part of Sweden that not many people have a chance to see. And so I just started to write in the evenings, and I didn't even plan to write the novel. You saying that you writing became something you did when you were finished with the court cases when you came home? Was it kind of therapy? Yes, I think it was. It was for me letting out some steam. You get, you come across pretty horrific stories and horrific people that went through pretty horrific thing, traumatic, tragic, and I dealt with that by writing. I'm fascinated by language. The language of a lawyer, it's a special language. Does that language spills over into the books, do you think? Well, I think it does. First of all, in any of my novels, I interject, I have judicial doc legal documents. So sometimes you will follow the chapters of the characters and then you will see the sentence written in court language. I have those kind of documents set in the text in the book. So that's one part of it. Another part of it is that I write very short-cut style. I write short sentences, which in a way mimics legal way of writing. Because legal way of writing, you want to get rid of all redundant. You never ever in legal writing want to write too much. So in a way, it does reflect the way of writing, but not because it's still literary language. But the slang and the language of the street, I get from a lot of inspiration to that language. I get from my job as a lawyer because there's a lot of wiretapping going on in Sweden. So if you have, for example, a big drug case, as a lawyer, you will be listening to a lot of the police wiretapping of the criminal gangs. When they speak and the police listen secretly, when you hear that, I pick up on a lot of phrases and words and slang words and so on. A claimed Swedish author, James Lapidus. In today's academia, Nordic Noir Scandinavian crime fiction can be started at some of the world's most prestigious universities. In front of me, I have the reenlist for the Nordic Noir course at Oxford University. With books entitled Death in a Cold Climate, the Making of Nordic Noir, transnational cinema in the global north. Nordic Noir can also be started at Iberlie Colleges, as Harvard University and Stanford University, where the professor behind the course is Professor Beverly Allen. The purpose of the course is to share the understanding I have about this genre that people call Nordic Noir, so that we can see not only how much fun it all is, but why we like it. So I think it's a big deal. What is it that you want your students to take away from this course? I want them to take away an understanding of why they like this stuff so much, and also how it opens up a huge context of historical and social and political understanding not only of the Nord, but also of the world they live in. Because a big question presents itself, which is why aren't such stories written here or in Australia to my knowledge? It's different, you see. You know, murder mysteries didn't exist before the age of reason, the enlightenment. They couldn't have, because murder mysteries generally depend on the capacity of the detectors to reason out how this murder happened. And the apex of that is Sherlock Holmes, who is nothing, it's not reason. What you find in Scandinavia, however, are detectives who are often imperfect, as is Sherlock. I mean, he has his drug addiction, but these detectors are imperfect, but they also use their intuition at times. And I think that's very important. It shows that they're using both sort of the male brain and the female brain to use clichés, you know? And so, So they are immensely attractive as people. You were talking about this is very different from, for instance, literature or crime fiction in America, in the United States. Can you talk a little bit more about that? What is the difference, Beverly? Well, the difference, I think, is we don't have the extremes that the North has, the Scandinavia and the Nordic countries. And if we have fabulous extreme landscapes from vast mountains to deserts to huge forests in Minnesota, for example, we don't have the endless night of the Scandinavian winter and we don't have the midnight sun. And there's something incredibly alluring about those things. There's something very exotic for English speakers, I think. And that may include Australians. Those darknesses, the northern lights, the mid-summer light when the birds never quit singing. You know, that offers such a mystery. It's a fabulous invitation to consider the mystery of life, even, or the mystery of death. And then how fabulous we're also satisfying to see death get explained somehow. Can you say something about the women being represented in this genre? Is this something specific about how women are portrayed, do you think? Well, yes, there's a history of that in the genre. They don't get much space in the early X series. Henning Menkel does a lot better in his Balander series, of course, Steve Larson, and also Peter Hague with Fnilla do more. I think one of the most important things about Steve Larson's millennial interlty is the way it pokes us sort of to think about how the women are portrayed. I think that Lusabeth Falander is probably the most interesting literary character of the decade. And, you know, part of why she shocks us is that he has taken traits normally associated with a male protagonist and given them to her. So she takes violent revenge on her tormentor and a lot of people cheer when that happens. Unfortunately, one may not think that that's the way that women could best go by imitating a male pattern. There may be sort of more sort of lost feminine possibility of not carrying on like that that could offer a new paradigm for everyone. So the feminists scholarly take on that character is both yay, oh good, you know, this will show them, but also wait a minute. That's not how we want them to be. Why should we want to be that way ourselves? Why not find another pattern? However, in that same series, there are several things that are welcome. Number one, pregnant characters function as normal human beings and their pregnancies do not become the urgent emergency birth scenes that drive the clock. At the same time, when you look at lots and lots of these series, you start to see that some traits get copied from the really good ones. So we have often, well, for example, the detective, the female detective who has something wrong with her. You know, she has assburgers or she's antisocial, but the protagonist, the detective has generally in Scandinavian transition had something wrong with him, which humanizes him. So that I would say there have been many wonderful new ways of looking at women because of the female characters in these stories, but sometimes they are cliched. But going back to Elizabeth Falander at the very least, she makes people think about gender relations and gender stereotypes. And I think that's a huge plus. We heard Professor Beverly Allen. Thanks for listening to our Noir here, this podcast series. The reading from Cheval Waller's book The Adomenal Man was made by Krunov Martinack. Production is by me, Johan Gorbelsson, and Technical Production by Vlad Lardgman. In our next episode, we travel to Denmark, home to some of the most popular Nordic Noir TV shows. The examine what lies behind the success of shows like The Bridge and The Killing. We also meet the queen of Danish crime writing, Sarah Bladal. If you liked what you heard, tell your friends. Subscribe via your favorite podcast app and review us on iTunes. It helps others find us. Goodbye. Is the home of Nordic Noir Down Under? From genre defining titles like The Bridge to the newest wave of Scandi thrillers, get ready to binge with over 20 of the genre's best titles, including Trapped, Midnight Sun, Dicta, Modus, Below the Service, and more. Buried secrets, buried bodies, unearth all the best Nordic Noir on SBS On Demand Now.