Nordic noir

Nordic noir, also known as Scandinavian noir or Scandi noir, is a genre of crime fiction usually written from a police point of view and set in Scandinavia or 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, misandry, rape, and racism it depicts as lying underneath. It contrasts with the whodunit style such as the English country house murder mystery.

Some of the best known Nordic noir authors include Jo Nesbø from Norway, Henning Mankell, Stieg Larsson and Camilla Läckberg from Sweden, Jussi Adler-Olsen from Denmark and Arnaldur Indriðason from Iceland. The popularity of Nordic noir has extended to the screen, with TV-series such as '' The Killing'', '' The Bridge'','' Trapped'', 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 writing 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, often involving the simultaneous investigation of several crimes. Examples especially include 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. 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
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