Superb moody thrillers

The global market for crime thrillers today is dominated by a band of left-wing writers from Sweden. Their dark novels about vigilantism, racism and sexual abuse, featuring angsty protagonists with broken marriages, estranged kids, and health issues — a far cry from the tried and tested formula of athletic, sharp-shooting, car-chasing super-sleuths — have added a new dimension to crime fiction.

The operative word in Swedish crime fiction, ask any fan, is moody. Dark winters, desolate miles of arctic countryside where the closest neighbour lives a couple of kilometres away, menacing woods, morose detectives, really malevolent criminals, ghoulish crimes...there is no rational explanation why anyone should spend time and money reading obsessively melancholy crime stories, right? Wrong.

Those who love crime fiction today are looking to Sweden for the really riveting and intelligent page turners. Not just Sweden, other Nordic nations too seem to have suddenly discovered a talent for immensely readable crime writing. Once you taste them, it is hard to go back to the sunny, racy thrillers from the US or the less fraught stuff coming out of the UK.

It does not matter that by the time you hit the last page you are sunk in deep depression at the goings on in some malevolent town whose name we will never be able to pronounce. Stieg Larsson, Henning Mankell, Hakan Nesser from Sweden, Arnaldur Indridason from Iceland...authors can’t seem to churn out books fast enough to keep up with the demand, publishers can’t translate them fast enough, or reprint the older ones often enough.

Filmmaker and scriptwriter Sriram Raghavan, who specialises in film noir, picks Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo as his favourites. The Swedish couple, who are seen as the parents of Swedish crime writing from back in the 1960s, more or less set the template for the kind of titles landing in bookstores today. They wrote a sum total of ten books, The Laughing Policeman being the best known, featuring Martin Beck.

“Superb moody thrillers,” is how Raghavan describes them. Researcher Avinash Celestine believes that the two, with their clear left wing leanings and activism did more than just churn out edge of the seat stuff. “They were clearly left wing activists who portrayed what was happening in the Swedish society at that time. Simply brilliant writing,” he says.

The protagonists of these novels — calling them thrillers would be unfair — are angsty men well into their middle age, they have health issues, eat junk, sleep badly, have broken marriages, distanced children. It is okay if they don’t pump iron because they aren’t much into car chases, gunbattles or fisticuffs anyway.
Most importantly, the plots are connected with social issues: migration, corruption, sexual abuse of women, vigilantism, racism, and so on. The books are almost entirely about painstaking police procedurals, and there is scope for mistakes, bad judgement, unfortunate coincidences. Predictably, more than one dead body ends up in the morgue by the time the book ends.

In the wake of the unprecedented success of Stieg Larsson’s Millenium Trilogy in India, the Swedish Embassy is holding a series of events featuring Hakan Nasser, starting next Monday in Delhi. He will speak on the resurgence of crime fiction in Sweden, and hold workshops on crime writing. These events will also be held in Mumbai and Bengaluru.