Sour on Swedes plus more on NoirCon

The wise and discerning keeper of the Crime Scraps Review blog, long a champion of Scandinavian crime fiction, asks after reading Autumn Killing by Mons Kallentoft: "Are we now getting the average Swedish crime novel translated simply because it is Swedish?"

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Back in Philadelphia, Jeremiah Healy is the latest NoirCon 2012 attendee to weigh in with his thoughts on the conference: 

"This will be my third NoirCon, and I attended the first two. I think my favorite story from the conference/convention was learning that David Goodis didn't just write noir: He also lived it, and probably more from desperation than enjoyment. ...

"NoirCon is different from most other conferences/conventions in that it is dedicated to a sub-genre of crime writing, something like the EyeCons (focusing on private-investigator fiction) sponsored by Gary Niebuhr and Ted Hertel in Milwaukee and Robert Randisi and Christine Matthews in St. Louis. As a result, it's like a wine-tasting dedicated to one varietal, say Pinot Noir (sorry), and therefore an event in which all the attendees have a common, if narrower, interest."

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Here's to you, Mr. Robinson, or the real secret of Nordic crime fiction

(Photo © Katja Gottschewski 2002)

Uriah Robinson of Crime Scraps published a piece of common sense the other day about why Scandinavian crime fiction is so popular.

He invoked an anecdote about a question to Atlanta students on a high school history exam: Why did the South lose the Civil War?

"Most of the class wrote reams and reams on the military, economic, social, political and demographic reasons," Uriah reported, "apart from one student who answered with one sentence: 'I think the Yankee Army had something to do with it.'"

"Scandinavian crime fiction is popular," he continued, "because it features good writing, usually excellent translation, well-thought-out plots and interesting characters."

Search his blog post from top to bottom, and you'll find no sociology, no commonplaces about Nordic stoicism, nothing about suicide or vodka or long nights. (You'll find precisely the opposite, in other words, of Laura Miller in the Wall Street Journal.)

It was a pleasure to see good writing, rather than sociology, invoked as a reason for popularity. Nordic crime writing is good? I think Arnaldur Indriðason (Or Jo Nesbø. Or Karin Fossum. Or ...) had something to do with it.

What are your favorite or least favorite takes on international crime fiction in the English-speaking world?

© Peter Rozovsky 2010