Larsson-y: I review Lars Kepler in the Philadelphia Inquirer

My review of The Nightmare by Lars Kepler in Sunday's Philadelphia Inquirer posits the existence of a school of Nordic crime writing called Stieg Larssonism (its practitioners are Larssonists) that

"combines potboiler thrills and righteous anger in a fat, sprawling tosh-filled package, often with 475 or more pages plus a didactic, statistics-filled epilogue in case the reader doesn’t get the point – or in case he or she thinks the point was just to have some fun. That way the reader get dirty thrills but feels morally uplifted at the same time."

While preparing the review, I came across a comment by Alexandra Coelho Ahndoril, the female half of the couple that writes as Lars Kepler, that Stieg Larsson had revitalized crime fiction and that the Lars part of their pen name was a tribute to him.

At the same time, I was reading Barry Forshaw's Death in a Cold Climate, which includes a chapter on the Larsson phenomenon but also another called "The Anti-Larsson Writers."  Finally, my post on realism, naturalism, and their opposite in crime fiction elicited this comment in Larsson's defense:

"[Larsson] was doing something different. He loved potboilers. He wrote fanfic when he was young and omnivorously consumed pop culture. He wrote a mashup of everything he loved and borrowed from Modesty Blaise to Sarah Paretsky but he also threw in everything he cared about in his day job as a journalist."

That commenter and I analyze Larsson and Larssonism in substantially identical terms, in other words, though her assessment is more positive than mine.

This, plus Forshaw's chapter on anti-Larsson writers, leaves me with a bracing feeling that I and the world now understand Nordic crime fiction better than we once did and the hope that we'll be spared further silly invocations of this, that, or the other utterly un-Larssonian writer as the next Stieg Larsson.

But mostly I liked writing the review because I got to define Stieg Larssonism as "potboiler plots with didactic political intent; call it Harold Robbins meets Noam Chomsky."

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

McFetridge, McKinty, and the Stieg Larssonists

Yesterday’s post about Lars Kepler’s novel The Nightmare took shape when I was struck dumb by the utter contrast between that book on the one hand and two tantalizing excerpts from new work by two of my favorite crime writers on the other.

The Nightmare, I write in an upcoming review, is an explicit example of Stieg Larssonism – a potboiler plot harnessed to didactic political intent. Its potboiler aspect means that everything notable that happens to every notable character is at the very least extraordinary. Nothing in the novel is impossible, but I never believed for a second that anything in the book was really happening to real people.

On the other hand are the bits from I Hear the Sirens in the Streets by Adrian McKinty and Black Rock by John McFetridge. Each features as its protagonist a young police officer just growing into maturity at a time of civil unrest. (Bombs figure in both books, McKinty’s, set amid Northern Ireland’s Troubles in the early 1980s, and McFetridge’s during Montreal’s turbulent year of 1970.)

Each book is, I believe, a serious effort to convey what a real person living through those troubled times must have felt like, a delicate balance between quotidian narrative and social history. More to the point, I read those bits (and McKinty’s current book, the excellent Cold Cold Ground), and I think, damn, that’s what it was like. These guys bring the history alive.

The debate between realism and naturalism on the one hand, and whatever their opposites are on the other, has probably been going on since those terms were invented. Which do you prefer? Or, to put the question perhaps more meaningfully, which is more important to you in your crime reading, the real, or the fantastic? Or do you prefer that more difficult feat, the fantastic within the real? Examples welcome.

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(Go to McKinty's blog to take your shot at winning I Hear the Sirens in the Streets in manuscript.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Why Lars Kepler are the real next Stieg Larsson

The Stieg Larsson school of Swedish crime writing doesn’t go in for guilty pleasures. Instead, it combines potboiler thrills and righteous anger in a fat, sprawling tosh-filled package, often with 475 or more pages plus a didactic, statistics-filled epilogue in case the reader doesn’t get the point – or in case he or she thinks the point was just to have some fun. That way the reader gets dirty thrills but feels morally uplifted at the same time.

The Nightmare, second of Lars Kepler’s novels to be translated from Swedish into English, offers one protagonist haunted by deep secrets. The novel is fascinated with Paganini and with great old violins. It equates moral rectitude with musical ability, and it does so with a straight face. Talk about far-fetched, potboiler-y notions.

The solution to the central mystery, though that mystery concerns a political issue torn from today’s headlines and involves government and corporate corruption, is straight out of Columbo. Quite naturally, the novel includes one especially horrible death. And then its prologue ranks the world’s top arms-dealing nations, of which Sweden is in the top nine.

There's nothing wrong with potboilers, and there's nothing wrong with politically engaged crime fiction. But it's always fair to ask whether the politics and the potboiling are organically intertwined, or whether they appeal, separately, to two separate aspects of what the reader wants. Dominque Manotti, Jean-Patrick Manchette, Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, and the great Leonardo Sciascia tell stories in which the politics and the thrills seem to emerge, inextricably bound, from the same reality. Among current Swedish crime writers, I would argue that Anders Roslund and Börge Hellström come close to achieving this in Three Seconds.

The Stieg Larssonites don't do this, and I don't think they try. I find their achievements less impressive than I do those of the authors I've just named, but it doesn't mean the Larssonians are any worse, just different. I can't blame an author for failing at what he or she may never have tried to do.

*

The invocation of Stieg Larsson is especially apt in the case of The Nightmare because Alexandra Coelho Ahndoril, the female half of the couple that writes as Lars Kepler, has said that the Lars part of the nom de plume is a tribute to Larsson. Crime writing previous to the late author of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo was fine, she said, but it had grown a bit stale.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

What makes a Swedish crime novel Swedish? (Or an Italian crime novel Italian? or ...)

I've just finished reading a fat Swedish crime novel that I'd have guessed was Swedish even if you deleted every set of eyebrows from above every a and o in the book. (You know what I mean: all the ö's and ä's, not to mention the å's.)

What was the giveaway? It wasn't cold weather or earnest leftist politics, and it wasn't a dour protagonist with bad digestion. Rather, the clue in this book (The Nightmare, by Lars Kepler) was that the lead police investigator does not make his first appearance until after the action is well under way and, once he does show up, he's less prominent than many police protagonists are.

Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, who elevated the diaeresis to a position of prominence unprecedented in crime fiction, did it first, and writers including Norway's Karin Fossum have followed suit. Since then I've always thought of the late-appearing police protagonist as a Nordic thing, perhaps as an example of Sjöwall and Wahlöö's politics.

What makes a Swedish crime novel typically Swedish for you? An Italian crime novel typically Italian? An American novel typically American? Pick a country, and tell me what you regard as typical features of that country's crime fiction.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012