Bouchercon panels are up!

Panel schedules for Bouchercon 2017 have been posted, and I'll take part in two sessions, including my first as a panelist rather than a moderator.

On Thursday, Oct. 12, at 11:30 a.m., Sarah Weinman will lead me, Margaret Cannon, Martin Edwards, Alex Gray, and David A. Poulsen in a session called "History of the Genre: Covering decades of good mysteries and its subgenres." Sarah is the North American Martin Edwards, and Martin is the British Sarah Weinman. No sharper and more knowledgeable crime fiction minds exist on either side of the Atlantic Ocean. Margaret is crime fiction critic for the Toronto Globe and Mail, and Alex and David are two authors new to me, which is one of the pleasures of Bouchercon panels.

On Friday at 5 p.m., I resume the moderator's role, talking crime fiction in Norway, Thailand, Cambodia, Iceland, Ecuador, and Italy, Thomas Enger, Christopher G. Moore, Yrsa Sigurdardottir, Leonardo Wild, and Timothy Williams. The panel is called "Across the Ponds," I've already begun assembling my questions,  and I'll see you there.

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Follow these links for the Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday schedules.

Crimefest Day 2: Fire and Iceland

"You never hear anyone telling Norwegian jokes anymore, and I think it's because of the money," Swedish crime writer Åsa Larsson said during today's Crimefest 2012 panel on Scandinavian crime fiction.

"Now it's the other away round," Norwegian crime writer Thomas Enger replied. Norway's oil wealth has apparently muted at least one outward expression of Sweden's superiority to its neighbors.

But the panel was not all doleful observations and good-natured gloating. Gunnar Staalesen gave a plausible answer to a question I'd long had about Scandinavian crime writers: Why did Satanism and the fear thereof figure in a number of their crime novels in the mid-1990s and early 2000s, Jo Nesbø's The Devil's Star, Helene Tursten's The Glass Devil, and Åsa Larsson's Sun Storm (a.k.a. The Savage Altar) among them? Tursten appeared to take umbrage when I put the question to her a few years ago, apparently thinking I implied she had copied Nesbø. I implied no such thing, and I'll chalk Tursten's impatience up to fatigue from a gruelling tour schedule.

Larsson said a church figured in her book simply because, while secular now, she had had a religious upbringing; churches were simply a part of her background. But Staalesen suggested that a real-life wave of church burnings in the 1990s by a black-metal musician who wrote about Germanic neo-Paganism might have brought Satanism to the fore as an issue of public concern.

The intriguing thing about the resulting novels, at least the three I named, is that Satanism and satanists tend to be suspects and sources of fear rather than the actual villains of the piece. The books do not decry or praise Satanism, they merely take it up as one aspect of Swedish and Norwegian social and spiritual life.

I asked Staalesen after the panel whether an amusing, geographically specific metaphor for oral sex in the English translation of his 1995 novel The Writing on the Wall was an accurate rendering of the Norwegian original. He did not remember the line, which he'd have written seventeen years ago. But he did say the metaphor would work just as well in Norwegian as in English.

Finally, Ragnar Jonasson paid tribute to the trail blazed by his fellow Icelandic crime writer Arnaldur Indriðason. That Arnaldur did not publish his first novel until 1997 indicates how new Icelandic crime writing is. "Prior to that," Ragnar said, echoing a battle that crime writing has had to wage in a number of countries, "crime fiction was looked down upon by the public."

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 The panel's moderator was Barry Forshaw, who really has written the book on Scandinavian crime fiction.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012