Recent Nordic Noir in Print and Television, Part One: Iceland

A scene from the Icelandic television series Trapped, currently streaming on Netflix.

Arnaldur Indridason is one of the most acclaimed Icelandic writers of police procedurals for his novels about Detective Erlendur, a brooding, lonely officer who is tormented by ghosts from his past: the disappearance of his younger brother, a failed marriage and two children whose lives have been scarred by drugs. Fittingly, he investigates a number of cold cases. One of the best Erlendur books, The Draining Lake (2009), begins with a discovery of a corpse that has a bullet in his head in a lake where the water level has dropped in the wake of an earthquake. Erlendur’s investigation takes him back to the time of the Cold War when bright, left-wing students would be sent from Iceland to study in the “heavenly state” of Communist East Germany.

Indridason has recently decided to put the Erlendur series in a deep freeze while he pursues another project. Making connections between the past and the present is a driving impulse of The Shadow District (Harvill Secker, 2017), the first of a projected trilogy that is set in wartime Iceland after the war, and in the present. A young girl is found murdered by an Icelandic young woman and her American beau behind the National Theatre in Reykjavík in 1944, a frequent site for trysts between local girls and foreign troops when the country was occupied by British and American forces. Two officers investigate: the more experienced Flovent and his young partner, Thorson, a Canadian with Icelandic roots. The two officers are conscientious investigators who ultimately arrest a student of Icelandic folklore for her murder and the disappearance of another young woman three years earlier who may have been driven to her death by a local folklore story. Unfortunately they botch the case when the accused is under their care, and that and external pressure cause the investigation to be officially closed. But the case shadows the two men for the rest of their lives. Thorson is so dissatisfied that he returns to Iceland after the Second World War, hoping that some new clue will turn up.

To Get to The Other Side: The Bridge

Kim Bodnia and Saga Noren star in the Swedish-Danish series The Bridge

The TV series The Bridge, a Swedish-Danish co-production that first aired in 2011, begins with the discovery of what appears to be the dead body of a Swedish politician. He has been cut in two; the corpse is lying at the exact spot on the Oresund Bridge that marks the point where the borders of Copenhagen and Malmo meet. Sofia (Saga Noren), a Swedish homicide detective, and Martin (Kim Bodnia), a Danish detective, both arrive at the scene, and it’s only after Sofia has brashly claimed the case for herself, with Martin’s happy consent, that it’s found that the “body” is actually two halves of two different dead women. Sofia and Martin end up working together on the case, which expands as it becomes clear that a serial killer with a larger agenda is at work.

Seeing in the Dark: Distinctive Voices in Nordic Noir

Readers of Phantom likely concluded that Jo Nesbo decided to end the high octane series with its brilliant but flawed detective, Harry Hole, given its grim ending. After all, the author revealed that “Harry will not have eternal life, that he will not rise from the dead.” But with the publication of Police (Random House, 2013), the tenth Harry Hole novel, Nesbo seems to have changed his mind - or has he? At the outset, the maverick Hole is not present unless he is that closely-guarded patient in a coma. To follow what transpires in this densely-plotted and disturbing thriller, the reader must read the previous novel first: the plots, characters and themes that coursed through that book are present in Police. For almost half of this intricately-plotted story, without Harry’s leadership, an elite and covert group of specialists are secretly working to put the pieces together and catch a serial killer who lures a police detective on the anniversary to the scene of the very crime the officer investigated but failed to solve. There, the unsuspecting officer is gruesomely dispatched in a manner similar to that of the victim of the unsolved crime. Removing Harry from the action may be a risk but it allows Nesbo to furnish incisive character studies of the ensemble players who have always languished in his shadow – secondary figures like Beate Lonn, the brilliant head of forensics, who has the uncanny ability to never forget a face, and Stale Aune, the mild-mannered psychologist who misses the adrenaline rush of helping hunt down Harry’s monstrous criminals.

Ghosts in Standalone Novels by Jo Nesbo and Peter Robinson

A scene from Headhunters (2011), based on Jo Nesbo's novel

Authors of a substantial corpus of popular police procedurals or featuring a homicide detective must relish the opportunity to leave the dictates of the genre and experiment with freestanding fiction. The internationally best-selling Norwegian crime writer, Jo Nesbo, who has churned out nine Harry Hole (pronounced Hurler) thrillers, has drawn upon some of his familiar trademarks – gruesome scenes, black humour, fast pacing and intricate plotting – to produce a pared down caper story Headhunters (2008, translated into English 2011, Vintage Canada). The British Canadian writer, Peter Robinson, best known for his successful nineteen novels about Chief Inspector Alan Banks of the Yorkshire police force, has recently released his third standalone, Before the Poison (McClelland & Stewart, 2011), a worthy winner of the 2013 Pilys Award for best mystery. Despite the vast differences in structure, style and narrative, what is similar about these novels is the function that ghosts play in propelling the narrative.

The Legacy of Fascism: Jo Nesbo’s Redbreast

Given that the English translation of the second novel in the Harry Hole series, The Cockroaches, will be released sometime in 2013, it seems appropriate to wait to review the entire series. In the meantime, because of its specific theme, I offer a few reflections on Nesbo’s Redbreast (Random House, 2006)

Readers of Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2005) will recall that some of the elder members of the dysfunctional Vanger family retained pronounced Nazi sympathies and that the family business once had strong ties with Nazi Germany. In Redbreast, Jo Nesbo investigates the role played by Nazism in Norway in World War II and its ripple effects down to the Millennium present. In particular Nesbo sets out to challenge the national myth that according to one character the Norwegian population was “fighting shoulder to shoulder against Nazism.” Nesbo achieves this feat of dispelling the national self-image through multiple switches in time, place and points of view.

This story has personal resonance for Nesbo, a former stock broker and still part time lead singer in a rock group. Before his parents met each other, his father had been among the seven thousand Norwegians who volunteered to fight alongside the Nazis against the Communists on the Eastern Front. His mother remained in Norway throughout the war and was a member of the national resistance. When his father returned home, he was branded as a traitor and spent three years in prison.