In the summer of 2009, I was home from college and camping for the weekend with my parents in the Wind River Mountains. I was reading The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. It rained a lot on that trip, which is unusual for Wyoming, but apparently common in Scandinavia. So it was easy to pretend the sloping evergreen forests all around us were those of Northern Sweden, and that danger lurked behind every tree. When my mom and I encountered a man on a hiking trail who claimed to have lost the Boy Scout troop he was camping with, I had my suspicions.
You can probably tell that I loved The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Once I got back to real life, away from all that serendipitous mise en scéne, I could never get into the sequel. Sometimes you just have to be in the right place at the right time.
By the time I encountered Stieg Larsson, the Norse invasion of American bookshelves was well under way. There were endless waves of crime fiction, of course. But there was also Karl Ove Knausgaard, who would become perhaps the most widely discussed literary writer of the 2010s. I could never get into Knausgaard’s longwinded autofiction—I go to fiction for artifice and invention, not for “authenticity.” (That I feel defensive writing those words, anticipating your retaliations in the comments, is a testament to how little my distaste matters to Knausgaard’s reputation.)
In our current malaise, I’ve gone back to Scandinavian crime stories, precisely because they’re such a distinctive flight of fancy. A friend mentioned the Icelandic miniseries The Valhalla Murders on Netflix. It happened to be the kind of thing I could convince my parents to watch. So we dove into a story of abuse, corruption, and conspiracy lurking beneath the surface of a well-ordered state like a corpse trapped beneath a frozen lake.
Valhalla Murders is in key ways a loyal homage to Larsson, the man most responsible for making “Nordic noir” a beloved genre across the Anglosphere. I won’t spoil much about the show, and I don’t have to. You’ve probably seen this all before, albeit maybe not set in Iceland. One of the two homicide detectives is a recovering alcoholic from an abusive Christian fundamentalist background. The other is a divorced hothead struggling to connect with her teenaged son. And you won’t believe this, but their dogged pursuit of a series of murders reveals unwelcome truths about the reality of their seemingly serene society.
Nordic “noir” earns the second part of its sobriquet by making exactly this move—exhuming the truth of the supposedly benign system. We need heroes who are equal parts broken and zealous to answer the dark call that’s coming from inside the gleaming house.
But like quite a bit of Nordic noir, Valhalla Murders is also a police procedural. In a procedural like Law and Order, the system reigns righteously. Embodied by the police and the courts—but also by other well-established institutions—the system must act to preserve itself, because the system is what is good. Valhalla Murders has a deep streak of this. At a key moment in the show, a self-regarding television reporter for the state broadcaster actually does her job. That kind of thing doesn’t happen in pure noir.
How do you reconcile such divergent approaches to telling stories about crime? It helps to understand that Nordic noir is inevitably about specific historical contradictions. Namely, the paradoxes inherent in trying to maintain a cohesive social democracy while your country is nonetheless capitalist and imperialist and misogynist and xenophobic and all those other things. In Larsson’s case, it all went back to literal Nazis.
Pointing all of this out is itself a cliché, one that many characters in Nordic noir roll their eyes at even before they make their dark discoveries. The characters in Valhalla Murders are seasoned detectives whom we can easily imagine mocking Viking-struck American tourists. And yet myths exist precisely because a critical mass of us desperately want them to be true.
So we need stories that can both debunk and uphold our myths. If you can marry noir and procedural, we get a double catharsis: The lies undergirding the system get exposed by our heroes, who in turn reaffirm that the system can work, if only we have heroes willing to stare down the lies.
We end up with both a scathing takedown of The Way Things Work and a fantasy about The Way We Want Things to Be. I may have given the impression that I think there’s something dishonest or cheap about this, but that couldn’t be farther from the truth. It’s a move I’m trying to make right now in my own fiction. To go back to the “authenticity” bugaboo, if I wanted to be told that the modern Western nation-state has a lot of problems, I could go on Twitter. I go to stories like Valhalla Murders because I want to briefly live within the contradictions and fantasies of that ominously shadowed forest where I first read Stieg Larsson.
Other fun things:
— If you want to feel slightly better about the state of our non-fantasy reality, this is a good introductory dive into the halting, grudging, but very real lurch toward wind power in my fossil fuel-brained home state
— In lieu of other fun content this week (it’s a weird time), here’s one of the least depressing poems about death ever written, Frank Stanford’s The Light the Dead See
A request:
I’m trying to figure out what kind of things you’d all like to see in the “fun things” roundup or in the body of the newsletter itself. Get at me on Twitter or in the comments section…
What I’m reading:
Finishing up Nine Princes in Amber by Zelazny. Finished Yoko Ogawa’s Revenge but I think I may want to read more of her before addressing her work in this space. She’s definitely good. That much I can safely say
I constantly look for new Nordic noir, however Valhalla was not gritty or real enough for me. Also not enough landscape photography which I think is a big part of the essence of that genre. Nine Princes in Amber is a favorite, I've read the series 3 times now. We Nordic fans must be if the same ilk.
I was disappointed by Valhalla Murders. Perhaps it was the translation (I am not a fan of dubbing -- might have to watch it that way to compare.) Too many loose ends and the ending, well it just ended.
I think the procedural element in all nordic noir begins and ends with the Beck series ( Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö) -- those 10 volumes are a great way to spend a week in quarantine. The TV series is wonderful as well. I am on the third viewing with all this time on my hands.