The bleak Scandinavian landscapes have inspired a series of hit books about dour detectives, and more writers are now lining up to claim the Nordic crime crown
Among the growing band of the faithful – the millions of readers drawn to the bleak tradition of Swedish crime fiction – the litany can be recited with ease: Inspector Martin Beck, created by Sjöwall and Wahlöö in the 1960s, begat Henning Mankell's Wallander, and then Wallander begat Stieg Larsson's Salander, the girl with the dragon tattoo.
With new episodes of Kenneth Branagh's Wallander promised and big-screen versions of Larsson's Millennium Trilogy due out soon in English as well as Swedish, what started as a genre with cult appeal has become part of the money-making mainstream.
Yet well before Mankell and Larsson's crime-solving anti-heroes reached our cinema screens, true aficionados of this Scandinavian genre understood that the family tree was more complex.
Among the growing band of the faithful – the millions of readers drawn to the bleak tradition of Swedish crime fiction – the litany can be recited with ease: Inspector Martin Beck, created by Sjöwall and Wahlöö in the 1960s, begat Henning Mankell's Wallander, and then Wallander begat Stieg Larsson's Salander, the girl with the dragon tattoo.
With new episodes of Kenneth Branagh's Wallander promised and big-screen versions of Larsson's Millennium Trilogy due out soon in English as well as Swedish, what started as a genre with cult appeal has become part of the money-making mainstream.
Yet well before Mankell and Larsson's crime-solving anti-heroes reached our cinema screens, true aficionados of this Scandinavian genre understood that the family tree was more complex.
- 9/11/2010
- by Vanessa Thorpe
- The Guardian - Film News
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