Jo Nesbo and Nordic Noir

FOR years now we've been hearing about a charismatic Norwegian crime writer whose novels were plotted with verve and driven by a weirdly compelling alcoholic detective. With the success of  Stieg Larsson's Girl trilogy, the time may be ripe for Jo Nesbo, whose sometimes horrifying new novel, The Snowman, kicks ass.

I spoke to Nesbo from his home in Oslo recently for a profile in this Sunday's Los Angeles Times. We had a lot to talk about. Besides the writer Jim Thompson -- whose The Killer Inside Me inspired him to become a crime novelist -- Nesbo and this blog share an interest in American alt-country: He told me about a club in '80s Oslo that brought American cowpunk bands, and at least once, R.E.M., to town. (His novel namechecks Ryan Adams, Gillian Welch, David Rawlings and Willie Nelson.) He's also into graphic novelist Frank Miller.

Will Nesbo repeat the stateside success of Larsson, or even Henning Mankell? His publisher, Knopf, is certainly hoping so. When I asked Nesbo if he felt much in common with other Scandinavian noir writers, he told me, "Not really. I mean, they're writers. But not because they write crime of because they're Scandinavian. I do admire Karin Fossum -- she writes great prose, it's beautiful to read her. I think we're all very different writers. When I started writing crime fiction, I hadn't read any of the Swedish crime writers."

A lot of money rides on the question of whether American readers agree.

Nesbo is in LA next Tuesday.

Stieg Larsson's "Girl"

THE international explosion of the Millennium trilogy -- which begins with The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo -- remains baffling even to those who know and love the books. In fact, even Sonny Mehta, the Knopf head who brought the books to the States, considers their popularity a happy enigma.

HERE is my piece in today's LA Times about the books and their world takeover. (The story is timed to tomorrow's release of the third and presumably final of the Swedish films made from the books. David Fincher's first Girl is still to come; after seeing The Social Network I am impressed with Rooney Mara.)


A lot of the success, most agree, comes down to heroine Lisbeth Salander.


Salander – the survivor of an abusive childhood who resembles a Goth Pippi Longstocking – is a withdrawn, sometimes violent, sexually kinky computer hacker with a dark charisma. In the novels she collaborates, often warily, with Mikael Blomkvist, a left-wing investigative journalist who in many ways resembled Larsson himself. Noir authority Otto Penzler calls her “the most interesting character I’ve read since Hannibal Lecter.”

I should make clear that while I see these books as in some ways unlikely success stories, they're terrific. They're not without flaw, but when the plot engages they're like Henning Mankell's atmospheric Wallander books on speed. It's gratifying to see long, at times difficult books -- in translation, no less -- generate this kind of intense and widespread following.


It will be even more satisfying to see readers move on to Nordic crime writers like Mankell, Karin Fossum, Jo Nesbo, and so on.


Readers curious about these books and their characters -- and politics -- should check out this this smart and analytical essay by crime-fiction critic/blogger Sarah Weinman. 

Nordic Noir Finally Arrives

SOME called 1991 – a decade and a half after the rumbles in London – “the year punk broke.” If so, 2009 is shaping up as the year Nordic Noir finally arrived.

Stieg Larsson – a Trotskyist sci-fi fan now, inconveniently, dead – is the movement’s Nirvana, and “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” a mystery novel with Nordic Noir’s coolest heroine ever, his “Nevermind.” The book’s recent sequel, “The Girl Who Played With Fire,” which continues the adventures of a tattooed hacker and crusading reporter, also kicks ass.

The Exene and John Doe might be Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, the Swedish husband-and-wife team whose classic ‘60s and ‘70s-era policiers – “The Laughing Policeman,” “The Man Who Went Up in Smoke” – are being reissued on Black Lizard.

What makes this grim, snowy stuff, with its umlauts and suns hidden for months at a time, so irresistible? You get, in Henning Mankell’s Wallender books, an existentialist detective who resembles “Point Blank”-era Lee Marvin, dropped into a Bergman movie. (Three of these were just ably adapted by Masterpiece.) With Norway’s Karin Fossum, penetrating glimpses into the psychology of killers. And with Iceland’s Arnaldur Indridason, storytelling so epic it’s almost medieval.

Modern crime hardboiled fiction first came out of California in the ‘20s and ‘30s, in newish cities where it was easy to fake a past, and where fog and dark alleys kept everything shadowy.

Scandinavia is an old land, overrun for centuries by Vikings swilling mead. But it’s got contemporary problems – drugs, immigration, global organized crime – that make these books feel pressing and urgent. That fact that it’s usually overcast doesn’t hurt.

“It’s the frontier independence frontier self sufficiency and frontier stoicism, combined with frontier weather, frontier isolation and frontier violence that makes these Nordic books so familiar to a US reader,” Junot Diaz of “Oscar Wao” told me. ”And yet the extremities of all these tendencies (and the almost alien history of these nations) are what gives them their unique compelling and ultimately terrifying tenor."

If 2009 is the year of Nordic Noir, then, we say it’s about damn time.

Photo credit: chatirygirl

Wagner's Ring Cycle vs. The Gods

ON wednesday night -- that's wotan's day to those of you who speak norse -- i caught "das rheingold," the los angeles opera's take on the first of wagner's ring cycle. it's directed by the avant-german achim freyer and has received quite mixed reviews in my circle. i found it intriguing in parts, hard to fathom in others; my former colleague mark swed mostly admired the production, here. and my friend tim mangan, here, liked it so much he wished it were longer! (yikes -- not without a break for the bathroom or bar.)

BUT speaking of long, outsiders probably dont realize how long this baby has been in the works -- a quick recounting makes it sound like the gods themselves have been conspiring against it.  i remember sitting, in spring or summer of 2001, in the wonderful downtown LA japanese place, R-23, while LAO publicist gary murphy and opera boss edgar baitzel talked about how excited they were to have just hired conductor kent nagano (the globe-trotter who baitzel had finally pinned down to take the job, as memory has it, in some european airport) to lead the company, and that they had george lucas interesting in designing a blowout "ring" that would show the world what california culture and technology could do. 

it would be "the 'star wars' ring," some said later, which is appropriate since wagner's work inspired not only tolkien's ring trilogy but the star wars franchise as well.

since that meeting, a lot has happened. a few months later, new york was attacked by terrorists. a few days after that dark day, nagano conducted a stunning production of wagner's "lohengrin" that is my first good memory of post-9/11 life -- it was soothing (and french-toned, actually) if either of those things can be said about the lugubrious saxon... a truly spiritual experience.

we got involved in two wars that cost a lot and let to a little recession.

somewhere in here the george lucas connection fell apart, probably because of money. 

a few years later, the graceful nagano left the company. after that, the man who ran the opera, edgar baitzel, a restrained german who i'd really gotten to like, died suddenly.

and last year the entire world market tanked. (i'd been hired to work at the LATimes in part on the evidence of my nagano story; last year i lost that job.) this couldn't have helped the funding for such a gargantuan project.

what did i think of the first installment of the "ring," which will continue over this and the next season? i'm still not sure. but with that backstory, i'm thanking the gods, norse and otherwise, that we have it at all.

Photo credit: Superstock