WATCHING THE SCANDI-DETECTIVES

Week 1 – EARLY DAYS - SJOWALL AND WAHLOO, SMILLA, PUSHER, INSOMNIA

2 – THE KILLING AND THE BRIDGE

3- WALLANDER X 2 AND VAN VEETEREN

4- GOING BACK HOME – DICTE- CRIME REPORTER, THE FJALLBACKA MURDERS

+ JORDSKOTT

5- THE QUIET MAN AND MACHO MEN - BECK, THE HUNTERS, FALSE TRAIL

6- LONE WOLVES - VARG VEUM , SEBASTIAN BERGMAN, IN ORDER OF DISAPPEARANCE

7- ICELAND – TRAPPED, JAR CITY, REYKJAVIK ROTTERDAM

8- STIEG LARSSON AND JO NESBO

9- TEAMWORK – UNIT ONE, ARNE DAHL, DEPT Q

10- INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS - FOLLOW THE MONEY, MODUS,

THE PROTECTORS , LILYHAMMER

SCANDINAVIAN CRIME

Ten clues to the amazing success of Nordic Noir

From The Irish Independent , 27 October 2012

It's Saturday night, are you a) dancing the night away in a pair of heels that cost a month's salary? b) staring glassy eyed at the box while yet another warbling youngster insists they've waited their whole life to sing on telly or c) perched on the edge of the sofa, reading glasses on, glued to the latest subtitled drama?

If it's option c, you're not alone. More and more of us are saying no to the usual Saturday night fare and 'tak' to BBC4 for serving up a veritable smogasboard of gripping Scandinavian shows.

Thanks to award-winning shows such as The Killing, Borgen and The Bridge, Nordic noir has us hooked and here's 10 reasons why . . .

We're not stupid

What Danish production company DK and BBC 4 have realised is that many viewers have an attention span longer than a gnat. The first series of The Killing (Forbrydelsen in Danish) twisted and turned for 20 episodes before its detectives solved the riddle of who killed Nanna Birk Larsen.Borgen (meaning 'The Castle' in Danish) leaps from public decision- making to private drama interweaving narratives of key players in a fictional Danish government.

The Bridge (Bron or Broen depending on whether you're watching from Sweden or Denmark -- the show is filmed in both languages) follows another lengthy and complex murder investigation.

It's not typical Saturday night fare, but the audience figures (and we're talking about more than a million people per episode) show that some of us like to be armchair Sarah Lunds forced to detect and intuit our way through narratives.

It's never made explicit that The Bridge's Swedish sleuth, Saga Noren, is probably on the autism spectrum and we've to wait a while to uncover why Borgen's spin-doctor Kasper Juul has issues -- but that's okay, many of us have read actual books, we can cope with not knowing everything within 30 minutes.

Real women - Yes, yes there are lingering shots of news reporter Katrine Fonsmark's sculpted bottom in Borgen and a certain appreciation of Saga's blonde locks and leather trousers in The Bridge, but what's most appealing is Scan-dram's ability to portray strong, complex women that audiences relate to.

In Borgen, Denmark's first female Prime Minister, Birgitte Nyborg, struggles with her work- life balance, juggling head-of-state meetings with two children who long for home-cooked meals and a husband ogling young students. The show's been hailed as a Danish West Wing, but actually probes further by following the politicians home after work.

From Nyborg's new job making her pile on the pounds and neglect her marriage, to the Killing's Sarah Lund eating out of a saucepan and letting her family fall second to work, Nordic Noir exposes the myth of having it all . . . much to the relief of women everywhere.

Un-aspirational living

Back in the Celtic Tiger days it might have been enough to pad-out plots with a parade of Jimmy Choos and sweeping shots of sumptuous soft furnishings, but today it's the significantly bleaker snow-scapes of Scandinavia that reflect the national temperature.

Scan-dram isn't about telling viewers 'this is the life you wish you had'. In fact with its plethora of utilitarian flats, sodden mists and perennial gloom, it's more about being grateful you're not there.

Scandi-design porn

That said, whilst we may not actually want to live the Nordic life, there's still a certain stylish element to the shows that keeps us coming back.

The Killing's detective Sarah Lund started the craze with her anti-fashion, chunky-knit sweaters. Her style statement, favouring functionality over labels or aesthetics, suddenly had hordes of devotees ordering woolies from designers Gudrun and Gudrun.

Borgen and The Bridge have interior design aficionados purring with delight over the Poul Henningsen lights, Arne Jacobsen chairs and pared back, sleek design showcased in Birgitte's and Saga's homes.

Storylines with a social conscience

Nordic Noir's emphasis on substance over style comes courtesy of the wide range of world affairs and home issues intertwined in every episode. In keeping with a new world that's realised Mammon was a fallible god, Scan-dram looks at social responsibility and problems that span a multinational audience. In The Bridge, the killer preys on the homeless and mentally incapacitated, raising questions of how society shares collective responsibility for these vulnerable groups.

Borgen addresses the complexities of terrorism and rendition.

They may be made-up characters and scenarios, but the show's writers aren't afraid to address a few inconvenient truths.

At last, a feast of real men

Rather than hairless metrosexuals, Nordic Noir delivers real men. The Bridge's top cop is a beer-loving, burly Dane who loves womanising and worries about his penis.The under-dog factor

Watching BBC4 is the televisual equivalent of snubbing Tesco and shopping in the farmer's market.Despite the fact that it's part of the Beeb's beast, the digital channel retains the status of plucky under-dog, resolutely sourcing fresh programming despite a £5m hole recently being made in its budget.

It's estimated that an episode of any of the three Danish series broadcast on BBC4 cost it just €124,000 (and even less to make), yet The Killing pulled in bigger audiences than Mad Men. It's like Shamrock Rovers beating Chelsea -- and who wouldn't love that?

Adults only

After an era where the line between kids' and adult entertainment has been distinctly blurred (thank you Harry Potter, Twilight and Hunger Games), Scan-dram, with its graphic autopsies, violent sex and occasional nudity is most definitely viewing pleasure for adults only.If you want family entertainment, hop over to Strictly X Factor or whatever drivel's on the other side.

Dark Coen-Brothers-esque comedy

Whether it's Birgitte's ministerial committees calling her 'mummy' the second she leaves the room or Saga pulling out corpse pics as post-sex entertainment -- verbal, visual and situational black comedy is where the Danes truly are great.

And finally . . .

The language, there's something oddly mesmeric about the sing-song sound of Danish -- even when it's describing a woman cut in half. Tak!

Sweden’s violent reality is undoing a peaceful self-image

Shootings have become so common that they don’t make top headlines anymore.

By PAULINA NEUDING 4/16/18 www.politico.eu

STOCKHOLM — Sweden may be known for its popular music, IKEA and a generous welfare state. It is also increasingly associated with a rising number of Islamic State recruits, bombings and hand grenade attacks.

In a period of two weeks earlier this year, five explosions took place in the country. It’s not unusual these days — Swedes have grown accustomed to headlines of violent crime, witness intimidation and gangland executions. In a country long renowned for its safety, voters cite “law and order” as the most important issue ahead of the general election in September.

The topic of crime is sensitive, however, and debate about the issue in the consensus- oriented Scandinavian society is restricted by taboos.

To understand crime in Sweden, it’s important to note that Sweden has benefited from the West’s broad decline in deadly violence, particularly when it comes to spontaneous violence and alcohol-related killings. The overall drop in homicides has been, however, far smaller in Sweden than in neighboring countries.

Shootings in the country have become so common that they don’t make top headlines anymore, unless they are spectacular or lead to fatalities.

Gang-related gun murders, now mainly a phenomenon among men with immigrant backgrounds in the country’s parallel societies, increased from 4 per year in the early 1990s to around 40 last year. Because of this, Sweden has gone from being a low-crime country to having homicide rates significantly above the Western European average. Social unrest, with car torchings, attacks on first responders and even riots, is a recurring phenomenon.

Shootings in the country have become so common that they don’t make top headlines anymore, unless they are spectacular or lead to fatalities. News of attacks are quickly replaced with headlines about sports events and celebrities, as readers have become desensitized to the violence. A generation ago, bombings against the police and riots were extremely rare events. Today, reading about such incidents is considered part of daily life.

The rising levels of violence have not gone unnoticed by Sweden’s Scandinavian neighbors. Norwegians commonly use the phrase “Swedish conditions” to describe crime and social unrest. The view from Denmark was made clear when former President of NATO and Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen said in an interview on Swedish TV: “I often use Sweden as a deterring example.”

In response, the Swedish government has launched an international campaign for “the image of Sweden” playing down the rise in crime, both in its media strategy and through tax-funded PR campaigns. During a visit to the White House in March, Sweden’s Prime Minister Stefan Löfven admitted that his country has problems with crime and specifically shootings, but denied the existence of no-go zones. Sweden’s education minister, Gustav Fridolin, traveled to Hungary last week with the same message.

But the reality is different for those on the ground: The head of the paramedics’ union Ambulansförbundet, Gordon Grattidge, and his predecessor Henrik Johansson recently told me in an interview that some neighborhoods are definitely no-go for ambulance drivers — at least without police protection.

Swedes are not prone to grandiose manifestations of national pride, but the notion of a “Swedish Model” — that the country has much to teach the world — is a vital part of the national self image.

Since crime is intimately linked to the country’s failure to integrate its immigrants, the rise in violence is a sensitive subject. When the Swedish government and opposition refer to the country as a “humanitarian superpower” because it opened its doors to more immigrants per capita during the migrant crisis than any other EU country, they mean it. This has resulted in some impressive contortions.

In March, Labor Market Minister Ylva Johansson appeared on the BBC, where she claimed that the number of reported rapes and sexual harassment cases “is going down and going down and going down.” In fact, the opposite is true, which Johansson later admitted in an apology.

Similarly, in an op-ed for the Washington Post, former Prime Minister Carl Bildt described the country’s immigration policy as a success story. He did not elaborate on violent crime. After repeated attacks against Jewish institutions in December — including the firebombing of a synagogue in Gothenburg — Bildt took to the same paper to claim that anti-Semitism is not a major problem in Sweden. “Historically, in Sweden it was the Catholics that were seen as the dangerous threat that had to be fought and restricted,” Bildt claimed, seemingly unaware that the laws he cited also applied to Jews. Intermarriage was illegal and hostility was based on ideas of Jews as racially inferior. Bildt’s attempt to relativize current anti-Semitism with odd and inaccurate historical arguments reflects how nervously Swedish elites react to negative headlines about their country.

Another spectacular example is an official government website on “Facts about migration, integration and crime in Sweden,” which alleges to debunk myths about the country. One “false claim” listed by the government is that “Not long ago, Sweden saw its first Islamic terrorist attack.”

This is surprising, since the Uzbek jihadist Rakhmat Akilov has pleaded guilty to the truck ramming that killed five people in Stockholm last April and swore allegiance to the Islamic State prior to the attack. Akilov, who is currently standing trial, has proudly repeated his support for ISIS and stated that his motive was to kill Swedish citizens. He also had documented contacts with international jihadis.

“They make it sound as if violence is out of control” — Stefan Sintéus, Malmö’s chief of police

The government’s excuse for denying the Islamic terrorist attack in Sweden is that no Islamic group has officially claimed responsibility. Given the importance these days of fighting fake news, the Swedish government’s tampering with politically inconvenient facts looks particularly irresponsible.

Sometimes it takes an outsider to put things in perspective. A recent piece by Bojan Pancevski in London’s Sunday Times put a spotlight on immigration and violent crime. The article caused a scandal in Sweden and was widely seen as part of the reason why the British and Canadian foreign ministries issued travel advice about the country, citing gang crime and explosions. “They make it sound as if violence is out of control,” said Stefan Sintéus, Malmö’s chief of police.

It didn’t seem to occur to the police chief that both the travel advice and the article could reflect the same underlying reality. After all, only a few days earlier, a police station in Malmö was rocked by a hand grenade attack. Earlier the same month, a police car in the city was destroyed in an explosion.

Officials may be resigned to the situation. But in a Western European country in peacetime, it is reasonable to view such levels of violence as out of control.

Paulina Neuding is the editor-in-chief of the online magazine Kvartal.

www.telgraph.co.uk

The couple who invented Nordic Noir

Maj Sjöwall and her late partner paved the way for Stieg Larsson and Jo Nesbø. Jake Kerridge meets her

By Jake Kerridge 19 Jul 2015

Imagine a parallel universe in which Stieg Larsson and Jo Nesbø wrote gentle detective stories set in country houses and vicarages. This might well have been the world we’d be living in if, more than half a century ago, an eminent Swedish journalist called Per Wahlöö had not fallen in love with a young publisher named Maj Sjöwall.

The couple decided to write a series of 10 detective stories featuring a decent but dyspeptic policeman called Martin Beck. The project took a decade, and the final volume was published shortly after Wahlöö died, aged 48, in 1975.

Over the years I’ve spoken to more Scandinavian crime writers than I’ve had hot smörgåsbords, and without exception they have cited Sjöwall and Wahlöö as the begetters of what we now know as Nordic Noir. According to Henning Mankell, the couple were pioneers of realism and political engagement in the detective story: “I think that anyone who writes about crime as a reflection of society has been inspired to some extent by what they wrote,” Mankell has said.

New generation of Nordic Noir novels are 'girls' books', Maj Sjöwall says

Sjöwall, the giant on whose shoulders the titans of modern Scandi crime fiction stand, is a small, elderly woman, a little asthmatic and with a tremulous voice, but bright-eyed and fizzing with intellectual energy. We meet in Bristol, where Lee Child has been interviewing her on stage at the CrimeFest convention to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the inaugural Martin Beck novel, Roseanna. During the event, Child compared the thrill of interviewing her with meeting Paul McCartney and Barack Obama. Sjöwall brought the house down when she explained why her first book concerned the death of a beautiful American tourist. She had caught Wahlöö staring at one such woman on a boat trip: “So I said, 'We kill her.’ ”

A documentary crew is trailing Sjöwall, making a film about her for Swedish television. They have accompanied her around the world, she tells me, for the past six years. She tramps gamely across Bristol as the crew searches for picturesque spots in which to film her.

We come to rest in a pub, and I say I felt she was a little hard on her character Martin Beck when earlier she called him “boring” on stage. “No, he is not boring, just a bit dry,” she replies. “We didn’t think he should be doing wisecracks all the time. He is not a heroic person. He is like James Stewart in some American films, just a nice guy trying to do his job.”

What makes Beck good at solving murders is his empathy for wrongdoers. I ask Sjöwall whether he was a revolutionary figure in crime fiction at the time. “Yes, I think so,” she says. “He knows it’s not always a very evil person who kills somebody, but people who are victims of something wrong in society. That makes them do things they wouldn’t have done if they weren’t victims themselves.”

In this, as in so much else, 21st-century crime writers follow where Sjöwall and Wahlöö led. They were trailblazers, too, in their depiction of the deterioration and collapse of Beck’s marriage, although Sjöwall thinks that today’s writers dwell too much on their detectives’ personal lives.

When I ask her whether she reads any new crime fiction, she is politely dismissive. “I have tried to read some of them but I don’t have the time, because there are so many other good books,” she says, grinning. “I read maybe 15 pages and then I read a bit in the middle and read the end.” What about Henning Mankell, whose Kurt Wallander novels owe so much to her work? “I like the first books. I don’t like his later books, they’re boring. I think they lack humour. When you are writing crime stories, it’s called “noir”, it’s about murder. If you are going to stand writing about this, you have to put in humour, otherwise it gets too black.”

It is precisely their humour that makes me cherish the Beck novels more than any of the Nordic Noir that has followed in their wake. Sjöwall and Wahlöö knew that the gulf between human ideals and behaviour may be tragic, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t funny.

“The humour was for each other. I tried to make him laugh. It was a game, it was great fun,” she says. The couple’s routine was to plan a book, allot themselves chapters, and, having put their children to bed, sit opposite each other writing for most of the night. “We never talked about the story when we were writing it. The only things we said were 'pass me the cigarettes’ or 'it’s your turn to make more tea’. I would get angry if he was writing and writing and I couldn’t get started, and the same for him.”

Sjöwall was born in 1935, and brought up on the top floor of a Stockholm hotel managed by her father. “I was a boyish girl, climbing trees and kicking footballs, but I was very introverted. My mother thought I was crazy. She said: 'She never talks, she never answers when you talk to her, and she’s very thin, and not very beautiful.’ When she was talking to her friends she called me 'Professor’.”

Sjöwall married and divorced in quick succession two much older men (“I think I had a father complex”) and was a single mother with a daughter when she met Wahlöö. He was nine years her senior and already married.

“It was not a passionate love story. We met as friends, and found out we thought very much the same way, and at first he was in love with me but I was not in love with him. It took some time.” He was persistent? “He was very persistent.”

As a journalist, Wahlöö was part of “a very masculine world, where men were important and women were just what you made love to”. But he was different, taking her comments on his work seriously, encouraging her to try writing herself. Eventually, he left his wife and, although they chose not to marry, he and Sjöwall co-authored two sons as well as 10 books.

She remembers Wahlöö as an unworldly figure, who once stranded them in London during a holiday by spending all the money they had on model ships. They had half a dozen years of blissful happiness, then half a dozen more shadowed by Wahlöö’s ill health. “It was hard for our relationship. It changed from me being younger to being the one who arranged everything.”

Since his death 40 years ago, she has collaborated occasionally with other authors. Sjöwall dislikes writing on her own. She is close to her children, but lives alone in a tiny apartment (“I am not stinking rich”) on a small island. “I would never leave the countryside, it’s so interesting. I choose the solitary life. I love it.”

As I leave, I ask the TV crew when their documentary will be shown. They are not sure, although it might be ready for Sjöwall’s 80th birthday in September. “They are waiting,” comes a gleeful shout, “for the shot of my coffin being carried!” As Sjöwall’s career has proved, life and death are so much more fun if you look them squarely in the face.

BOOK REVIEW / The agenbite of Inuit: 'Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow' - Peter Hoeg;

CLIVE SINCLAIR www.independent.co.uk

Sunday 10 October 1993

I DO NOT know whether Peter Hoeg is familiar with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis but, consciously or not, his new novel reads like an attempt to prove its worth. Sapir and Whorf were a pair of linguists and anthropologists dominant in their profession during its BC (Before Chomsky) years. In short, they were latter-day romantics who stuck doggedly to their principles. These were linguistic determinism, which stated that language determines thought, and linguistic relativity, which emphasised the distinctiveness of each language. By way of illustration, Whorf noted the numerous words uniquely available to Eskimos allowing them to describe the various conditions of snow and ice.

Miss Smilla Jaspersen's father is a famous Danish doctor, but her mother was a Greenlander (whose language was Eskimo or Inuit), hence her feeling for snow. During the course of the novel we are introduced to so many of these native terms that, by its end, we are able to distinguish between qanik (big flakes) and apuhiniq (frozen drifts).

Hoeg divides his cast into Greenlanders and Europeans, of whom the Danes are a sub- species. We (the Europeans) are all baddies. Thus, when the Cryolite Corporation of Denmark is introduced, it doesn't require a doctorate in comparative linguistics to spot the villain. Its general malfeasance is the exploitation of Greenland, its more specific crime the murder of Smilla's six-year-old neighbour (which, needless to say, the local constabulary regard as an accident).

And so spunky Smilla resolves to track down the killer, whereupon her quest begins to resemble Gerda's search for Kay in The Snow Queen. As Smilla battles to preserve her intuitive Inuit heritage against the embrace of a Danish education (personified by her father), so Hoeg is forced to rely more and more upon his heroine's inquisitiveness, rather than her gut feeling for snow.

Like Gerda, Smilla must venture to a distant ice palace; in this case, to Greenland itself, to a hollow in a glacier where fanatical men of science are attempting to salvage a strange meteor from a glassy lake. Two previous attempts have foundered because of a parasitical worm, a mutation, which destroyed the vital organs of the original divers. Now only our heroine stands between the evil genius loci and success.

'Suddenly it has become a symbol,' thinks Smilla of the mysterious stone. 'At this moment it becomes the crystallisation of the attitude of Western science towards the world. Calculation, hatred, hope, fear, the attempt to measure everything. And above all else, stronger than any empathy for living things: the desire for money.' You may recall that the Snow Queen called the frozen lake in her icy hall the Mirror of Reason, as opposed to the spontaneous joys of childhood or the selfless understanding of the Eskimo.

I cannot give away the ending, but anyone familiar with Frankenstein or even Herge's The Shooting Star (in which Tintin, like Smilla, joins a sea-borne expedition to retrieve a meteorite from Arctic waters) will have a fair idea of the outcome. For good measure, the crazed boffin refers to Jules Verne, H G Wells and other writers who have dared to speculate about alternative life forms.

I remain unconvinced by Hoeg's efforts to empathise with the Greenlanders. When all is said and done I think he is more influenced by American movies than by Inuit culture (the usual suspects are all here: big corporations, neo-Nazis, drug-smugglers, mad scientists). Indeed, the book really comes to life in the numerous passages which describe the shedding of blood, not the falling of snow. I look forward to seeing Sigourney Weaver as Smilla Jaspersen.

Sarah Lund's sweater

From www.sarahlundsweater.com

If, like my wife and I you've been gripped by Danish TV show Forbrydelsen (the Killing), then you've more likely than not been spending more time than you would ever have thought possible staring at a certain chunky knit jumper. Now, during the show's early run in March of this year (2011) on BBC4, you might have been forgiven for paying it no more than a passing interest, however - if like our family, you've just caught on to the series at it's second showing as the nights are drawing in then you're no doubt thinking - "oooh, that jumper looks nice and warm"

So why this sweater?

The original sweater, as worn by series heroine Sarah Lund, was chosen by actress Sofie Gråbøl, as she explains in an interview with "The Guardian" "We had a costume meeting and I saw that sweater and thought: 'That's it!'," she says, despite the jumper being decidedly unpolice-like. "The reason it's so perfect is because it tells so many stories. It tells of a person who doesn't use her sexuality – that's a big point. Lund's so sure of herself she doesn't have to wear a suit. She's at peace with herself." What's so special about it? Whilst "Forbrydelsen" is a Danish show, the jumper is not traditional Danish. It is Faroese. The Faroe Islands lie to the north of Scotland, equidistant from Iceland, Scotland and Denmark. Faroese knitwear is very traditional, with jumpers being worn for totally practical purposes, all winter through. The wool used is undyed organic wool from hardy northern Faroese sheep. The black wool in a jumper comes from black sheep - it isn't dyed. Organic wool is not just warm, it is lightweight, breathable and hypoallergenic. The jumper itself is hand knitted with every single one being unique.

OK so where can I buy it?

Well, a hand-knitted, organic wool jumper shipped from an island in the middle of the north atlantic isn't going to be cheap, is it? Furthermore, the Sarah Lund sweater is not a folksy cottage industry. It is designed and produced by the hyper-savvy fashion knitwear brand Gudrun & Gudrun, who just happen to be based in the Faroe Islands. G&G are quite rightly proud of their design and have protected it by pursuing a rigorous legal campaign against those who would produce "knock-offs" or "look-alikes". So, if you want to buy a Sarah Lund jumper "off the rack" then there's only one place to go, and only one price to pay… The Gudrun & Gudrun original is available for £230 from our "buy one" page ;-)

I'm sorry, how much?

Here at SarahLundSweater.com, we're not in the business of trying to sell you dodgy knock- offs of the Sarah Lund Sweater, but nor are we so dumb as to believe everybody has the best part of £250 to spend on a jumper. So what are your options if you don't want to spend £230? Well, it seems to us you can either make one - after all it's only knitting eh? How hard can that be? We have listed everything you'll need to knit your own Sarah Lund jumper here Or you can buy something similar after all, it's fine saying you've got a Sarah Lund sweater, but what happens when you bump into somebody else wearing one?

From The Telegraph - The Bridge's Sofia Helin: interview

Sofia Helin, the star of the hit Scandi crime drama The Bridge, talks to Patrick Smith about her character's penchant for leather trousers and how the Swedes are more sexually liberated than the British.

Sofia Helin is the new face of Nordic noir TV. The 40-year-old mother of two is currently garnering rave reviews in The Bridge, the enthralling and complex Swedish-Danish crime drama that concludes tomorrow night on BBC Four. And her character, the smart, emotionally disconnected detective Saga Noren, is the latest addition to a burgeoning Scandinavian list of fascinating but flawed female leads – think Sofie Gråbøl in The Killing and Sidse Babett Knudsen in Borgen. Here the actress from Hovsta, Sweden talks about her character's penchant for leather trousers, and how the Scandinavians are more sexually liberated than the British.

Why do you think the show has been so successful abroad?

It might be because you all like The Killing. The Bridge also has a feminine main character. Maybe that is something that appeals. Maybe it’s also because it’s a different way of telling this kind of story, with a bit more action – and it’s very dark.

What was your first reaction to reading the part of your character?

I was so confused and irritated, and couldn’t understand how to do her. She is everything I’m not. As an actor you always start with searching inside of yourself – what can I find that is similar? In this case I could barely use anything of myself. It was hard.

Was there any inspiration for your character?

No, I didn’t try to think about anyone else. I didn’t see Claire Danes before because Homeland came out in Stockholm at the same time as The Bridge. But many people said, “You see Claire Danes – she could be a friend of Saga Noren.”

Your character has Asperger's. Did you research it for the role? How did you go about conveying it onscreen?

Yes, I did. I read about it. It was hard to pull it off because as an actor you always use your emotions. So, yes, this was about not giving anything but also giving something. It was very strange. People in Sweden who knew me were confused at the beginning when they saw my character, because she’s so far away from me.

So might Scandinavian police officers wear leather trousers?

I haven’t seen anyone doing that. On the other hand, I don’t know if they dress in silly clothes. You don’t know who is an undercover policeman or not. They’re good to wear actually. They’re warm and they can take almost everything. I mean rain and snow, you know?

In one scene in The Bridge, your character walks into a bar and promptly asks a man who smiles at her if he would like to have sex...

People in Sweden are not so shocked by that scene, I think. I got much more reaction from you, in the UK, about that scene.

Why do you think that is?

We are more sexually liberated, I think, than you are. What women can do, and cannot do. I don’t think that’s on an individual level, I think it’s in general how we see women. So what can we expect from the second series of The Bridge?

I’ve just had a meeting and it sounds very exciting. I have just read one part. From Saga’s perspective, we’re going to see her in situations where she has never been in her private life. So I’m looking forward to that. There will be another very big case, obviously.

Why do you think crime fiction is so popular in Scandinavia?

Maybe it’s because Scandinavia was very insular for a long time, but we’re not any more. Also, during winter, it’s very dark and rainy – the landscape plays a part for sure.

Do you feel like The Killing is a rival to The Bridge?

I don’t know. I haven’t seen The Killing.

How have you managed to avoid The Killing?

I don’t have much time to just watch TV series. I think it aired when I was doing something else. I don’t know. It wasn’t a decision to not watch it.

Henning Mankell interview

Extract From www.telegraph.co.uk john Preston 2011

His melancholy detective Kurt Wallander started a boom in ‘Scandi’ crime fiction. So why is he ditching him?

It’s a dismal day in Antibes. Outside in the town square, the rain is bucketing down. Inside the café where I’m to meet the author Henning Mankell, steam rises from people’s shoulders as they sit sipping their coffee.

At 11 o’clock precisely, the door opens and Mankell walks in. Unshaven and with his grey hair plastered across his head, there’s something faintly louche about him. This might have something to do with the fact that his open shirt reveals more of his chest than you might expect. Famously irascible, the Swedish master of “Scandi crime” doesn’t disappoint on this score. Immediately, his brow darkens into a frown: “Haven’t you paid yet?” he demands.

“But I thought we were going to do the interview here?” I say.

“No, no,” he says impatiently. “We’ll do it around the corner, at my house.”

We set off through the rain to where a sign on a wall bears the names “Mankell/Bergman”. “In here,” he says, pushing open the door. Once inside the house, Mankell’s manner changes. Perhaps it’s something to do with the presence of his wife Eva, daughter of the film director Ingmar Bergman. She’s his fourth wife and after 13 years of marriage there’s still a palpable tenderness between them. “Work well!” she says before disappearing into the rain. Mankell’s eyes follow her down the path until she reaches the gate.

The eight novels and one book of short stories that Mankell has written featuring his great detective, Kurt Wallander, have sold close to 40million copies around the world. This, he concedes, is gratifying, although it brings some minor irritations in its wake, one of these being that people often assume that Wallander is just a lightly fictionalised version of Mankell himself.

It’s true that they are more-or-less the same age, Mankell is 63. It’s true too that they are both Swedish, rumpled and melancholy. But there, Mankell insists, any resemblance ends. Possibly, there may still be some scepticism about this. If so, the following should soon put paid to that.

Early last year, 21 years after Mankell first took down an Ystad telephone directory and picked the name Kurt Wallander for his newly created detective, he finished his ninth and last Wallander novel, The Troubled Man.

Although he wasn’t killing Wallander off, Mankell was none the less putting him finally and irrevocably to rest. It must, I suggest, have been a huge wrench parting company with him after so long?

Mankell doesn’t have a very mobile face. He lifts one eyebrow slightly, but the implication is unmistakable. “If I go back to my diary and see what I was doing that day, which I haven’t incidentally, I’m sure I would see it was a perfectly normal, unremarkable day. I didn’t have any feelings at all, as far as I remember. I just accepted that now it was over and the next day I started writing something else.”

In fact, Mankell thought he’d finished with Wallander once before, in 1999. “For the next five years I hardly thought about him at all, I was too busy doing other things. Then it occurred to me that it might be interesting to have a story that was as much about him as it was about him solving a crime.”

Mankell did eventually give him a crime to solve, one based on what he calls “the biggest political scandal of my lifetime in Sweden”, when a Russian submarine was found stranded deep inside Swedish waters in 1981. But much of the book is given over to Wallander’s gloomy reflections as he looks back over his life, and his fears about what lies ahead.

What fate lies in store for Wallander? At this point you may wish to look away or, perhaps more aptly, bury your face in your hands. As Mankell puts it, Wallander walks off into a shadow-land. “One of the few things that Wallander and I do have in common is that we’re the same age. When you are around 60, there are certain things that are completely terrifying. One of them is that you have made the wrong choices in life, and now it’s too late to do anything about them. Another is that you start to think about physical and mental degeneration. I’m absolutely not afraid of dying. But what really scares me is that one day Eva will say to me: ‘Henning, you’ve started to forget things.’

“That scares the hell out of me. If there were five people in this room right now, one of us for sure will get Alzheimer’s. When I decided to do one more Wallander novel, this was what I wanted to write about.”

Something very strange happens to Mankell when he talks about Wallander. Plainly, he knows him better than anyone else, but there’s a constant note of irritation, even distaste, in his voice as he describes his character’s foibles, foibles which Wallander’s innumerable fans regard with enormous fondness.

“It’s quite true that I don’t particularly like him. But then I think most writers would say it’s more interesting to write about a person you don’t like. I’m quite sure Shakespeare enjoyed writing Iago much more than he did writing Othello. If you write about someone you love, what the hell are you supposed to say about that person? It’s much better to have something between you and your main character that grates.”

What does he particularly dislike about him? “Well,” he says, sighing in exasperation. “His attitude towards women. I don’t like that at all. I think I treat women much better than he does. He’s much too… brusque.”

Back in 1989, when he wrote the first Wallander novel, Faceless Killers, Mankell had no idea that he and Wallander would be metaphorical bedfellows for the next 21 years. “God no!” he exclaims. “But then I realised after two or three novels that I had this… instrument who could be useful.

“I wanted to show how difficult it is to be a good police officer. But after, I think, the third novel, I spoke to this friend of mine and asked what sort of disease I could give him. Someone who leads the life he does. Without hesitating, she said: ‘Diabetes!’ So I gave him diabetes and that made him more popular. I mean, you could never imagine James Bond giving himself a shot of insulin, but with Wallander it seemed perfectly natural.”

The publication of Faceless Killers effectively kick-started the Scandinavian crime writing boom. After Mankell came the deluge − his fellow Swede, Stieg Larsson, the Norwegian Karin Fossum and so on. What Mankell did, brilliantly, was to take the classic noir novel, lower the temperature and add plenty of snow. And in the middle of these whitened wastes stood Kurt Wallander, a man whose gloom is matched only by his vulnerability.

What I learned about Europe from watching Dicte - Crime Reporter

With Brexit looming, Channel 4’s newest import reaffirms the close bond with our Viking sisters. Chunky knits at the ready!

www.theguardian.com

Filipa Jodelka Tue 14 Jun 2016

Britain will soon be going to the polls, and between the pamphlets, the rolling news, and the shoehorning of referendum debate into that most sacred of TV institutions, Countryfile, it’s clear that the British public haven’t yet had their fill of EU chatter. It’s a difficult time whichever side of the debate you find yourself on. Looking to our western and central European cousins, their quirks and foibles – which at one time seemed so exotic, so cosmopolitan, so continental – are now dry and tired. Oh Europe, your trade agreements and farming subsidies, which once may have stirred up passion, now bear down like the asthmatic wheeze of a sleeping lover on a stuffy night.

The European identity has never been in greater danger, so in this special edition of The Other Side, we break new ground, and take a look where no other TV critic has before: at a Nordic crime procedural. Dicte – Crime Reporter (Friday, 9pm, More4) is currently halfway through its run, part of the Walter Presents strand of world imports. Unsurprisingly, it’s about divorced Danish crime reporter Dicte Svendsen, a woman with an amazing knack for solving the crimes she’s reporting on. Dicte has moved back from Copenhagen to her home town of Aarhus with her teenage daughter after a messy breakup. Dicte also has two female friends, Anne and Ida-Marie, who are known to meet with her and drink wine. I don’t know about you, but I haven’t quite had my fill of grey dramas about the exhausted life of a crime- solving woman. If you’re the sort of person who’ll watch any old claptrap with a strong female lead and are keen to learn the Danish for “The body is still warm” (spoiler alert: “Kroppen er stadig varm”), then Dicte really comes into her own.

Dicte’s backstory is set out in the opening episode so it can be slowly picked at later in the series. As a teenager, she gave her baby up for adoption at the insistence of her religious parents, and occasionally pauses from her sleuthing to have a traumatic flashback. Not only does this arc mix nicely with the show’s themes of family and motherhood but also with the plot of this week’s double bill, as Dicte tries to bust an illegal surrogacy ring. Speaking as a woman, Dicte’s sense of injustice resonates. As a woman, people are always telling me what to do as well (“wear heels”, “be nice”, “pay taxes”, ugh). Also, as a woman, I’m biologically capable of popping a baby out of my body. So you can imagine how relatable it feels when the Aarhus police discover a dead baby in a river as Dicte looks on with her notebook and several ideas about how it got there.

This river baby is only one in a long line of murky crimes to trouble Aarhus. Dicte’s ends are a veritable hotbed of nasty crimes. But for those in the throes of a Brexit-inspired identity crisis, don’t think of this as a reason for estrangement. The series began with Dicte discovering a body while having a wee round the back of some bins. An overworked single mother crouching in a dank gutter, her trail of urine leading to a corpse. There are only two places this could work. The flat, well-lit streets of Luxembourg? An-extra wide cycle path in Den Haag? No. A rough corner of Denmark and a side-street of the Bigg Market, Newcastle. It might not be pretty but, in this moment, the connection to our Viking sisters is pure and true. Union or no union, we’ll find a way; just bring your hand sanitiser and some chunky knits.

www.crimebythgebook.com

NORDIC NOIR SERIES RECOMMENDATION: THE FJÄLLBACKA SERIES BY CAMILLA LÄCKBERG

November 2, 2018

One of the trickiest things about blogging for me personally is finding time to highlight books that I loved before starting Crime by the Book. Recently, though, I’ve been feeling particularly inspired to put together a post on one of the very first Scandinavian crime series I fell in love with—so that’s exactly what I’m doing today! After reading (and loving) Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy many years ago, I found myself on a personal quest to learn as much as I could about the Nordic Noir genre. It was during this time period that I discovered Jo Nesbø, Sara Blaedel, and today’s featured author: Camilla Läckberg. In the years since, my love of Camilla Läckberg’s endearing, engrossing Fjällbacka Series has only grown. If you’re a reader who prefers mysteries that focus less on violence and more on character development, these books will be right up your alley; they are undeniably lighter novels than many of their Nordic peers, but that’s not at all a negative. Instead, think of these books as the kind of “comfort read” that you’ll want to come back to over and over, thanks to their rich atmosphere, endearing characters, and chilling (but not terrifying) mysteries. I couldn’t be more excited to finally be taking the time to share exactly why I love this series - and why I think you’ll love it, too. In today’s blog post, you can find my top three reasons why the Fjällbacka Series belongs on your reading list—plus details on where to start with Camilla Läckberg’s fantastic series. Happy reading!

THREE REASONS CAMILLA LÄCKBERG’S CRIME BOOKS BELONG ON YOUR TBR:

1. THEY’RE THE PERFECT PLACE TO START EXPLORING NORDIC NOIR.

If you’re a newcomer to the Nordic Noir genre, make Camilla Läckberg’s series one of your first stops along your journey. Scandinavian crime fiction has a (well-earned) reputation for being dark, gritty, dense, and quite violent—but if you want to ease yourself into it, Camilla Läckberg’s books are the perfect place to start. The Fjällbacka books have all the atmosphere, rich character development, and compelling investigations of Nordic Noir, but they do not rely on the same dark violence or dense plotting that define many of their peers. These books are much more focused on exploring the human fallout of crimes than on showing readers every little detail of the crime’s commission. What do I mean by that exactly? Where many Scandinavian crime novels bring readers up close and personal with the violence that sparks these stories, and then dig into the nitty-gritty of the investigative process after those crimes are committed, Läckberg’s books focus instead on the way her characters react to the violence they are facing. There are certainly compelling investigations at the heart of each of Läckberg’s books - and some of them do get quite chilling! - but if you’re a bit hesitant to jump right into the dark, gritty violence found in books by authors like Jo Nesbø or Lars Kepler, these books are a great place to start. Läckberg’s books are light enough in tone and content to suit the genre newcomer, but still deliver the chills and suspense we all love from Nordic mystery novels.

2. THEY FEATURE CHARACTERS YOU’LL WISH YOU COULD BE FRIENDS WITH IN REAL LIFE.

There are lots of reasons to love Camilla Läckberg’s books, but this reason is my personal favorite. The Fjällbacka Series centers around two protagonists: Erica Falck and Patrik Hedstrom. Patrik is a detective, and Erica is a writer with a particular interest in true crime; when their paths cross due to the suspicious death of one of Erica’s close childhood friends in the first book in the series (THE ICE PRINCESS), an alliance is formed between the two. Erica’s journalistic instincts make her a major asset in the investigation of her friend’s death… and even when the police wish she would give them just a bit of breathing room, she never gives up searching for justice. Over the course of the series, the police quickly discover that they can rely on Erica to provide sharp, intelligent contributions to their investigations. Truly, the best part about this series for me as a reader has been getting to know these characters. There are a number of characters who become quite beloved over the course of the series as well, but the relationship between Patrik and Erica is the series’ driving force. I won’t spoil anything, but as the series progresses, readers will be completely wrapped up in the tender and heartwarming moments that these two share. A word of warning: there will be a bit of romance as the series progresses, but it certainly never overshadows the fact that this is first and foremost a crime series. Instead, the romantic relationships in these books are all in service of just how human and relatable Läckberg makes her characters. Bonus: if you’re a reader who typically enjoys domestic suspense, the fact that these books do explore the personal lives of their protagonists will make this a natural fit for your reading preferences.

3. THEY’RE THE PERFECT MYSTERIES TO COZY UP WITH ON A CHILLY WINTER’S NIGHT.

Set in the quiet fishing village of Fjällbacka, Sweden, this series is steeped in the kind of rich atmosphere that defines the best of Scandinavian crime writing. Sinking into these books feels like traveling to a different world; my strongest memories of the first Fjällbacka books I read aren’t as much about plot as they are about the general feeling that washed over me while I read these stories. Camilla Läckberg does a fantastic job wrapping readers up in the peaceful, mysterious, just a bit melancholy atmosphere of this quiet fishing village. And of course, this little village has lots of chilling secrets in store for its readers. As we look towards the winter months, these mysteries are exactly the kind of reads that were made for quiet snow days. You’ll want to wrap yourself up in a blanket, grab a hot cup of coffee, and cozy up with one (or more!) of these books for a weekend binge-read.

Monday, 12 June 2017

Forty years with Varg Veum by Gunnar Staalesen www.shotsmagcouk.blogspot.com

In June it is forty years since the first novel about Varg Veum was published in Norway. It bears the title Bukken til havresekken and is still not translated into English. The title comes from an old Norwegian saying: ‘You do not tell the buck to watch the bag of oats.’ (Bukken til havresekken translates directly as: ‘The buck to the bag of oats’.) The French edition was called: Le Loup dans la bergerie, which means ‘The wolf in the sheepfold’ and therefore has a similar meaning: ‘You don’t ask a wolf to look after the sheep.’ But in Germany it was simply called it: Das Haus mit der grünen Tür (‘The House with the Green Door’, which, interestingly, was my working title for the book, although I never told anyone about that. How did they know?!) The book was an experiment. I wanted to move the traditional private eye novel from America to Norway, while taking account of the differences between the US of the 1930s, 40s and 50s, and Norway in the 1970s. So Varg Veum was without doubt a close relative of Philip Marlowe and Lew Archer; but he was transformed into a Scandinavian, left-wing social democrat, with whom many of my readers at the time could sympathise. He had a different type of background too: he was originally a social worker, employed by the local authority to help children who were in difficult situations or came from families where their parents were not able to take care of them.

My inspiration as a crime writer originally came from the Swedish couple, Sjöwall & Wahlöö, who, between 1965 and 1975, had a huge impact on international crime fiction with their ten novels about the Stockholm-based police inspector Martin Beck. My first two crime novels (and the fourth) were police procedurals in more or less the same style as Sjöwall & Wahlöö, with added inspiration coming from the American writer Chester Himes and his books about Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones. In the back of my head, however, there was also the traditional plotting I’d learnt by reading Agatha Christie, Quentin Patrick, Erle Stanley Gardner and many other great plot constructors. And I had, of course, read Arthur Conan Doyle and been fascinated by the combination of Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson since I first read The Hound of the Baskervilles when I was twelve years old.

However, it was only when I read Raymond Chandler for the first time, in 1971, that I really understood what good literature a crime novel could be. At that time I had published two experimental novels that were more inspired by Jack Kerouac than by crime writers, but I could see the similarities between Kerouac and Chandler, particularly the poetic and playful language. This made me think: Perhaps – some day – a crime novel? After having more or less failed (I have to admit) as a mainstream, ‘serious’ novelist, I then started my career as a crime writer in 1975, with the first of my police procedurals, and in 1977 the first Varg Veum novel.

I have to admit that I was sceptical about the experiment myself: was it possible to transfer this American style of crime writing to Norway in the 70s? But no critic protested that you couldn’t set a private detective story in contemporary Bergen, and the readers loved it. Having finished my third and last police procedural, in 1979, I then wrote number two in what was now going to be the Varg Veum series: Yours until Death. This book is available in English.

In June 2017, my seventeenth novel in the series, Wolves in the Dark, is published in the UK and will be available as an ebook all over the world. During the forty years between the first book and this, Varg has aged only twenty-five years. (The action in this book takes place in 2002, when he is almost sixty.) But he is still has the same roots: shooting off one-liners like a stressed Philip Marlowe, and solving mysteries like a sad and disturbed Lew Archer. In this book Varg deals with one of the most difficult cases of his career: he is on the run from the police himself, at the same time as trying to find out who is seeking revenge on him, and why? The combination of these ‘who’ and ‘why’ questions forms the basis for most modern crime novels. But it is the ‘why’ that is perhaps even more important now than in the earlier periods of the genre; and this is certainly the case in Wolves in the Dark.

The book also deals with a couple of big themes: the problem of hacking into private computers; and – more tragically – the abuse of children carried out by international groups; a problem that has been demonstrated by a big investigation being conducted by the police in Bergen right now, as I write these words.

It seems that the stuff crime novels are made of never goes away

Jar City - Jason Solomons , The Observer, Sunday 14 September 2008

At first, it looks like Fargo, that offbeat, snowy police investigation from the Coen brothers: a cop in funny knitwear, a dowdy female officer in a too-big anorak shivering against the chill wind. But Jar City, Baltasar Kormákur's biting thriller from Iceland, soon reveals itself to be something more gloomily intricate and unique, unfolding in a series of sharp observational details, skidding plot twists and haunting landscapes.

'It's a typical Iceland murder,' murmurs one cop at the crime scene. 'Messy and pointless.' This almost offhand comment - I always find that subtitles regrettably overemphasise such quiet asides - nevertheless strikes a note of dread, indicating the start of a bleakly existential policier centred around Inspector Erlendur played, in a marvellous performance of unwavering equability, by Ingvar Eggert Sigurdsson.

The murder of a former petty criminal and suspected paedophile sparks a search for a long- disappeared hoodlum and an investigation into a rape case from more than 30 years ago. After he discovers a photograph of a gravestone hidden in a drawer, we follow Erlendur on his quest around this extraordinary island: to lonely corrugated cottages surrounded by giant seas, over angry black volcanic rock, through clouds of belching industrial smoke that mingle with steam from geysers, while freezing peaks of ice provide the distant backdrop. The last time we saw Iceland on the big screen was in the beautiful music documentary Heima, about the band Sigur Rós and their tour of their homeland, playing gigs in spectacular locations and a disused herring factory.

Jar City takes us to murkier places, to mortuaries and stairwells and grotty satellite towns, and into the brutalist high rise housing block where the lonely inspector shelters from the constant wind and the howl of his job. Parallel to Inspector Erlendur's life, a separate story strand shows a man, Orn (Atli Rafn Sigurdsson) grieving for his young daughter and investigating her death from a rare genetic brain condition. He appears to work at some secret ultra-modern lab, and how this will eventually mesh with the rest of the plot forms not only much of the film's intrigue but also much of its resonance. Iceland itself has recently embarked on a controversial nationwide programme to form a DNA database: as a uniquely isolated community of just over 300,000 people, its rich history is, of course, written in rock and preserved in ice and lava but it's also in the pure genetics of its inhabitants. Director Kormákur manages to cram such wide-reaching themes and issues into this deceptively subtle film.

Although the combination of council housing, greyish light and saturnine cop may remind audiences of British television serials such as Taggart, Z Cars or even the current Waking The Dead, many scenes in Jar City linger in the mind for their sheer weirdness, the sort of dry details that still distinguish good cinema from decent telly. Erlendur, for instance, picks up his dinner at a drive-through restaurant. Only when he gets back to his flat to enjoy his food do we see he's tucking into a sheep's head, gouging out the eye and sucking on the teeth. (Research assures me that singed sheep's head, or Svid, is indeed a popular dish, though not half as loved as ram's testicles or fermented shark.) The theme of pickling, however, returns on a visit to the quaintly-named spot that forms the film's title. Jar City is just that, a vast store of jars containing preserved foetuses and brains, like some Victorian biological reliquary.

Looking more like a geography teacher, with his beard, horn-rimmed glasses and knitted cardies, Erlendur is a singular screen detective. He has a troubled yet tender relationship with his own daughter Eva (Agústa Eva Erlendsdóttir) who may be a drug addict and who is certainly well liked by the seedy underworld types her father is trying to police. He even storms into one party and pulls her out of the dingy bed she's sharing with a punk. The punk, it should be noted, doesn't wake up.

There's another splendid sequence when Erlendur and one of his deputies visit a jail to quiz Elli...i (Theódór Júlíusson), who seems to have earned the title of 'one of the most notorious maniacs in Iceland'. Warranted, it turns out, and as Erlendur finally shuts the door on the prisoner's solitary cell, the two conduct a painful interview, Elli...i's huge, balding bulk framed by the cell door's window and contorted in anguish.

Kormákur enjoyed some international acclaim with the broadly comic 101 Reykjavik in 2000 but his Hollywood debut, A Little Trip To Heaven, was less successful, despite starring Forest Whittaker, Julia Stiles and Peter Coyote. Looking back, I now sense some studio involvement clouding the director's dark and quirky eye and reining in his style. However, Kormákur shot most of A Little Trip To Heaven in Iceland, making it stand in for small-town Minnesota, and its noirish themes of crime and families return to better effect here, as does the distinctive work of Icelandic musician Mugison, who wrote the soundtrack for both films. Perhaps even more memorable than Mugison's string-and-synth-scapes is the stirring yet troubling sound of a male choir who chant over many scenes, as if summoning up the storms and sea swells, like voices of Nordic gods watching over actions on earth of which they heartily disapprove. Is Lisbeth Salander a Psychopath?

Published on January 3, 2012 by Melissa Burkley, Ph.D. in The Social Thinker

In an earlier post, I posed the question "Is Dexter a successful psychopath." Given the upcoming release of the David Fincher film The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, I wanted to revisit this question but instead ask, "Is Lisbeth Salander a Psychopath?"

In the recently published book The Psychology of the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, my colleague (who is an expert in the empirical study of psychopaths) and I wrote a chapter where we examined the personality profiles of Lisbeth and several other characters from the Millenium series to determine if they would meet the clinical definition of a psychopath. if you read my earlier Dexter post, you will remember that a psychopath is commonly defined as "a social predator who charms, manipulates and ruthlessly plows their way through life...completely lacking in feelings for others, they selfishly take what they want and do as they please, violating social norms and expectations without the slightest sense of guilt or regret (Hare, 2003, xi)." From a personality perspective, we would say that psychopaths are low in the agreeableness, meaning they are low distrusting, manipulative, arrogant, and callous towards others.

Consider two known psychopaths: Jeffrey Dahmer and Ted Bundy. Both are examples of men who were callous, arrogant and manipulative. However, even though these two men are both psychopaths, there is clearly a difference in the way that they pursued their bloodlust. Jeffrey Dahmer's desire murderous desires were so strong that they overwhelmed his concern for self-preservation and eventually led to his capture. However, Ted Bundy was more strategic in his behavior, allowing him to successfully evade the police for years. Returning to the personality perspective, we would say that even though both of these men are low in agreeableness, they differ in their level of consciousness. People low in conscientiousness tend to be impulsive and give up on goals easily whereas people high in conscientiousness are controlled, committed, and goal-driven. So Jeffrey Dahmer's behavior suggests he was low in conscientiousness whereas Ted Bundy's behavior suggests he was high in this trait.

Psychologists use this distinction between high and low conscientiousness to distinguish between "successful psychopaths" and "unsuccessful psychopaths." Although most psychopaths who make the news would be considered unsuccessful (because they were caught), the majority of psychopaths in our society are successful. This doesn't mean that there are lots of murderers running amok, but it does mean that there are lots of people who you likely interact on a daily basis who are charming, manipulative, and ruthless in their endeavors. In fact, research suggests that 4% of the population meet the criteria for psychopathy. They may be our boss, our lawyer, or even our spouse. And odds are that on the outside, they look like a model citizen: charismatic, successful and accomplished in their career. In fact, many of these psychopathic traits (e.g., competitive, manipulative, ruthless) might be valuable assets within certain professions, such as law, politics, or business.

In The Psychology of the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, my colleague Dr. Mullins-Sweatt and I use the dimensions of agreeableness and conscientiousness to identify who in the millennium series fits the definition of a successful or unsuccessful psychopath. Not surprisingly, we found a number of Steig Larssons character fit the psychopath criteria. But one character in particular who really rides the line between mentally health and psychopathic is Lisbeth Salander. Below is an exerpt from our chapter that examines whether Lisbeth would be clinically diagnosed as a psychopath or not:

Lisbeth Salander: The Antisocial Anti-Hero

No character in the Millenium trilogy is as fascinating or complex as the female protagonist, Lisbeth Salander. Her behavior, her lifestyle, and even her appearance has led some readers to ask, "Is Salander a psychopath?"

Many of Salander's behaviors suggest low agreeableness. For instance, Salander shows complete disregard for societal rules or norms and engages in behaviors that are both antisocial and illegal. Salander's occupation in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is as a private investigator and one reason why she is so skilled at this position is because she is a genius computer hacker. She also engages in a number of other significant crimes, including tax evasion, identity theft, fraud, and stealing approximately three billion kronor ($75 million dollars) from Wennerström. In addition to her criminal activities, Salander is also quite violent. Throughout her childhood, Salander was in trouble for hitting classmates who teased her and when she was 12 years old, she attempted to kill her father by throwing a firebomb in his car. Salander "never forgot an injustice, and by nature she was anything but forgiving" (The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, p. 228). Finally, Salander is distrustful of everyone and is noncompliant, displaying a complete lack of regard for authority such as the police and government.

And just like the successful psychopaths that she goes up against in the series, Salander is clever and conscientious. The trilogy is replete with examples of the patience and planning she uses to exact revenge against the men that have harmed her. For instance, when Bjurman first assaulted her in his office, Salander considered taking the letter opener from his desk and attacking him but instead chooses to do nothing, thinking, "impulsive actions led to trouble, and trouble could have unpleasant consequences. She never did anything without first weighing the consequences" (The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, pp. 220-221). Following her rape, Salander spent time planning ways to kill Bjurman. She methodically decided against guns, knives, bombs, and poisons before deciding it might be to her benefit to keep him alive to grant her independence. These are the behaviors of someone with a high degree of discipline and self-control.

With her extreme violence and seeming lack of remorse, it is easy to see why people might consider Salander a successful psychopath. However, ultimately, we do not feel this is an accurate label for her. Although Salander is antagonistic and violent, she doesn't appear to lack a conscience, which is the hallmark trait of a psychopath. While she may not always follow society's rules, she does have her own set of moral principles that abide by a code of right and wrong. Most notably, she only attacks men who have ruthlessly hurt her or other vulnerable women. Of people like Martin and Gottfried Vanger, she says, "If I had to decide, men like that would be exterminated, every last one" (The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, 508). Salander's moral code leaves no room for compromise. When a man hurts a woman, she believes he deserves to die or be punished so that he can't repeat his crimes (e.g., the tattoo she puts on Bjurman). In this way, she poses an ethical dilemma for the readers. But whatever we think of her moral code, we feel compelled to admire her desire to protect those who are vulnerable to exploitation.

Her role as an avenger also demonstrates another important aspect of her personality: she seems to care for people other than herself. In general, psychopaths lack emotional connections with others and simply see the people around them as pawns. While difficult to see through her hard exterior, deep down it seems that Salander experiences concern for others, especially for women in her country who are exploited and abused.

For these reasons, Lisbeth Salander would not meet the criteria of a psychopath. And in this way, her character reveals the complexity involved with the scientific analysis of psychopaths. Just because someone is a psychopath doesn't mean they are a murderer (e.g., Wennerström) and just because someone is a murderer (or attempts murder) doesn't mean they are a psychopath (e.g., Salander).

www.telegraph.co.uk Tim Adler 3 OCTOBER 2017 •

What makes Jo Nesbø the perfect crime writer?

Gripping plots, compelling characters and punchy scenes – it’s easy to see why Hollywood wants to adapt the Harry Hole books. Jo Nesbø has held off – until now, with The Snowman

You get the feeling that Jo Nesbø would have become famous whatever he turned his hand to. Aged 17, he was star player with Norwegian soccer club Molde FK and won the prize for best junior player the following year. Then he became one of Norway’s best-known rock stars as lead singer with wildly popular local band, Di Derre (Those Guys), who racked up 91 weeks in Norway’s pop charts.

And of course, he is now Norway’s most popular internationally bestselling author, with worldwide sales of more than 33 million books – and The Snowman (2010), seventh of the Harry Hole series, which features a brilliant and driven detective with unorthodox methods, is considered his best.

Nesbø’s books say, don’t be deluded – behind those tasteful Ikea curtains, something wicked this way comes

Nesbø, who still performs with Di Derre, has compared crime fiction to punk rock – and his visceral, punchy books grab readers by the scruff of the neck and frogmarch them down Oslo’s backstreets and into an unrelenting criminal underworld of rape, violence, exploitation and murder.

As a writer, he was influenced more by American hardboiled crime movies than by literature when he penned his first novel, The Bat (1997), and it’s easy to see why filmmakers have begged to adapt Nesbø’s crime series more or less ever since. He writes in short chapters that cut quickly from scene to scene, as if you’re watching a film.

Nesbø’s writing method is to patiently develop his story from a brief synopsis to a fuller treatment, to a longer outline and then to the finished work, just as a Hollywood screenwriter would do. What’s most satisfying about Nesbø is how his plots exhibit the precise engineering of a Swiss timepiece; he will write synopsis after synopsis, for up to a year, before he gets it where he wants it, and how his audience loves it.

As with the plays of another great Norwegian writer, Henrik Ibsen, the secrets – and the crimes – of Nesbø’s central characters are not revealed until the final act. The crime novel may be the vessel but Nesbø’s stories are really about conflict and the human condition.

However, unlike other world-renowned Scandinavian crime writers, such as the late Henning Mankell or Stieg Larsson, Nesbø eschews exposing society’s corruption – he is more interested in the smell of individual damnation. In Nesbø’s novels, it is very much ghosts from the past which cause people to do what they do.

It is important to remember that Norway has an astonishingly low murder rate. Just 23 people were murdered in Norway in 2015. Which makes every homicide in Norway personal (the entire population of Norway could fit inside St Petersburg, so you’re bound to know someone who knew the victim), and also a symbol of how fragile civilisation is; Nesbø’s books say, don’t be deluded – behind those tasteful Ikea curtains, something wicked this way comes. Reading one of Nesbø’s intensely dark crime thrillers has the naughty pleasure of eating plain chocolate; there may be a horrible world beyond the safety of your four walls, but right now you’re safe and cosy, reading in your armchair.

Because no matter how dark the novels get, good does eventually triumph in the end – even if the hero is somebody as damaged as detective Harry Hole – and love overwhelms evil.

Unit One: the Danish crime drama you may have missed

This Emmy-winning programme was created by a who's-who of Nordic talent – and the second season is out on DVD soon www.guardian.com Nick Edwards Fri 19 Jul 2013

As we're in one of those brief periods when a big new Scandinavian drama is not being broadcast on UK TV, there may be some satisfaction to be found in the second season of Unit One (Rejseholdet), released on DVD next week, which was a key player in the first wave of series that sowed the seeds for The Bridge, Borgen and The Killing.

First broadcast in 2000, Unit One is based around an elite mobile police task force that travels around Denmark helping local forces solve a smörgåsbord of typically noir-tinged crime, from cross-border sex trafficking to child pornography. Its plots were based on real- life crimes in Denmark at the time, and the show got a relentless grilling from the country's tabloids for its supposed lack of sensitivity towards the victims. But it was a huge hit with audiences and critics, winning an Emmy for best foreign drama in 2002.

As with other series from that era – The Protectors, The Eagle, Nikolaj & Julie – the show's alumni are a who's-who of Nordic talent, as writers, directors and actors from The Killing, The Bridge and Borgen are all to be found in the credits. Benedikte Hansen, who plays the experienced journalist with alcohol problems in Borgen, has a returning guest role. Mads Mikkelsen, now the most recent incarnation of Hannibal Lecter, delivers a classic turn as the hard-boiled chief cop. Season two (it eventually ran to four) sees the team dealing with crimes that involve a trip to London, sex games in a chocolate factory, and a core member of the Unit ending up in custody. However, it also shows that Danish drama was not quite the well-oiled machine that it is today.lp

"We were thought of as second class in comparison to film directors," says Charlotte Sieling, conceptual director on the first series of The Bridge, who got her break as a director on Unit One. "It was tough. We didn't even know if what we were doing was any good."

Inevitably, it does feel slightly dated compared to the shows that followed it. But it also boasts solid plotting, stories that tackle the social issues of the day and the further development of a strong set of characters from the first season. For a hardcore Scandi noir fan, it's a decent watch, and a fascinating document of Denmark's TV drama as it evolves into a golden age.

My day on a plate: Arne Dahl, crime writer

A day in the life of Arne Dahl.

27 Jun 2013 www.telegraph.co.uk

8am If I haven't been writing through the night, my day starts with coffee, breakfast and the paper. Wholegrain toast, Greek yogurt, muesli with berries, and low-carb orange juice.

9am Get started on my computer. I've tried to write in all kinds of places, but home suits me best. I drink a lot of coffee.

11am As I've only moved a few steps all morning, I go for a run around the island near my house in Stockholm. Make a protein drink – not a delicious lunch but quite efficient.

2pm Stop writing for a Thai chicken curry with rice, from the fridge, then return to finish a chapter before answering readers' questions on Facebook and Twitter. Sometimes I forget about lunch, dinner, and even coffee, and just keep writing.

7pm Go to a local Italian restaurant with my wife for beef carpaccio and then creamy, cheesy pasta. With pasta I make an exception to all my rules about eating lots of protein.

Eating patterns often disintegrate when authors get immersed in their work, so Arne can be forgiven for looking for simplicity at lunch-time. He preaches high protein but in fact eats a reasonable amount of carbs. More fruit and veg would balance things out. He doesn't need masses of protein, so a fruit smoothie would make a better choice for a convenient lunch.