Tangled Web UK Review January 2012
Death in a Cold Climate: A Guide to Scandinavian Crime Fiction by
Barry Forshaw
hbk out January 12
Published by Palgrave Macmillan
at £55
Barry Forshaw is a prolific writer on crime fiction topics, with a particular
interest in contemporary fiction from Scandinavia. He has written, for instance,
a book about the life and work of the late Stieg Larsson, The
Man Who Left Too Soon. His latest venture is a more academic –
but still very readable – study of Nordic crime, covering work from Sweden,
Norway, Denmark, Iceland and Finland. Authors from those countries have enjoyed
increasing, and in some cases global, success in recent years. We can perhaps
date the trend back to the appearance of Miss
Smilla’s Feeling For Snow, just short of 20 years ago, but
of course there were crime novels being written in Scandinavia before then, and
the excellent work of Sjowall and Wahloo receives numerous mentions. The focus,
though, is on recent work, and the authors covered include not only Larsson but
also Jo Nesbo, Hakan Nesser, Camilla Lackberg, Karin Fossum, Henning Mankell and
many others – some of them, certainly, were names unfamiliar to me. There
are extensive quotations from people closely concerned with Scandinavian fiction,
and interesting observations on – amongst other subjects – the nature
of translation. This a timely and wide-ranging study of a very popular subject.
(
Martin Edwards
- author of the highly acclaimed Harry Devlin Mysteries)
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