Scandinavian Crime Novels

It was a Tuesday morning like any other Tuesday morning. I came into the office, said hi to my co-workers, and checked my e-mail. I had never given any thought to Scandinavian crime novels myself, but all that was about to change.

When I got my weekly e-mail update from Books & Culture , I saw that the book of the week is Black Seconds , the latest book by the Norwegian novelist Karin Fossum. And the reviewer was a mug I’d seen before, one Joseph Bottum. He began with an auspicious reminder that good writing needs good content (in this case, a good plot) to back it up:

There’s something indelicate about delicacy. Pushed too hard, striven for too relentlessly, the obstinate attempt to express every shade of human motivation usually ends in a muddle—like an over-detailed pencil drawing, where the cross-hatching of the background obscures the subject of the foreground. Karin Fossum’s latest novel, Black Seconds, is a failure. There’s just no way around that fact. But it is, perhaps, an instructive failure, for it shows that talented writing, carefully observed characters, and psychological acuity are not enough to make a good mystery novel. You also need a story and a plot to express it. Karin Fossum is ten times the writer that, say, Agatha Christie was. And still, somehow, Christie’s A.B.C. Murders is ten times the mystery novel that Fossum’s Black Seconds is.

There was more, and I mulled it over in my mind, wincing as I downed the last of the gritty black coffee in my cup. When I was done, I was ready to face another day of being an assistant editor. Or so I thought . . . .