Scandinavian Noir by Wendy Lesser

Scandinavian Noir: In Pursuit of a Mystery
By Wendy Lesser
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020

Wendy Lesser’s previous book was her fantastic You Say to Brick: The Life of Louis Kahn, and the one before that was the equally-fantastic Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books, and those two books combined to give the impression of Lesser as a wonderfully inquisitive and interrogatory reader, an animated companion on the page, a bookish wonk. And that impression is the whole atmosphere of her new book, Scandinavian Noir: In Pursuit of a Mystery: here she takes her long-standing love of Nordic-noir mysteries and thrillers and splays that love on the dissecting table. 

The book’s charming conceit is that Lesser came to know the Scandinavian countries, peoples, and cultures through the world of all the mystery novels she read long before she even thought of experiencing any of those things directly. Reading the Martin Beck novels by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo, the Kurt Wallander series by Henning Mankell, Jo Nesbo’s Harry Hole books, the Lisbeth Salander series by Stieg Larsson, and a dozen others, Lesser maps out her own composite imaginary version of the backdrop world connecting all of them. 

She’s read the whole array of Scandinavian noir, may the Dear Lord have mercy on her, and she’s pulled together the commonalities and differences with the attention to detail you only find in the passionate fan. Some of those commonalities will be familiar to anybody who’s ever read one of these misbegotten books: the tendency of all the characters to drink their body weight in alcohol every time they’re in a bad mood (hint: they’re always in a bad mood), the tendency of all the main characters (pace Lisbeth Salander) to be jowly middle-aged men, the tendency of these men to be a) plodding, b) noticeably lackluster at their job (Lesser is particularly enamored of the Martin Beck novels, possibly to such an extent that she fails to notice all the very obvious plain-old mistakes he makes in virtually every book), and c) in a sexual relationship with a woman who’s 25 years younger, 180 pounds lighter, and 45 IQ points smarter than he is. Lesser gamely - and quite rightly - dismisses the kind of snobbery that too often accompanies any serious examination of mystery/thriller novels - “Let’s agree at the outset to dispense with any discussion of brow levels,” she writes - but even she might have to admit that much of this stuff would require a significant haberdashery upgrade even to aspire to being low-brow.

Once these thematic commonalities have been laid out, the examination that follows is utterly delicious. Lesser is the perfect, upbeat guide to all this dour Nordic wet-wash, and she’s eloquent on the bedrock reasons why people might subject themselves to such books in the first place:

Sadistic tendencies occur in all murder mysteries, of course. Part of the reason we read these books is to be appalled, or scared, or perhaps titillated by our own secret passion for violence. As Walter Benjamin remarked in an entirely different context, we warn our shivering lives with the deaths we read about. And if the thriller form makes masochists of us all, inflicting ugly sights and events on us, it also reassures and soothes us, by making sense of all the apparent mayhem through the detective’s eventual solution.

It’s a brave author who can so blithely link the term “sadistic tendencies” with the experience of reading something written by, for instance, Henning Mankell, but Lesser is tenaciously hoping that she’s preaching to the convertible. “If you are not won over by the time you finish [the fourth Martin Beck story] The Laughing Policeman, I guess you can give up, but you will have missed something terrific.” Given the sheer, leaden ridiculousness of The Laughing Policeman, the declaration alone is enough to make all but the most cynical Stockholm detective cheer Lesser on. 

Nordic noir has an unaccountably enormous fan-base, and Wendy Lesser has written the ultimate love-letter to both those books and those fans. And given how endlessly allusive Scandinavian Noir is, even those fans may find some new recommendations in these pages, along the general principle of misery loving company, one assumes.

—Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.