Mrs. Rees has given me two lovely kids. She has enjoyed the presence of my parents. She even visited Wales with me. But I was never quite sure of her. Because she had only read one Raymond Chandler novel.

In an effort to make our marriage complete, I suggested this week she augment her reading of “The Big Sleep” by going through the remainder of Big Ray’s oeuvre. I tossed “Farewell, My Lovely” at her and she got going.

As I did so, I was just finishing a draft of my next novel. Part of writing, let us be frank, is anticipating what editors will say about it when it’s done. I decided to look at Chandler’s work in the light of the comments I get from agents and editors about my manuscripts – and from readers about the finished book. I wonder how he’d have responded?

For example, “Farewell, My Lovely” begins, as you may recall, with Marlowe outside a bar, watching a very large fellow. The large man enters and tosses another man out of the door. Then Marlowe says: “I walked along to the double doors [of the bar] and stood in front of them. They were motionless now. It wasn’t any of my business. So I pushed them open and looked in.”

There’s no way a contemporary editor or agent would go for that. “What?” they’d say. “Marlowe has no stake here. He needs to have a compelling reason to go through those doors.”

Of course, the reason Marlowe goes through those doors isn’t that Chandler didn’t do plots (as some allege.) It’s that Marlowe is somewhat comically interested in random things around him. He isn’t looking for trouble, but he’s attracted to places where he might encounter it – out of curiosity. He’s an anthropologist of low-life.

Now an anthropologist might work as a “series character” in today’s fiction. But he’d have to be a real anthropologist. Everyone has to have a reason for what they do. Their family must be at risk. Someone must want to kill them. Their identity has been mistaken and they must clear their names. You know what I mean.

No character is allowed to be interested in what’s happening around them and nothing more.

Partially that’s the result of the James Patterson-ization of the thriller/crime genre. Every chapter must have the clock ticking down to the dread event our hero has to prevent.

But it’s also because we’ve grown accustomed to being able to nail everything down in life in general. If you don’t know the answer to a question, look it up on the web and instantly you’ll have someone else’s answer, right or wrong.

A New York Times article this morning noted that Americans increasingly are employing two or even three computer screens on one desk to hold all the different web windows they want to have open before them. One poor monkey-minded lady (it’s a yoga/meditation reference, before you get offended, and it refers to the inability to focus on one thing) told the Times that when her third screen malfunctioned, she felt like she was missing out on the news (because she keeps news feeds on that screen.) Sounds like information-overload, rather than so-called “multi-tasking”? As for the proliferation of data before her on her desk: “I can handle it,” she said. Like any other addict.

But the best example of the changes in our society and the way they’re reflected in our fiction is this: in “The Big Sleep,” one of the characters is fished out of the sea, having been driven off a pier in a car. Chandler was later asked who killed that character. He replied, “I never figured that out.”

Try telling that to an editor or an agent or a reader today. It’d be a badge of incompetence.

But Chandler didn’t need to know. Neither do we.

There should be ambiguity and lacunae in our knowledge. We should learn only what we can focus on. That means looking at a single computer screen and not worrying about missing information as it zips meaninglessly across the web. It also means allowing our plots to maintain a focus on what’s important, and leaving the occasional loose end untied.
–
The wait for a successor to Amadeus is over.  MOZART’S LAST ARIA by Matt Rees www.mattrees.net
www.themanoftwistsandturns.com

You can’t pick up a newspaper or click on a news website these days without reading about the wave of violent crime that has inundated Mexico and Central America. It isn’t unusual to read of a dozen, two dozen or more people being found dead at one time in some desert locale in northern Mexico, on a back street in Acapulco, or even on a major thoroughfare in the city of Veracruz. Over the past five years more than 40,000 people have died in Mexico in what is generally described as drug violence. Much of this bloodletting is between cartels, some of it results from battles between the Mexican Army and the drug interests, and some is just the gratuitous killing of innocents in order to sew terror. At the top of heap when it comes to bloodletting are the  dreaded  Zetas, former Mexican Army special forces commandos who decided the drug business was much more lucrative than the military, rented themselves out to the Gulf Cartel for a time, and finally went into the drug business forming their own cartel. Late last year a commando team of Zetas walked into a Monterrey casino with automatic weapons, opened fire and then set the place ablaze, killing more than 50 people. Why? Apparently they were just flexing their muscles, sewing horror. One mass grave in the northern hinterlands attributed to the Zetas reportedly contained 193 bodies. By all accounts they were innocent people who had been dragged off buses passing through that region and murdered. Their crime? Being in the wrong place at a time when the Zetas needed to throw a scare into the country.   In order to coordinate all that mayhem, the cartel, until recently, had its own radio network that spanned much of Mexico–including towers, antennas, repeaters—so they could avoid eavesdropping by the authorities. It was discovered and at least partially destroyed by government agents last year.

The Zetas have also moved into Guatemala where they have recruited into their ranks special forces troops trained by the U.S. to fight leftist guerrillas there two decades ago. Those commandos were known as Los Kabiles and were notorious for their vicious killing of Mayan Indians suspected of being leftist sympathizers back in the 1980s. Put them together with the Zetas and you have a very violent marriage of interests. It has made them almost impossible to control. Drug cartels are so entrenched in some parts of the country that they have their own Public Works Department, so to speak, building not only rural airstrips, but roads and bridges to help move their product. Cocaine processing labs have also relocated there, after being forced out of Colombia by the Colombian military. Those locals who try to resist the new industry in town don’t resist for long. Twenty-seven people were found dead on one remote cattle ranch in Guatemala last year.

The Zetas are not the only Mexican drug interest to have spread its tentacles south. The Sinaloa Cartel, thought to be the richest in Mexico, has also expanded. Those drug interests also control regions of Honduras and are entrenched in  El Salvador as well. Salvadoran police, not long ago, found $9 million in cash buried in a barrel on a ranch there.

In all the countries –Mexico and the Northern Triangle countries of Central America—cartels have found eager recruits among local gang members.  In many cases, those gangs were formed by members of U.S. gangs who had been deported back to their native countries. The MS-13 and 18^th Street gangs –both founded in California—are now powerful in Central America. The

cartels find the gangsters willing recruits and ready  to employ the violence the job calls for.  It’s ironic that to some extent it is U.S. trained former soldiers and former U.S. gang members who are destabilizing both Mexico and Central America and causing headaches for the U.S., especially for the Drug Enforcement Agency.

I lived in southern Mexico for more than four years in the 1970s. I ran a camping business in the mountains of the state of Oaxaca, taking hikers through the Pacific slope of the Sierra Madre.and getting to know locals.  In the 1980s, as a journalist, I lived in Honduras and Nicaragua for seven years, and worked  in El Salvador and Guatemala at times. I saw lots of poverty in all those places. In some cases, it was desperate poverty. I also saw a lot of indifference toward that poverty on the part of the more well-to-do citizens of those countries and no small measure of arrogance. In the case of Guatemala, I heard undisguised racism expressed by the elite toward the dark-skinned Mayans. When I first started to read about the spread of wholesale killing in those countries, I thought back to my experiences there. The Central American countries, in particular, had already gone through enough violence during the civil wars of the 1970s and 1980s. I had lost friends there. But I also understood where this new wave of violence was coming from in those countries.  The inequities I had seen made me angry, so I could only imagine how they made those young, poor Mexicans and Central Americans themselves feel. There was pent up rage. The frustrations and abuses of those societies has made it very easy for the cartels to find young men willing to spill blood and risk their lives –throw away their lives—in exchange for  drugs and some cash. What we’re seeing there isn’t a problem created by drug cartels. It is a situation exploited by drug cartels, but it is rooted in the same poverty, frustration and indifference that I witnessed.

Charles Dickens has always been one of my favourite authors. As a child I read ‘Oliver Twist’ and ‘A Christmas Carol’ at the same time as I was also exposed to tales from my paternal grandparents respective pasts. Reclusive and possessed of a ‘no contact’ policy towards the modern world, their stories were full of Victorian darkness; of poverty, of premature death and of long and arduous working days and nights. Because of them I believe I was kind of pre-programmed to enjoy the Dickensian world.

As well as the plots and the characters probably the most startling thing to me as a kid about Dickens were the names of his characters. Weird but always appropriate to the person in question, even now I delight in the beauty of handles like Uriah Heep, Mrs Gamp, Wackford Squeers, Mr Wopsle, Martin Chuzzlewit, Lady Dedlock, Betsy Trotwood and Mr Fezziwig. It is said that Dickens, on his many, many long walks around London and Kent would select names that he liked from gravestones. To my mind he clearly had a very good eye for the odd and the attention grabbing. But then Dickens was no slouch when it came to the great game of self promotion. When his career took off he became the biggest and brightest kid on the Victorian literature block. Personally I think that the fantastical names that he used for his characters only served to endear his work to the public still further.

Names are important. They can also be a bloody pain in the bum when people have ‘issues’ with them. I refer here, specifically, to the Turkish names that I use in my Çetin İkmen books. Now I accept that if one is unfamiliar with Turkey and Turkish this can be a bit of a challenge. Some people point at names like Farsakoğlu and Ardiç and just ask ‘how do you say that?’ They also, sometimes, go on to tell me that ‘the names’ can on occasion mar their enjoyment of my books. This is worrying, saddens me and is also a tad strange, in my opinion.

The biggest movement in crime fiction at the moment is the so called ‘Scandinavian Crime Wave.’ Thanks to the likes of Steig Larsson and Henning Mankell crimes set in countries like Sweden, Iceland, Norway and Finland are enjoying huge and very understandable popularity. Personally I would of course rather a Turkish Crime Tsunami hit the genre but that doesn’t seem to be on the cards just yet partly, I have been told, because of ‘the names’.

Now this strikes me as odd.

Just in the articles in this blog over the last week a slew of Scandinavian names have been bandied about with very casual confidence. Some of course, like Steig Larsson are so familiar that even as yet undiscovered tribes in the Amazon Basin can say them without getting them wrong. But what about Maj Sjowall, Solrun Gisladottir and Per Wahloo? I can have a go at pronouncing them but if I’m honest, I don’t really know how to do it and, when I’m reading the names silently, I just sort of make a humming noise in my mind. As a youngster reading the great Russian novels of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky I used to do much the same with the characters’ seemingly endless and often inscrutable patronymics. The ‘names’ do not and never have put me off any book whose characters I have loved and whose plot I have thrilled to. So what’s the problem with my Turkish names?

I have a dark and awful fear that my books are not as well received as the Scandinavian Crime Wave, because people have some sort of weird prejudice about the place. Or maybe it’s me? Maybe I’m crap and people don’t want to say so and so they get around it by blaming the Turkish names? When they handed out self esteem I was the last one in the queue and so there’s no point asking me. But if it really is the names that is putting people off then I can heartily recommend my humming method or, possibly, even some sort of substitution. So maybe Ayşe Farsakoğlu can become Lady Dedlock, Commissioner Ardiç, Wackford Squeers. It’s just a thought.

There’s a big nugget of truth in Doctor Johnson’s axiom that ‘no man but a blockhead ever wrote, other than for money’.

On the other hand, I have a couple of yellowing quotes pinned to the wall above the table that my battle-scarred laptop occupies. Both are from George Orwell, and this is the other one: ‘All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a bout of some painful illness.’

A chance remark set me thinking and I’m not even sure where I heard it. It was along the lines that it was terribly saddening to realize that writers don’t write for the love of it, but for money, and that when crime writers (and presumably, authors of bodice-rippers, literary fiction writers, purveyors of erotica and those who produce novels or ‘autobiographies’ with celebrity names on the covers) congregate around the bar the talk is not of elegant plot twists, neat turns of the screw, stoking the fires of tension – instead it’s all about money. The conversation is of sales figures, the iniquities of Amazon, the myriad shortcomings of publishers, the toil of trying to chisel a few extra quid out of the publisher’s accounts department (who keep the company chequebook presumably in a coal cellar deep beneath their offices, locked, barred and clearly marked ‘Nuclear Waste – Do Not Open Before 2068’).

Saying that, it should be remembered that these are fiction writers, people who make stuff up for a living, so maybe not every word should be treated as the unvarnished truth.

But it’s the same anywhere with any profession. Trawlermen may talk about big trips and bad weather when they encounter each other ashore, but the talk invariably swings back to the lousy markets and the merchants who screw down the fish prices at auction. As a journalist, I found that other hacks talk about editors who parcel out a publisher’s money as if it were their own – but carefully keep it to themselves if they can tap into the favours of a generous features editor.

What was striking was the assumption that writers are something different from ordinary people. It’s a poorly-kept secret, but writers generally are ordinary people, well, for the most part, anyway. That’s if you count making (or trying to make) a living out of sitting in a room on your own with a word processor for hours on end and swearing a lot, while alternating this with staring into space while the kettle boils yet again.

So why do writers write? If the truth be told, most of us don’t do it purely for the money. If it was only about the cash, most of us would be writing copy for advertising agencies, or have retrained as plumbers. If it was just the money that was important, I’d have stayed on the trawlers.

The reality is that relatively few writers are able to make a full-time living out of it. It’s a not generally known fact, but you have to shift books by the ton to make a modest living. Those happy few who do sell by the ton are in the minority. A startlingly small percentage are able to earn a living from their book sales alone, while the majority have a ‘proper’ job of some kind that pays the gas bill, feeds the kids, buys cat food, etc. I think we’ve established that most of us don’t do it for the money alone. I’m sure that even Stephen King and Dan Brown didn’t think to themselves ‘I’ll write a bestseller and start coining it in a few years’ as they started out.

Writing tends to be a highly personal business. We do this alone, most of us. The money side of it is something that we all have in common, so when colleagues in the same field meet over a beer to three, guess what they talk about? You guessed it.

Working in an obscure backwater of journalism does push one towards the Doctor Johnson end of the scale, and it’s important to keep a sense of proportion in that kind of environment. The robust attitude that the editor can do what he or she likes with copy as long as it’s been paid for is far from being unhealthy, and somewhere between George Orwell and Samuel Johnson lies the truth of it. Most of us are driven in one way or another to do this, and while it’s not the shekels piling up that are generally the impetus to embark on it, it’s crucial to keeping it going.

I guess that for most of us what it comes down to is that writers write because we get a huge kick out of it, because we are driven to it, or else because we either can’t do anything else or have forgotten the skills that kept us employed in the distant past. I know which category I fall into, but I’m not telling… But we sell stories to live, and there’s some clear ground there between the two, whatever you might think if you happen to overhear a couple of impoverished crime writers in a bar somewhere bemoaning their lot.

Crime stories are both universal and local. A murder in New York, Vancouver, London or Bangkok is universally seen as a crime, one deserving of punishment of the wrongdoer and assistance to the family of the victim. In reality, we tend to focus on the crime that is on our doorstep. Murders close to home cause people to sit up and pay attention. This is especially true if the victim has any kind of public profile, the murder is bizarre, or the relationship between the killer and victim unusual.

The success of a crime fiction novel is connected with the ability of the author to convey the internal life of the characters—their thoughts, fears, doubts, and desires—and to convincingly show how the relationship between the characters can spiral into the death of one character at the hands of another.

In the world of noir fiction, murders are a natural outcome of an overarching political and social system that itself tolerates, justifies or condones certain murders. Law enforcement institutions designed to protect security and safety breakdown inside the noir world. The wrong person is convicted of a crime. Or the killer gets away with murder.

Where does a writer look for ideas and inspiration when writing about crime?

This is where research comes into planning a book. The Internet is your friend in tracking down crime stories. One site that is an example of the kind of material you can find is Violent Crime News.

The mission of this blog is to establish the importance of authenticity in crime fiction. Getting the facts right matters. If that were the only issue, then writing crime fiction would be a snap. The art of the novel is to take the authentic and find a way to tell a compelling, emotionally satisfying and memorable story. In crime fiction that often starts with a murder.

For a crime writer and reader, not all murders work well as a novel. There are three categories of murder that produce a lot of contemporary fiction.

Domestic murder, sex related murder and professional murderers are common  in crime fiction. Below are examples of cases available to anyone with an Internet connection.

The Domestic murder

A husband kills his wife, or the wife kills the husband. A parent kills a child, or a child kills a parent. Families are a place of potential violence. A death row inmate appeals for clemency on the grounds a stranger set the fire that killed his three-year-old son.  A woman is accused of killing her newborn twins and hiding the bodies in the boot of her car.  Or the thirteen year who shoots and kills his father.

A large percentage of murders fall within this category. The domestic murder is also a staple of crime fiction.

Sex Related Murder

When the murder has a sex angle that attracts a great deal of attention. When the police investigate into the violent death of prostitutes, the news especially if it is an old, ongoing case and new technology leads to a break through. Here’s an example from Vancouver

By Jeff Nagel – The Tri-City News Published: January 30, 2012 5:00 PM Police so strongly suspected Robert Pickton might be killing prostitutes in the late 1990s they tried using infrared photography on the hunch he had an underground dungeon beneath the Port Coquitlam farm.

Authorities believe that Pickton was responsible for dozens of killings in British Columbia. He was convicted on six counts of second-degree murder and was sentenced to life imprisonment with no chance of parole for 25 years.

Adding murder and sex is a surefire way to attract attention as a crime writer.

Murder by Professional Criminals

Professional criminals are a staple of crime fiction. Richard Stark’s Parker series is a good example. The crime news follows the fate of hitmen and mafia snitches and there is a considerable audience for such news. Ever since the Godfather movies and books, crime readers have supported this genre.

Here are a couple of examples of the kind of real life cases that work their way into fiction (sooner or later). Professional criminals also move inside a subculture that attracts curiosity not only among law enforcement professionals but by ordinary citizens whose ordinary day-to-day lives, by comparison, lacks the edge, danger and risk.

In New York a mobster turned and testified against a mob boss and escaped a life sentence for a couple of murder. He was sentenced to ten years for bringing down the big guy.  The Today Show reported:

“A former New York mobster who turned against the Mafia and helped convict Vincent “Vinny Gorgeous” Basciano, then acting boss of the Bonanno crime family, was sentenced to 10 years in prison on Monday despite being involved in multiple murders.”

AP carried a story about a hitman with a consciousness and heart of gold. His testimony is about to spring an accused who despite being blind in one eye and suffering from a learning disability from going to prison for a murder that he didn’t commit (though he confessed to it).

“A Detroit hitman in prison for eight murders said he’s willing to publicly take responsibility for four more to help clear a young man who claims he’s innocent of the slayings and confessed at age 14 only to satisfy police.

Vincent Smothers’ testimony would be the most crucial evidence yet to try to persuade a judge to throw out Davontae Sanford’s guilty plea and free him from a nearly 40-year prison sentence. In an interview with The Associated Press, Smothers declared: “He’s not guilty. He didn’t do it.”

Smothers said he never used a 14-year-old accomplice – blind in one eye and learning disabled – to carry out his paid hits, mostly victims tied to Detroit’s drug trade. Ironically, there’s no dispute that Smothers confessed to the so-called Runyon Street slayings when he was captured in 2008, but prosecutors have never charged him and never explained why.”

The lesson for a crime author is to keep an eye out for violent crimes wherever they occur. What happens in real life is often much stranger than fiction. At the same time, there is a lot to be learned from the profile of the killer, the victims, the cops, prosecutors, defense counsel and judges in such cases. And of course the use of the latest technology alongside some of the medieval techniques that produce convictions.

Any writer knows that things can go wrong sometimes. Characters start to get wooden. Scenes won’t come alive. But the slipperiest dilemma of all –– because it’s the one least likely to be obvious when you’re re-reading the manuscript –– is when certain words turn out to have unintended consequences.

A fine example of this cropped up just now as I was reading “The Defector,” an excellent spy novel by Daniel Silva. Silva is describing the people who work in the Mossad’s Special Ops department: “Its operatives were executioners and kidnappers; buggers and blackmailers; men of intellect and ingenuity…”

Now it could be that Silva paired the word to which –– as I’m sure you’ve guessed –– I refer with “blackmailers” for a reason. Perhaps the dark arts of the Mossad, whose main office is a modest drive from where I live (though unmarked on maps, of course), include buggering people and then blackmailing them. They’re known to have used female agents as a “honey trap,” after all. Why not add to their repertoire the “chocolate come-on”? Or the “bronze bait”?

More likely, I’d concede, is that bugging someone qualifies one, in spy parlance, as a bugger. And I’d certainly agree that maybe this jumped off the page only because of the little bit of Benny Hill that lives on in me…

But it highlighted to me how a writer can be ambushed by words in many different ways.

Needless to add, for those who know Silva’s work, it didn’t put me off “The Defector,” which is a superb example of classy writing and thrilling pace.

–
The wait for a successor to Amadeus is over.  MOZART’S LAST ARIA by Matt Rees www.mattrees.net
www.themanoftwistsandturns.com

That’s right. I said it out loud. Larsson is dead, and I’m sorry to be the bearer of such unsettling news, but he’s not coming back. Despite being anointed the literary Son of God by the media. Despite article after article predicting who will be the next Stieg Larson, he’s dead. He died, and the requisite three days and resurrection have long since come and gone, so apparently he won’t rise from the dead. Or if he did, he’s keeping mum about it. My cat, Sulo, was born around the time that Larsson died. Maybe Sulo, a foundling but presumably of Nordic origin, is the reincarnation of Stieg Larsson, unable to reveal himself because of a lack of prehensile digits that render him incapable of holding a pen or typing. It’s possible, but I doubt it.

Day after day after mindless day, critics, reviewers and journalists tout yet another Nordic writer as the next Stieg Larsson. I myself have been compared to Steig Larsson dozens if not hundreds of times. Our work has little in common. I don’t mind though, it helps me sell books and earn a living.

As nearly as I can tell, every inhabitant of the Nordic region able to string enough words together to form a coherent sentence is a potential next Stieg Larsson. Some months ago, I read a quote in a Finnish newspaper, discussing Purge (Puhdistus) citing a British newspaper extolling Sofi Oksanen as the next Stieg Larsson, and referring to Oksanen as a ‘crime writer.’ I quote neither the original publication nor the writer in question, because I can’t make myself believe that anyone could make such a moronic mistake, and the British newspaper is unavailable on the internet without a subscription, so I couldn’t check this fact for myself.

Still, either the author of the piece or its translator apparently misunderstands the meaning of crime fiction. I will enlighten. Crime fiction is a genre that explores crimes and their detection, criminals and their motives. I’m a crime writer by profession and so fairly certain about this. The aforementioned author writes mainstream literary fiction, and is extremely talented, but no more a crime writer than I am the author of Harlequin romances. Or could it be, just possibly be, that the writer of the original article knows what crime fiction is, but didn’t know that Oksanen isn’t a crime writer because the journalist in question hasn’t read a single word of her work? That the journalist just wanted to spew out the name, Stieg Larsson, in the hopes that it would sell more newspapers? Nah, now I’m just being silly.

Please don’t conclude from this essay that I don’t like Stieg Larsson’s novels. I think they’re too fat and under-edited, but I enjoyed his first two books, haven’t read the last one yet. And further, I think society owes a collective debt to Stieg Larsson. Once in a great while, a writer comes along who sparks the popular imagination: Larsson, J.K. Rowling, Dan Brown. Whether you like their books or not, their tremendous popularity encourages people to read, and many people have discovered the joys of reading because of them. In today’s world of fractured attention spans and the plethora of entertainments to choose from (and reading is one of the few common entertainments of our time that makes you smarter, not dumber), that’s no easy trick. Still, Larsson is gone, there will be no next Larsson, nor should there be. His body of work was unique, and what the world needs is new and unique voices to spirit us away.

This constant harping about who will be the next Larsson is simply an exploitation of his name, in a way I feel demeaning to his memory, and repeating Larsson’s name over and over again like a printed mantra in the belief that it will sell more papers is insulting to the reading public.

Journalists, critics, reviewers, I’m pleading with you. Stop this madness and move on before I cut my own throat out of ennui. Find fresh voices, new ideas, authors that expose the world to us in a way we’ve never before encountered. I think Stieg Larsson might have wanted it that way.

In a few closing words on the subject, let me say only this, in the hopes of getting a few more web hits and reposts: Stieg Larsson, Stieg Larsson, Stieg Larsson, Stieg Larsson, Stieg Larsson, Stieg Larsson, Stieg Larsson, Stieg Larsson, Stieg Larsson, Stieg Larsson, Stieg Larsson, Stieg Larsson, Stieg Larsson, Stieg Larsson, Stieg Larsson, Stieg Larsson, Stieg Larsson, Stieg Larsson, Stieg Larsson, Stieg Larsson, Stieg Larsson, Stieg Larsson.

Get it now? Annoying, isn’t it?

Some Thoughts on the Scandinavian Crime Wave

I didn’t know I was a Scandinavian Crime Wave writer until Snow Angels came out internationally, and a number of reviewers said that I am one. Here in Finland, despite my nationality, I’m often considered a domestic writer, and obviously I write noir, but I never gave my placement as a writer much thought beyond that. Probably because I’ve never cared about it, I just want to write good stories. It didn’t really sink in until I was in a bookstore in Barcelona, and saw Snow Angels (in Spanish: (Ángeles en la Nieve) placed alongside works by Stieg Larsson, Henning Mankell, Karin Fossum, etc. Some reviews have said that I’m clearly influenced by the work of Arnaldur Indriðason. Sorry, never read any. I guess now I will though. Reviewers also sometimes inform that I’m influenced by Ian Rankin. I had never read any of his books either, so I picked one up (good stuff), and I see where they got that idea, but wrong. Sorry, I’m digressing…the point is I’m part of a literary movement, some might even call it a genre, and didn’t even know it until I was told so.

So what is the Scandinavian Crime Wave, where did it come from, and why is it so popular?

First, I’m not a huge fan of the genre myself, and the reason is obvious. I’ve lived for well over a decade in a Nordic country, and so unlike most international readers, authors exposing this part of the world and its way of life are telling me things I already know. Second, the protagonists in the genre tend to be middle-aged, divorced men, sick of their jobs and have drinking problems. They’re depressed, their kids don’t like them, etc., and I’m bored with the stereotype at this point. Which isn’t to say I don’t like some Nordic crime writing. I do. I enjoy Larsson, Mankell (I’m using these names in particular because most readers of this article will likely be familiar with them, so let’s stick with them), and some others, it’s just that my tastes are more eclectic.

Larsson, to the casual observer, because of his overwhelming popularity, might be considered the father of the genre, which is a mistake, but more about that later. He was a good writer, but I have some mild criticisms. I haven’t read The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest yet, but by the end of The Girl who Played With Fire, he had set Lisbeth Salander up as a kind of dysfunctional waif superhero. She has a photographic memory, and the implication and setup for the last book seems to be that she has Asperger’s Syndrome, which is supposed to explain her sociopathy. Now, I think Salander is a brilliant character, but there are a couple problems here that I’ve never seen commented upon, and they bother me. 1. There is no proof that photographic memory exists. There are people documented as possessing vast powers of memory, but as written for the Salander character, nope, sorry, not buying it. 2. Granted, the symptoms of Asperger’s vary so much from individual to individual that they’re nearly unique, but Salander just doesn’t fit the profile. I researched these topics in-depth for a book released in Finland, Jumalan Nimeen, and I feel confident about these statements. If you disagree, sit in front of your computer for a few days and read some hundreds of blogs by people with Asperger’s and see if any of their voices remind you of Salander. I know I’m digressing again, but what the hell, it’s my article.

My analysis of the reason behind the success of the Millennium series, in brief: I’ve never heard anyone say the Millennium Trilogy was well written, yet it sold a gazillion copies. As I said, I don’t find Salander a believable character. A pint-sized Superwoman. But here’s the rub. She’s been brutalized as a child and an adult. She’s emotionally damaged beyond words. Her appearance is diminutive and child-like. Everything about her screams victim. But she overcomes all. She finds a way to live life on her own terms and refuses to be a victim. When others try to victimize her, she punishes them in the most vicious ways. The kinds of punishments people dream about when figures in their own lives mistreat them. It sends the message that no matter how cruelly life treats you, you can overcome it and survive, even thrive. I think it’s that message that made the series a success.

But people who do love the Scandinavian Crime Wave genre. Why? Obviously, they’re getting something they lacked from novels by authors from other regions. At least for U.S. and UK readers, I suspect a prime reason is the aforementioned cultural reading experience, but also and more importantly, is that the depth of characterization in the best of Nordic crime fiction is, in my humble opinion, often far superior to that of most crime novels on the bestseller lists by writers from those regions. Yet another difference between Nordic and Anglo crime fiction is the weighting of the crime vs. social commentary in the novels. In Nordic fiction, the crime is often no more important, sometimes of less importance, than the descriptions of the societies in which the stories take place. All this hints to me that the international reading community is bored with cardboard crime novels and demands something more and better.

Mankell is sometimes referred to as the father of Scandinavian crime fiction. Yet his first book, Faceless Killers, in the much acclaimed Wallander series, didn’t appear until 1997. What, in the formation of the Scandinavian Crime Wave, preceded it?

The Scandinavian Crime Wave truly originated with the Martin Beck series, a decalogue written by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö between 1965 and 1975. Although they seem a bit dated by today’s writing standards, I love this series. They feature a great cast of characters and solid crimes. Most notably, in terms of this discussion, is that they contain scathing critiques of Sweden’s social democracy, from a Marxist viewpoint. These critiques sometimes seem to come out of nowhere, delivered by an omniscient third person narrator, and this technique, to me, carries with it an almost Victorian feel, hence my comment about dated writing. However, these small tirades are often delivered with humor that I think enhances rather than detracts from the writing as a whole.

I read that Larsson’s Millenium trilogy was intended as a decalogue, but he died before he got further along in it, which makes me tend to think that, at least to some extent, the Millenium series was intended as a homage to Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö. I think you would be hard put to find a Nordic crime writer who would disagree with this statement: no Martin Beck series, no Scandinavian Crime Wave as it exists in its current form.

So, who influenced Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö? I read an interview with Mankell, in which he stated that Ed McBain influenced the Martin Beck series. This doesn’t surprise me. I did some minor research to try and find out if Sjöwall and Wahlöö had mentioned their influences, but found nothing. Per Wahlöö died in 1975, but Maj Sjöwall is still with us, so I had a look to see if her contact information was readily available. I thought it would be fun to just e-mail or even call her and ask about this. However, I didn’t find it, and thought that if her contact info is hard to find, she values her privacy and doesn’t want to be bothered.

When I read the Beck series though, I get the distinct impression that it’s heavily influenced by noir and pulp. As well as McBain, I see echoes of Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and even Jim Thompson (not me of course, the guy who wrote The Killer Inside Me, etc.). If I’m correct about this, the Scandinavian Crime Wave of today was in part born in the U.S.A. and took the long way home over the course of the better part of a century. And so, in a sense, the Scandinavian Crime Wave is in part a retro movement. I’ve long considered myself in some ways to be a retro writer, but that’s the topic of another discussion.

Also interesting to me is that the bleak outlook of noir and pulp and their tales of social injustice have often carried with them fascist ideals through the voices of their narrators, but that, in the hands of Sjöwall and Wahlöö, they turned those nihilistic societal worldviews into left-wing arguments, and to good effect. And so in retrospect, their work makes all crime noir seem like socialist propaganda. Does this mean that all these years, I’ve been writing political and crime noir and protagonists with sociopathic tendencies and never knew I was a Communist sympathizer in disguise? Me. A Comsymp. Whodda thunk?

James Thompson

Helsinki, Finland

24.01.2012

James Thompson is an established author in Finland. His novel, Snow Angels, the first in the Inspector Vaara series, was released in the U.S. by Putnam and marked his entrance into the international crime fiction scene. Booklist named it one of the ten best debut crime novels of 2010, and it was nominated for the Edgar, Anthony, and Strand Critics awards. His second Vaara novel, Lucifer’s Tears, earned starred reviews from all quarters and was chosen by Kirkus Reviews as one of the twenty-five best novels of 2011. The third in the series, Helsinki White, will be released in March, 2012.

www.jamesthompsonauthor.com

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I am currently lusting after a book called ‘You can’t read this book’ by the left leaning journalist, Nick Cohen. I haven’t actually read it yet myself and so I can’t vouch for how brilliant or otherwise, it might be. But I have read some reviews which were promising.

Cohen’s thesis is that liberal voices, not just in the UK, but all over the world are being silenced by people who are threatening and scary and who, in many cases, have government support behind them. We’re talking about big business, celebrities of all stripes and religious groups. Criticise this lot or even express your personal opinion about anything that may only marginally impinge on their world and you’ll find yourself in trouble.

In the case of big business your ‘punishment’ will generally be fiscal, ditto in the wonderful world of celebrity. Criticise these people and you will be threatened with financial ruin, branded a liar (you will later be proved right but by that time you’ll be in a homeless shelter and so no-one will give a shit) and maybe even sent to prison. But then it was ever thus with big business and celebrities, so no surprises there. The same applies, as far as I’m concerned, to religion and in recent years that seems to have made quite a bit of a comeback in the getting offended and going nuts stakes. In the wonderful world of religion it isn’t just your money that can be at stake. It can be your life.

What I can never really understand, and maybe someone out there can help me with this, is why religious folk get so exercised about people saying negative things about God and/or adhering to alternative views they do not hold. God being all powerful and all seeing can probably take care of any abusers Himself. Personally, and speaking as an avowed wishy washy agnostic here, I think that God is very tolerant. A clue to this can be found in the lack of celestial thunderbolts landing on Richard Dawkins head. As for alternative views, why, religious people, are you so threatened by them? If you are right and I am wrong then surely you should sit about being smug and leave me to my fiery, hellish fate? It is after all me and not you who is going to get a red hot trident up my bum – so why don’t you leave me alone to just get on with that? Why do you feel the need to torture and then kill me for my views? Have we learned nothing from the abomination that was the Holy Inquisition?

However what is even weirder and probably more disturbing than all that is the strange case of Dr Simon Singh. Dr Singh is a UK academic and journalist who, a few years ago, gave it as his opinion that certain alternative medical practices were not proven according to scientific principles. Dr Singh is a scientist himself and so he works to certain standards he did not see reflected in these therapies. He had the audacity, in other words, to tell it like he saw it.

The next thing Dr Singh found was that he was being sued by the British Chiropractic Association. He had apparently defamed them by expressing his personal opinion and he went on to face two years of litigation. Thankfully the Chiropractic Association eventually dropped the case and settled out of court (www.guardian.co.uk/…/simon-singh-libel-case-dropped). By his own admission Dr Singh is well off and so the money he poured into his own defence was not an issue, but two years of his life were. And what if someone with very little money had brought the case? What then?

Then they would have lost because they would have to have folded and the British Chiropractic Association would have effectively gagged any nascent opinion expressers for ever more. One should expect more from an organisation which promotes itself as socially useful, kindly and caring. But then I blame the heavyweights for this. Why not, if big business, celebrities and religion can apply gags to people, can’t alternative medicine do it too? Clearly there is no reason, but that doesn’t make it right. If we can’t say what we think because we’re afraid that someone might ruin or even kill us, what kind of freedom do we have?

A bit of a shabby ghost of one, in my opinion.

It’s never happened before. The debate on whether or not to impeach Iceland’s former Prime Minister rumbles on. Geir Haarde was the man supposedly at the helm of government during Iceland’s banking crisis in 2008, and is now awaiting trial on charges of incompetence. It’s a development that’s almost reminiscent of a post-revolutionary third-world state, or maybe Berlusconi’s madcap Italy rather than a staid Nordic democracy.

Opinions are all over the place, as always, and it’s far from certain that the former PM will ever get to court. Many Icelanders believe that it shouldn’t be happening at all. What is strange is that Geir Haarde is up there on his own, and many believe that ministers of finance, foreign affairs, and business affairs who could have been indicted at the same time should be up there with him.

The comment made by British Tory MP Julian Critchley that Margaret Thatcher was the label on the can of worms could be applied easily to Geir Haarde, and the process threatens to pillory the man on his own while others who undoubtedly have questions to answer have been allowed to move on.

It is a bizarre move to indict one single person, as the roots of Iceland’s present  unhappy situation extend so much further back, possibly a decade or more to the shady deals done when Iceland’s three main largely state-owned banks were privatised and handed over to the party faithful. Landsbankinn went to friends of the Independence party, while Kaupthing was handed on a plate to deserving Progressive Party supporters.

Ingibjörg Sólrún Gísladóttir, Minister for Foreign Affairs at the time of the crash, is now serving with UN Women in Afghanistan. Former Minister for Business Affairs Björgvin Sigurdsson is still in Parliament although no longer a minister, while former Finance Minister Árni Mathíesen briefly went back to his former profession as a vet before being discreetly shuffled out of the country to a plum job in Rome with the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation.

There is a distinct feeling in some quarters that these three should be called to account alongside Geir Haarde. All four of them must have had an inkling as 2008 progressed that something was seriously wrong at Kaupthing, Landsbankinn and Glitnir. The rest of the country knew something wasn’t right, even if they didn’t now what it was. If the foursome didn’t at least suspect something, they certainly should have done. It’s virtually inconceivable that these senior figures, including the man supposedly in charge of the nation’s money, genuinely had no idea what was happening right under their noses.

On the other hand, there’s also the real possibility that all four were painfully aware that a disaster was about to happen, but also knew perfectly well that by 2008 it was too late to avert it. The banks had outgrown themselves and were headed for the rocks with no chance of changing course.

The likeliest outcome is that none of them will be called to account. The conservative Independence Party, of which Geir Haarde is a perfect, polished product, is lobbying hard for the impeachment process to be rescinded and the outcome could go either way. But for the moment Parliament is locked into the undignified process of voting on whether or not to level charges against one of its own former senior members, practically to the exclusion of other business that plenty of average citizens would undoubtedly say deserves more urgent attention.

The issue has spread far beyond the Independence Party and the move to withdraw the impeachment has supporters across the parties – including among the far left end of the spectrum. The net result is likely to give the Social Democrats and the Left-Greens yet another opportunity to rip themselves to shreds and batter their own credibility as the opposition waits in the wings.

A cynical observer would say that when the IP is back in power after the next elections, as it undoubtedly will be as part of whatever ramshackle coalition is eventually formed, the issue of what to do with Geir Haarde will be discreetly shelved.

The conservatives don’t want to see charges brought against one of its own, any more than the Social Democrats would want to see their people hauled up before a grim-faced court of enquiry looking for answers to uncomfortable questions. It’s understandable, and more layers of complexity are added as serving MPs would presumably be called to give evidence, as well as plenty of others who were part of the circus at the time – and who knows what other guilty secrets the process could haul out into the light of day?

Sometimes a novel is ahead of its time, seeming to write about events that predict the future. In Philip K. Dick’s Minority Report, the idea of precognition allows the police to know in advance about future criminal activity and to stop it before it happens.

The future is that strange, unknowable terrain over the horizon. In the mind’s eye, we speculate on what awaits us on the other side of the present. But speculation is not the same as what actually will transpire. Novelists also speculate about the future. Sometimes they predict the general pattern of what the future will bring; other times they strike gold by predicting an actual event.

From our vantage point in the present, we can read books that appear to predict what will happen.  A large number of speculative books about the future fall into the category of science fiction. Jules Verne predicted moon shots from Florida. That sounds impressive until you remember that Jules Verne’s launch vehicle was an astronaut shot from a cannon.

Arthur C. Clark foresaw satellite communication systems. George Orwell’s 1984 predicted a future of surveillance cameras, newspeak, perpetual hate campaigns. William Gibson’s Neuromancer anticipated cyberspace and virtual reality. H.G. Wells predicted the importance of planes in warfare, bombing raids by planes, and the atom bomb.

Morgan Robertson’s Futility was a book written fourteen years before the maiden voyage of the RMS Titanic, about a ship called Titan that hit an iceberg on the starboard side and sank in the Atlantic Ocean. The sinking was in April. In other words, many of the details in Robertson’s novel tracked the actual details surrounding the sinking of the Titanic.

William Gibson’s take on predicting the future is clear: he can’t. No one can. If he possessed such precognition, Gibson says, he would have written about Facebook, incorporating it into one of his novels years before it came into being.

Science fiction and crime novels can overlap. Philip K. Dick’s Minority Report, where three mutants can predict future criminal activity, is an example. In Minority Report, precognition creates paradoxes. A cop receives precognition about murdering a person he’s never met. If precognition of crime is a possibility, then our notion of free will need to undergo a major transformation.

In Michel Houellebecq’s The Platform, there is a terrorist bombing in Phuket in which two hundred people are killed. After the novel was published to great acclaim, the Bali terrorist bombing killed over two hundred people.

In my recently released novel, The Wisdom of Beer, there is a warehouse heist. The warehouse is filled with weapons destined for terrorists groups. Last week, when The Wisdom of Beer appeared in bookstores in Thailand, the police uncovered a rental premise filled with materials for bombs and the theory of the police is that those materials were being readied for export to possible terrorists organizations outside of Thailand.

Does that mean Michel Houellebecq in The Platform and my The Wisdom of Beer predicted the future? In reality, neither novel predicts the actual place but does come close to predicting the nature of the occurrence of the criminal activity.

Novelists share with the police and others in the law enforcement system an ability to reason based on probability analysis. Predicting the dangerous is about assessing the probability of people, ideologies, politics and opportunities collating over time to create an incident. The future of dangerousness is less crystal ball-gazing than statistical analysis of vast amounts of data, cultural and historical trends, and personalities.

What novelists often do is employ pattern recognition to a vast amount of information, taking into account trends, prior cases, and probabilities. We take the temperature of the body politic and look at whether the patient has a fever and then make a case as to the possible outcome. Modern crime novelists are cultural profilers. We mine the source material and our own experiences in order to create narratives that are plausible outcomes for the reader. To the extent that the profiling works, it seems that we have predicted the future. But, in fact, we have gauged the probability of events correctly. No magic. No voodoo. No precognition. Just an ability to combine ingredients from the past and to present those elements and bake the cake we subsequently recognize as the future.