Abstract
Title: Narrative Strategies and Reader Address in Nordic Children's Crime Fiction: LasseMaja and Detektivbyrå nr. 2This article draws on Gerard Genette’s concept of paratext, Mikhail Bakhtin’s discourse on carnival, Ingeborg Mjør’s work on the truth value of iconotexts and Tzvetan Todorov’s typology of detective fiction to analyze the narrative form, character gallery, visual style and paratextual communication of two popular Scandinavian crime fiction series for young readers: Martin Widmark and Helena Willis’ Swedish LasseMaja series and Jørn Lier Horst and Jørgen Sandnes’ Norwegian series about Detektivbyrå nr. 2. The article argues that although both series follow the classical form of the “whodunit”, their address to the child reader markedly differs. While Widmark and Willis’ series establishes a carnevalesque subversion of the child-adult power hierarchy, Horst and Sandnes’ series draws on the rhetoric of non-fiction to establish a more didactic and educational frame of reading that works to maintain adults as powerful due to their “real world” knowledge and know-how.
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