Out of Place: Geographical Fiction(s) in Håkan Nesser’s Inspector Van Veeteren Series

Abstract

In his review of the 2008 BBC production of ‘Wallander’, based on Henning Mankell’s 1995 crime novel ‘Villospår’ (‘Sidetracked’), Paul Hoggart proposes that ‘[i]f you want to get under the skin of a foreign culture, skip the guided tours of cathedrals and art galleries, and read its crime thrillers’. Which culture is it then, one wonders, that reveals itself through a reading of Håkan Nesser’s Inspector Van Veeteren series? Unlike Mankell’s Wallander, who generally operates within the greater Ystad area in southern Sweden, Van Veeteren lives and works in a geographically unspecific location somewhere in Northern Europe, coded with place names reminiscent mainly of Flanders and The Netherlands but also incorporating references in the form of personal names and geographical denotations that could best be described as pan-European. Whereas the specificity of place is integral to – arguably even the defining characteristic of – the crime novels of Swedish writers such as Mankell, Sjöwall-Wahlöö, Liza Marklund and others, Nesser invents the fictional town of Maardam and its surroundings for the settings of his Van Veeteren stories. Where Nesser’s stated aim in locating his novels in fictional settings is a stripping of geographical connotation in order to create possibilities for readers to engage in their own poetic practice of image-creation – one neither based on nor burdened by geographical knowledge or accuracy, we find some of these readers compelled towards acts of compensatory cartography that reflect a drive to establish an environmental orientation even within geographically indeterminate literary worlds. Nesser speaks of a reading group formed around another of his novels, ‘Kim Novak Never Swam in Genesaret’s Lake’ [‘Kim Novak badade aldrig i Genesarets sjö’], whose members ‘sketched out maps and sent them to me. “Is this what it looks like?” they wondered’. This article explores the ways in which these texts initiate reflection on the nature of the relationship between fictional texts and the ‘real’ world from which they simultaneously emerge and ontologically differ; the function of geographical indeterminacy in Nesser’s crime fiction as a whole; and evaluate the author’s stated claims about precisely what ‘freedoms’ such indeterminacy allows – both from the perspective of an aesthetics of production, as well as for those readers seeking to orient themselves in fictional worlds.