Scandinavian Crime Fiction and the Facts: Social Criticism, Epistemology, and Globalization

Abstract

Rather than celebrating the success of Scandinavian crime writers as evidence of the continuing global spread of crime fiction, Nestingen’s focus is to examine how crime, and the investigation of crime, has been narrativized in contemporary Scandinavian crime fiction, and what the implications of this might be. Nestingen argues that Stieg Larsson’s “Millennium” novels in general, and the figure of Lisbeth Salander, in particular, enact a new form of investigation based on positivist assumptions—a move that needs to be understood as a response to the conditions of neoliberal globalization and the orthodoxies of the free market, and as a rejoinder to the socially conscious crime fiction of Mankell, and Sjöwall and Wahlöö. The use of epistemological questions and problems, to give voice to social criticism, remains an enduring feature of Scandinavian crime fiction, but Nestingen argues that authors like Larsson frame such questions specifically to address the challenges of globalization and the state’s role in it, and to emphasize moral issues over explicitly political ones. This allows Nestingen to construct a new genealogy of Scandinavian crime fiction that is characterized more by disruption and discontinuity than by seamlessly integrating all writers into the same mode of narration and tradition.