Swedish crime fiction became an international phenomenon in the first decade of the twenty-first century, starting with novels but then percolating through Swedish-language television serials and films into English-language BBC productions and Hollywood remakes. This book looks at the rich history of Nordic noir, examines the appeal of this particular genre, and attempt to reveal why it is distinct from the plethora of other crime fictions.
French crime fiction and the Second World War explores France's preoccupation with memories of the Second World War through an examination of crime fiction, one of popular culture's most enduring literary forms. The study analyses representations of the war years in a selection of French crime novels from the late 1940s to the 2000s. All the crime novels discussed grapple with the challenges of what it means for generations past and present to live in the shadow of the war: from memories of French resistance and collaboration to Jewish persecution and the legacies of the concentration camps. The book argues that crime fiction offers novel ways for charting the two-way traffic between official discourses and popular reconstructions of such a contested conflict in French cultural memory.
3970 Postcolonial Manchester:Layout 1 28/6/13 12:37 Page 110 3 Manchester’s crime fiction: the mystery of the city’s smoking gun Lynne Pearce Greater Manchester is frequently written and spoken about as one of the UK’s top crime hotspots; and many of its districts (Hulme, Moss Side, Wythenshawe, Longsight, Whalley Range) rank high in those league tables used to provide a snapshot of the nation’s most socially and economically deprived areas (Taylor, Evans and Fraser, 1996: 275–9; ).1 It should therefore be no surprize that the fiction genre that has become
3 SPACE AND PLACE As the example from Before the Frost illustrates, Swedish crime fiction emphasises the powerful connection between closed communities and spatial arrangements. This chapter concentrates on the latter factor, exploring how characters and texts negotiate the architecture of social control, disorganisation, and conflict, the neighbourhoods of collective action and communal unrest. At the heart of the chapter, and many works of Swedish crime fiction, is a question about ‘what occurs in settings where the idea of a public or common good has been
collectivism and protectionism 29 Swedish crime fiction from outside intervention. And yet, with the onset of the Second World War, Sweden struggled to assert its favoured stance of neutrality, with resultant senses of anxiety that resonate into the present day. In Sweden, the Swastika and Stalin: The Swedish Experience in the Second World War, John Gilmour provides an intricate account of the social and political complexities rife at this time in the country’s history. Gilmour presents a dual stronghold of separatism as ‘the two histories of wartime Sweden. One covers the
rethinking memory as acts of remembrance defined by social frameworks anchored in the nation-state. He proposes instead a fluid model of memory networks that allow multiple and multi-layered points of contact between past events to resurface. As Rothberg asserts, ‘memory emerges from unexpected, multidirectional encounters – encounters between diverse pasts and a conflictual present, to be sure, but also between different agents or catalysts of memory’.2 In this book, memories of the Second World War have been examined via encounters with crime fiction, a
• 5 • Mobilising memory: reading the Second World War in children’s crime fiction of the 1990s and 2000s The 1990s and 2000s in France saw a number of memorial taboos surrounding the Second World War publicly overturned. The most symbolic of these acts occurred during the speech delivered by newly elected President Jacques Chirac on 16 July 1995 to mark the fifty-third anniversary of the rafle du Vélodrome d’Hiver. For the first time in national history, a French head of state officially acknowledged the active support of the Vichy regime and its agents
• 3 • Resurgent collaboration: revisiting collaboration in French crime fiction of the 1980s French collaboration with the occupier was one of a number of war stories that resurfaced sporadically in the immediate post-war decades in the form of high-profile political and legal affairs.1 Such public airings served to remind people of the reverberations of wartime choices, although collaboration was ever the the shadowy other of dominant resistance narratives shadowy other of dominant resistance narratives of national heroism. Even into the 1970s and early
which divides as much as unites communities of remembrance in contemporary France.2 This study aims to examine the memorial legacies of the Second World War in a cultural arena which has been little studied: crime fiction. For, as this study will contend, crime fiction, as a form of popular culture, constructs narratives of war that exploit connections between war and crime, guilt and responsibility, justice and resolution, all couplings that have marked collective understandings of the war years in France. Historically contingent and highly
INTRODUCTION: A POST-MILLENNIUM PHENOMENON The 2000s saw an explosion of interest in Swedish crime fiction. Between 2008 and 2010, in the UK, digital television station BBC Four hit upon a winning formula of screening double episodes of Swedish detective series.1 First onto the channel came the Swedish Wallander (dir. various, 2005–2010), based on the characters of Henning Mankell’s bestselling novels, the Wallander mysteries.2 A wintry sort of Inspector Morse (dir. various, 1987–2000), Wallander focuses on an eponymous loner detective (played by Krister