Malmö is Sweden’s third largest city and the sixth largest Nordic conurbation, but also Sweden’s fastest growing city right now, partly due to immigration and its bustling port city atmosphere. And host city to Eurovision 2024 (I know this doesn’t mean much to American readers!). Malmö serves as a primary entry point for the majority of migrants heading to Sweden and the population could hit half a million in the next ten years. So, of course, a locale for the phenomenon of Scandi Noir given that Malmö has some rough and poor districts, some issues around migration and crime and, as ever with a port city, some shady types about. So where can we find Malmö in crime fiction?
Let’s start with the biggest and most successful crime novel series to be set in Malmö – The Malmö Mysteries, a nine book series featuring Inspector Anita Sundström written by regular visitor to the city, Torquil MacLeod (who, as his name might suggest, is originally from Scotland). The series starts with Meet Me In Malmö (2015). A British journalist is invited to Malmö to interview an old university friend who is now one of Sweden’s leading film directors. When he discovers the directors glamorous film star wife dead in her apartment, the Skåne County Police (the regional police for Malmö) are called in to solve the high-profile case. Among the investigating team is Inspector Anita Sundström, of the Criminal Investigation Squad, who soon finds the list of suspects growing.
In subsequent books Inspector Sundström deals with many of the issues seen as key to understanding Malmö – a gunman loose in Malmö and targeting immigrants, a woman stabbed to death while jogging in Malmö’s main park, murders on the Malmö to Ystad train, dead entrepreneurs. Interestingly Mourning in Malmö (2019), book seven in the series, harks back to the the birth of an independent Estonia and also the 1994 MS Estonia ferry disaster (the ship sunk en route from Tallin to Stockholm).
Another Malmö-set series comes from another Scottish author, Alexander McCall Smith (of The No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency fame) and it’s rather different – the Detective Varg series. In the Swedish criminal justice system (supposedly), certain cases are considered especially strange and difficult. In Malmö the dedicated detectives who investigate these crimes are members of an elite squad known as The Sensitive Crimes Division. It’s a four-book series that starts with The Department of Sensitive Crimes (2019). A man is stabbed in the back of the knee, then a young woman’s imaginary boyfriend goes missing. Call in the Sensitive Crimes team – Ulf “the Wolf” Varg, the top dog, thoughtful and diligent; Anna Bengsdotter, who’s in love with Varg’s car (and possibly Varg too); Carl Holgersson, who likes nothing more than filling out paperwork; and Erik Nykvist, who is deeply committed to fly fishing. The novels are often funny, weird and strangely compelling, as readers of McCall Smith’s other books will recognise, and all laced with a certain Swedish, perhaps peculiarly Malmö-esque – Nordic oddness.
The series continues with The Talented Mr Varg (2020 and a hat tip to Patricia Highsmith there!) with the team on the trail of a notorious philanderer and a group of dealers exporting wolves. The Man with the Silver Saab (2021) – once Sweden’s coolest auto exports – dives into the art scene in Malmö. Finally The Discreet Charm of the Big Bad Wolf (2023) sees the Department of Sensitive Crimes downsizing and the team bickering and fighting for their jobs. Still there are sensitive crimes to be solved – very Malmö crimes – a man’s cabin has mysteriously disappeared and Ulf is tasked with finding out what happened. And a potentially promising veterinary treatment for deafness in dogs. See what I mean? Slightly weird, funny and very Swedish.
Anders de la Motte and his novel, The Mountain King (2024). Detective Leonore Asker seems to have a great, but slightly odd, job at Malmö’s Major Crime Division investigating high profile kidnapping cases in the so-called Department of Lost Souls – a unit for odd, cold cases banished to the basement of Malmö’s police station. Someone is secretly placing small ominous figures in a huge model train displays and one of the figures seems to represent the missing woman from a recent kidnapping case. As Leonore Asker’s investigation leads her into the world of the abandoned and forgotten, she reaches out to her old friend and urban explorer Martin Hill. It is expected that this will be the first in a series featuring Detective Leonore Asker and the Department of Lost Souls. BTW: I don’t know if anyone ever transferred from the Department of Lost Souls to the Sensitive Cases Division!).
Though not mostly set in the city the popular Martin Beck series of novels by Swedish husband and wife team Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö has several that take place in Malmö (though Beck is chief of the National Murder Squad in Stockholm). For instance the sixth novel in the series, Murder at the Savoy (2009) opens when Viktor Palmgren, a powerful Swedish industrialist is shot during his after-dinner speech in the luxurious Hotel Savoy in Malmö. No one in the restaurant can identify the gunman, and local police are baffled so Beck is called in to take over the scene and quickly picks through Palmgren’s background.
And finally, as we are in Malmö we should perhaps make mention of Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallander, who works in the town of Ystad, 35 miles south-east of the city of Malmö. Wallander has of course been a massive success with eleven novels by Mankell, Swedish and British TV adaptation (the latter with Kenneth Branagh in Ystad but speaking English) and legions of fans. Mankell’s series starts with Faceless Killers (1991), which won the prestigious Glass Key award for Nordic crime writers. Inside an almost isolated Skåne (the region of southern Sweden that includes Malmö) farmhouse an old man, Johannes Lövgren, is tortured to death and his wife Maria savagely beaten and left for dead with a noose around her neck. Inspector Kurt Wallander, a 42-year-old Ystad police detective, is put on the case with his team: Rydberg, an aging detective with rheumatism; Martinsson, a 29-year-old rookie; Naslund, a thirty-year veteran; Svedberg, a balding, forty-something-year-old detective; Hansson and Peters And so starts Wallander’s literary career. A dozen or so Wallander novels followed becoming a worldwide sensation and putting Ystad, Skåne and Malmö on the crime writing map.
