Norway has perhaps lagged behind the Swedes and the Danes when it comes to adding to the now gigantic shelf of Scandi-noir. That is, of course, with the exception of the world’s bestselling Osloite (as people from Oslo are called), crime author Jo Nesbø. Oslo is Norway’s capital, where a large chunk of the country’s population resides; and it has long been one of the most expensive cities in the world. Read as much Jo Nesbø as you like but the single largest crime in Oslo is that a Big Mac Meal is US$14! And despite awful domestic terrorist incidents in 2011, Oslo is still considered one of the safest cities in Europe. Like much of the Scandi-noir genre, Oslo crime fiction is largely about being in danger in a very safe place.
Nesbø is the best-known Norwegian in the world. You simply can’t escape his Detective Harry Hole novels—you’ll come across them in bookstores, libraries, charity shops, second hand book stalls and on the shelves of random paperbacks that you peruse in holiday rentals, left by previous guests who didn’t like them quite enough to take home. Nesbø is omnipresent in the crime writing world and long dominant. The Harry Hole phenomenon all began with The Bat (2012), which, while not the first Nesbø novel translated into English, is where his career began. The Bat is actually largely set in Australia, where Nesbø was travelling at the time. Harry, who works for the Norwegian Crime Squad, and later with the National Criminal Investigation Service (Kripos), travels quite a lot in Nesbø books: across Australia, Hong Kong, the Congo, etc.
Since The Bat Nesbó has produced ten Harry Hole novels, sold over 30 million books in total in 40 languages, three million copies in Norway alone (which only has a population of 5.2 million people!) and seen The Snowman (2010) adapted into a so-so Hollywood movie. It’s probably safe to assume that nobody reading this column needs any more introduction to Nesbø or Harry Hole, so let’s move on to other Norwegian crime writers.
Karin Fossum is often referred to as the “Norwegian Queen of Crime.” She started out as a poet but her Inspector Konrad Sejer series of crime novels have sold around the world. There have been thirteen Sejer novels so far with a successful Norwegian TV adaptation. Though he’s an Oslo detective, the Sejer books are predominantly character driven and unfortunately don’t offer much local color. We need to look for writers for a little more flavor of the city.
Derek B. Miller certainly offers more of Oslo. As an American married to a Norwegian and living in Oslo no doubt his own discovery of the city feeds into his books. Miller’s Norwegian by Night was listed as one of the best six novels in the world by The Economist in 2013 (written in English, it was translated into Norwegian and published in Oslo slightly earlier in 2010). The story revolves around an elderly ex-US Marine and WWII veteran living in Oslo with his granddaughter and her Norwegian husband. When he witnesses the murder of a woman in his apartment complex, he rescues her six-year-old son and decides to run. The pair are pursued by a Balkan gang responsible for the murder and by the Norwegian police. In Miller’s follow up book, American by Day (2018), he reverses the conceit and has Oslo police Chief Inspector Sigrid Odegard travel to America to search for her missing brother implicated in a murder. Protagonists feeling their way around new and unfamiliar environments—an American in Oslo or an Osloite in America is the leit motif of Miller’s books.
If Jo Nesbø is the King of Norwegian crime and Karin Fossim the Queen, then Anne Holt is (and Nesbø officially named her thus) the “Godmother of Norwegian Noir.” Holt should know what she’s talking about: formerly employed in the Oslo Police Department, she then became a lawyer before being appointed Norway’s Minster of Justice. Holt started writing novels in the early 1990s, just before her move into the higher echelons of the Norwegian government. Her most successful character is the lesbian police officer Hanne Wilhelmsen who features in ten novels now. The Wilhelmsen novels are procedurals that often deal with government corruption.
Several major crime series from Norway are set in towns just outside Oslo but occasionally have their protagonists visit the capital. Jorn Lier Host is a former detective turned crime writer. His William Wisting series is now twelve novels strong and based largely in the town of Larvik, where Wisting is the fictional head of the town’s CID and where Lier Host actually lives. The Wisting series has been translated into English and sold moderately well. However in Norway the books have sold over two million copies and been adapted for TV.
Gunnar Staalesen is another Norwegian writer based outside Oslo whose characters make occasion forays to the capital. Staalesen was born and is still based in Bergen, Norway’s second largest city on the country’s west coast. Staalesen’s literary creation is Bergen-based private eye Varg Veum. Staalesen has been cranking out the Varg Veum novels since the late 1970s and they’re universally known and loved in Norway. There are twenty of them now and a whole slew of movie and TV adaptations. The Varg Veum novels are dark, even by regular Scandi-noir standards, and often involve conspiracies and corruption.
Given that Norway is a generally safe place, what are the issues that drive Oslo crime novels? Aside from Nesbø’s serial killers, terrorism and extremism are high on the list. After the Oslo car bombings of 2011, the same attacker, the far right Anders Breivik, went on to commit the mass killing (89 young people in total) on Utoya Island. Breivik’s mentally unstable actions were perceived to be part of a wider problem in Norwegian society, namely those unhappy about what they viewed as too much immigration into the country and the “Islamisation” of Norway. Consequently, Islamist terror cells, lone wolf attackers, and problems of racism in Oslo are major themes. Of central Oslo’s 624,000 inhabitants, 189,400 are immigrants or born to immigrant parents, representing 30.4% of the capital’s population. In suburbs such as Sondre Nordstrand and Stovner og Alna immigrants account for about 50% of the population. This influx has happened fairly recently and in a country that is not traditionally multicultural. Adjustments have had to be made on all sides and it has not been easy. Many Norwegian crime novels work through this recent social convulsion in fictional form. For instance, Anne Holt was outspoken against racism when she was Norway’s Minister of Justice and this stance is also clear in her novels.
Other European crime fiction concerns of the moment are represented in Norwegian writing, like Eastern European gangs infiltrating new territories consequent upon the enlargement of and free movement within the European Union, female trafficking, and other immigrant issues.
Let’s finish with a writer who concentrates his successful series firmly in the capital. K.O. Dahl’s eleven novels feature Oslo detectives Frolich and Gunnarstranda. The series starts with Lethal Investments (1993) and introduces its two protagonists. Frolich is a bearded giant with some hope left for humanity while Gunnarstranda is an aging, chain-smoker who has used up all his limited faith in human beings quite some time ago. Frolich and Gunnarstranda are the Norwegian equivalents of Hening Mankell’s Swedish detective Kurt Wallander, or Denmark’s Sarah Lund. They live in a country envied by most of us for its wealth, apparent social justice, low crime rates and seemingly successful welfare state that allows everyone economic freedom without sacrificing the less able to totally desperate poverty.
Dahl’s books might not sell quite as well internationally as Nesbø’s, but they’re massively popular in Norway. Like other Oslo writers who look below the surface of a society and into the Norwegian soul, they reveal the darker side of the Oslo success story of sensibly spent oil revenues and of Scandinavian-style social order.
Norway’s crime writers throughout the region, like their Scandi-noir counterparts, veer from hope to anxieties about the future of Norway, of Nordic Europe and dystopian predictions of social collapse. In that sense Olso stands with the other Scandinavian capitals as a most noir city—prone to fatalism and suffering from moral ambiguity. It’s made for some great crime writing.
