Nordic Noir: An Overview

As of 2025, the books of four Scandinavian writers – Stieg Larsson, Jo Nesbo, Camilla Läckberg and Henning Mankell – have collectively sold nearly 300 million copies. These four are only the most prominent of many writers from the Nordic region whose stories of crime have been termed ‘Nordic Noir’, and whose success over the past three decades has become a global phenomenon, prompting the question ‘what makes Nordic Noir special?’

It must be acknowledged that key elements of many Nordic Noir novels will be familiar to readers of crime fiction from other regions and cultures: grumpy ‘outsider’ investigators dealing with eruptions of violence in unexpected settings, keen collaborators, ruthless villains, tragic victims, twisting plots,  and ‘cold cases’ bursting into new focus following terrible discoveries. This familiarity is unsurprising, as Nordic Noir writers, from early pioneers like Maj Sjöwal and Per Wahlöö to modern stars like Anne Holt, have made conscious and concerted use of such classic crime models as Ed McBain’s police procedurals and Agatha Christie’s country house mysteries. However, there are points of difference which arguably set Nordic Noir apart from other sub-genres which have followed in the wake of these classics.

A significant distinctive feature is the explicit social and political focus. Henning Mankell noted that the subtitle for his Kurt Wallander novels series had to be ‘Novels about the Swedish anxiety’. In his long career investigating crime in the small city of Ystad, Wallander encounters corruption, greed, exploitation, the failures of governments to maintain the Swedish welfare state, and the struggles of Swedish society to integrate new communities. Wallander becomes increasingly pessimistic – a gloomy seeker of truth and justice in an imperfect world. Many other Nordic Noir writers have highlighted social issues. Lisa Marklund has commented that ‘the abuse of power is probably my central theme, whatever form it takes’, and uses her journalist protagonist, Annika Bengtzon, to delve into complex corruption. The Rebecka Martinsson novels of Åsa Larsson are set in and around the Swedish town of Kiruna, which is gradually collapsing into the earth, literally undermined by the reckless actions of the mining corporations that dominate the area’s economy. The Swedish title of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larsson’s searing examination of gender-based violence, was Män Som Hatar Kvinnor (Men who Hate Women) – a title which encapsulates the rage against exploitation that runs through all of Larsson’s work.

Nordic Noir novels also stand out in their use of settings. A casual browser in UK bookshops might assume that all Nordic Noir novels feature icy wastes, isolated cabins, and bodies buried in the snow. However, this commercial exploitation of the ‘northern exotic’, so beloved of marketing departments, fails to capture the nuanced utilisation of environments in Nordic Noir. Bodies are sometimes found in the snow and lonely farms and ice-bound lakes do sometimes hide secrets. However, much of the action takes place within settings that would seem familiar, even prosaic, to modern UK readers – offices, meeting rooms, apartment buildings, parks and traffic-choked streets. The uniqueness of Nordic Noir perhaps comes from the mingling of the specifics of place and culture with the homogenised reality of modern life. The novels of Icelandic writers Arnaldur Indridason and Yrsa Sigurdartdottir feature city-dwelling, hard-working protagonists dealing with the challenges of their professional and private lives, but they also show ghosts rising out of the vast dark spaces of the land – for Indridason’s Erlendur Sveinsson these ghosts are memories from a childhood lived in those spaces, for Sigurdardottir’s Thora Gudmundsdottir they are active and consequential visitors from Iceland’s spirit-filled past.

Perhaps the extraordinary popularity of Nordic Noir ultimately rests on this mixture of the familiar and the ‘exotic’, a mixture that fuels our fascination with the lives of northern others.

Andy Sievewright

Note: Andy Sievewright runs a regular course on Nordic Noir literature at the Ipswich Institute.