Nordic noir novels reflect the view evident in many Scandinavian regions that violent crime in on the rise, unsettling traditional concepts of national identity, security, and the capacity of the police to cope with the perceived crisis even though crime levels are statistically low still in Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Iceland, and these countries are consistently ranked very high on peace indexes and other measurements of quality of life. The dramatic tension between the dark perspective of crime writers and the public image mediated by tourism and related government agencies, as well the idealistic view of these "social democracies" nurtured among liberals in distant countries like America, for instance (by figures from Martin Luther King to Bernie Sanders) create a dramatic, and sometimes comical, spectacle of competing sensibilities in nordic identity. In fact, travel sites go to great, almost absurd lengths at times, intent on warning prospective travellers that grim and ugly landscapes found in these celebrated novels, are no reflection of the actual experiences found in everyday life, even as they celebrate these authors as emblematic of the country's rich cultural traditions. From the authors perspective it is often argued the utopian-like images of these various governments are fictions produced for foreign consumption. And on the debate goes.
In Henning Mankell's first Wallander mystery from 1991 an elderly couple on an isolated farm are so brutally tortured and murdered that the police find themselves emotionally and mentally overwhelmed, unable to comprehend such levels of savagery by so-called "Faceless Killers." Throughout this and other novels Wallander broods over a Swedien in transition, at risk from crimes unimaginable in just the recent past, the era of the noose, as he describes it, demanding a totally different type of police force.and detective. Despite the neurotic hyperbole that Wallander is prone to, which other characters resist on occasion, his paranoid vision achieves a resonant and eloquent legitimacy, and in many ways is representative of the scandi- procedural novel, The faceless killers are refugees, prompting a further murder of an innocent refugee by a secret anti-immigration society run by an an ex-cop. And all of this played out in the midst of a sustained critique by Wallander of the bureaucratic incompetency of Immigration policy and services, while a largely tabloid press sensationalizes every new facet in the double-murder narrative.
The important link between such violence and the police procedural format cannot be overstated. Placing the story within the intricate workings of a police squad legitimizes the novels' dark cultural narratives in a way not so easily achieved in fiction featuring private detectives.But on a more dramatic level, the detective "team" is consistently alienated from larger structures within the police and governmental bureaucracy, they function, against tremendous burdens and obstacles, within a nationalized police force characterized by various levels of corruption and incompetency. So the casual chain of responsibility for the various crimes point vertically as well as horizontally.The novel A Step Behind provides an excellent example of this.
Like most procedural novels of this kind, the book features a series of brutal deaths seemingly unconnected to each other. At first Wallander is called to a small farm where a young girl is standing in a field of rape (we call it canola) acting suspiciously. As he approaches her and despite his efforts to calm her down and help her, she immolates herself, with gasoline she has stolen from the farmer's barn, when she realizes he is a police officer. The horrific sight of the burning girl, imaged as a human torch haunts Wallander as he struggles to understand how such a bizarre event can happen in bucolic Ystad. And this is only the beginning in a book punctuated with heads cleaved in two, eyes torn out, and the head of one victim cooked in a stove. The murderer, a teenage serial killer avenging sexual exploitation of his sister by his father as well as as a sex trafficking ring, involving the burning girl in the field, which services wealthy and prominent men, including the former Minister of Justice, the first to be murdered. The young killer escaping into a psychotic alternative personality, merging two prominent American heroes (in his eyes). J. Edgar Hoover and Geronimo. As in a number of procedural novels, we are aware of the killer's identity by the middle of the novel.
Such brutality certainly can be seen, in part, as an index of an increase in violence in Swedish society, but beyond this, metonymically, it conveys a defacing and dismemberment of the body-politic, undermining various social utopian myths within the culture. The violent arc of the book leading the reader to a point zero, prodding us closer and closer to a breaking point of reason, sanity and decency. Yet by its very nature, the eradication of eyes, the obliteration of the face and brain, the un-facing of the victim/perpetrators invites us also to consider alternate configurations of society, a new mode of understanding and perception.
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