How the world became one big crime scene
Declan Burke in The Irish Times, 8 July, 2010

    * Photograph: Getty Images

From the Palestinian Territories to Mongolia and beyond, crime writers are using international locations to tackle global themes

The popular perception of crime fiction is that it’s the foul-mouthed, hard-drinking, black sheep of the literary family. Unsurprisingly, it’s quite popular with women readers, perhaps as a result of the broad mind it has developed on its travels.

The success of Stieg Larsson’s Sweden-set Millennium Trilogy has alerted mainstream readers to the fact that the crime novel has an existence beyond its traditional enclaves in the US and the UK. Larsson, of course, is following in the footsteps of his countryman Henning Mankell, while “foreign” settings for crime novels are nothing new for readers familiar with the groundbreaking works of Georges Simenon (France) and Sjöwall and Wahlöö (Sweden), and latterly the likes of Andrea Camilleri (Italy), Colin Cotterill (Cambodia), Michael Dibdin (Italy), Jo Nesbø (Norway) and Deon Meyer (South Africa), to mention but a few.

Three years ago, writing in The New Yorker , Clive James, (pic right, The Times), celebrated international crime fiction offerings from Ireland, Scandinavia and Italy while simultaneously deriding the limitations of the genre’s form. “In most of the crime novels coming out now,” he said, “it’s a matter not of what happens but of where. Essentially, they are guide books.” What James failed to recognise is that the crime novel, by virtue of engaging with issues of law and (dis)order in a timely and relevant fashion, tends to be at the cutting edge in terms of addressing society’s fundamental concerns and broaching its taboos.

Per Wahlöö, for example, claimed that the motive behind the 10-book Martin Beck series written with her husband was to “use the crime novel as a scalpel cutting open the belly of the ideologically pauperised and morally debatable so-called welfare state of the bourgeois type”. Peeling back layers of cant and perceived wisdom is a theme that writers are currently exploring in settings as diverse as Canada, Poland, the Palestinian Territories, Brazil, South Africa and Mongolia.
The full story at The Irish Times.