Molly’s Top International Crime Writers

Come by BookPeople this Sunday, June 12th, from 2 PM to 4 PM for a panel discussion on international crime fiction, featuring authors, booksellers, and critics. There will be lots of giveaways (and possibly cookies, but you’ll have to come to the event to find out!). All of the books listed below are in print and available either on our shelves or via bookpeople.com.

Leading up to our panel discussion on international crime fiction coming up this Sunday, we’ll be running top lists of world crime writers all week long. Below, you’ll find a list from bookseller and international crime fiction enthusiast Molly.

• Post by Molly Odintz

I’ve always been intrigued by fiction in translation, and especially crime fiction from around the world, yet after a few years of concentrated reading in these areas, I still feel as I’ve barely scraped the surface of what world crime fiction has to offer. Every nation has its great crime writers, and only some have been translated and are still in print, yet just in our mystery section alone, one can find countless stories from all over the world.

Rather than choose my favorite international books, an overwhelming task, I have decided to list my preferred international authors. To narrow the scope, I picked only authors in translation. I have read and enjoyed multiple books by each of the authors mentioned below, and each one combines brilliant writing, a dark vision, and deep knowledge of their genre.

Paco Ignacio Taibo II

As a student at UT Austin, I spent a great deal of time up on the Perry Castaneda Library’s 6th floor, where the crime fiction and foreign language texts were located. Browsing the stacks, I discovered the works of Paco Ignacio Taibo II, activist, historian, and prolific author of the Hector Belascoaran Shayne series as well as many stand-alone. Taibo fled Franco’s Spain for Mexico City, which I guess makes him the literary equivalent of Manu Chao in his turn towards political action in Latin America (except even cooler!!).

International Crime Fiction Friday: Two From Scandinavia

-Post by Molly

Scandinavian crime fiction, with its roots in the 1960s socially conscious police procedurals written by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo, has impressed international audiences for some time. With the exploding popularity of writers like Henning Mankell in the 1990s and Steig Larson in the early aughts, this region of few actual murders and sizable numbers of fictional killings has continued its run as a hotspot of international crime.

However, these powerhouse names are just (pardon the pun) the tip of the iceberg when it comes to crime writers of the region. This week in International Crime Fiction Friday, we bring you excerpts from two works by Scandinavian authors – Åsne Seierstad of Norway and Arnaldur Indriðason of Iceland.

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 Åsne Seierstad is a Norwegian journalist and renowned war correspondent who has written several accounts of life during conflicts. Her works include The Bookseller of Kabul and One Hundred and One Days: A Baghdad Journal, among others.  The following excerpt, courtesy of criminal elements.com, is from One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway, a narrative journalistic account of the massacre. Although this is technically Crime Fiction Friday (emphasis on the fiction), I think you’ll be able to see why I threw a true crime story into the mix. You can find works by Seierstad on our shelves and via bookpeople.com. 

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Excerpt: One of Us

“Prologue

She ran.

Up the hill, through the moss. Her wellingtons sank into the wet earth. The forest floor squelched beneath her feet.

She had seen it.

She had seen him fire and a boy fall.

‘We won’t die today, girls,’ she had said to her companions. ‘We won’t die today.’

More shots rang out. Rapid reports, a pause. Then another series.

She had reached Lovers’ Path. All around her there were people running, trying to find places to hide.

Behind her, a rusty wire fence ran alongside the path. On the other side of the netting, steep cliffs dropped down into the Tyrifjord. The roots of a few lilies of the valley clung to the mountainside, looking as though they had grown out of solid rock. They had finished flowering, and the bases of their leaves were filled with rainwater that had trickled over the rocky edge.

From the air, the island was green. The tops of the tall pines spread into each other. The slender branches of thin, broadleaved trees stretched into the sky.

Down here, seen from the ground, the forest was sparse.

But in a few places, the grass was tall enough to cover you. Flat rocks hung over one part of the sloping path, like shields you could creep under.

There were more shots, louder.

Who was shooting?

She crept along Lovers’ Path. Back and forth. Lots of kids were there.

‘Let’s lie down and pretend we’re dead,’ one boy said. ‘Lie down in strange positions, so they think we’re dead!’”

Read more of this excerpt. 

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Arnaldur Indriðason burst onto the international scene with his multi-generational genetic thriller, Jar City, the first featuring Detective Erlender to be translated into English. His series numbers 14 in Icelandic and is up to ten Erlender novels available in English today. Also courtesy of criminalelements.com, I present to you an excerpt from Reykjavik Nights. You can find copies of the Erlender Series on our shelves and via bookpeople.com. 

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Excerpt: Reykjavik Nights

“…‘What is it?’ asked one, poking cautiously with his pole.

‘Is it a bag?’ asked his friend.

‘No, it’s an anorak,’ said the third.

The first boy prodded harder, jabbing the object until finally it moved. It sank from view and they fished around until it floated up again. Then, by slow degrees it turned over, and from under the anorak a man’s head appeared, white and bloodless, with colourless strands of hair. It was the most gruesome sight they had ever seen. One of the boys let out a yell and tumbled backwards into the water. At that, the precarious equilibrium was lost and before they knew it all three had fallen overboard, and they waded shrieking to the shore.

They stood there for a moment, wet and shivering, gaping at the green anorak and the side of the face that was exposed above the water, then turned and fled as fast as their legs would carry them…”

Read more of this excerpt. 

International Crime Month: Maj Sjöwall & Per Wahlöö

~post by Molly

As Scandinavian detective fiction has exploded onto the international scene over the last twenty years, it is sometimes easy to forget that the genre has been experiencing international renown since the late 1960s. With so much attention paid to contemporary authors, it is time to contextualize the recent history of Scandinavian detective fiction in terms of the region’s most classic crime writers, Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö.

These two authors, over the course of ten years and ten novels, single handedly created the modern police procedural. Their oeuvre has been the model for Henning Mankell, Stieg Larsson, and pretty much every detective show on television. Their cast of detectives, cantankerous, flawed, and with all the personality clashes of long-time coworkers, have become the template for cop dramas at home and abroad. Their detective, Martin Beck, has been played by Walter Mathau, which by itself indicates their commitment to portraying the extraordinary in the ordinary.

Their story, too, has been the model for many an author’s journey.  The two began in investigative journalism and from there decided to put political opinions to paper in a popular and accessible format. Inspired by the social criticism in such authors as Dashiell Hammett and George Simenon, they chose detective fiction as their medium.

Unusually, however, they wrote as a team – Sjöwall and Wahlöö lived together as a common law couple and each night, after putting their children to bed, each wrote an alternating chapter. The next day, they would switch chapters and edit each other’s work. In this way, they wrote one novel a year, for ten years. In the tenth year of their collaboration, Per Wahlöö died, and Maj Sjöwall never wrote again.

As a collaborative team, they found common ground not only in their mutual affection, but in their shared left-wing politics. They established a model for social criticism in Scandinavia still used today, in which they focused on examining the shadowy nature of capitalism embedded within the post-war welfare state. They wrote in a time of social and political upheaval, especially in terms of gender roles, and the crimes investigated are carefully chosen to match the spirit of the times. Many of the Scandinavian crime writers we most associate with the genre draw heavily from the allegorical nature of Sjöwall and Wahlöö ‘s crimes, and in such pointed pieces as Henning Mankell’s Faceless Killers and Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with a Dragon Tattoo we find increasingly refined and yet somehow less immediate variations on a theme.

Despite their politically motivated message, the two never wrote in a heavy-handed manner, choosing to embrace the simplest prose and the most compelling discourse as a way of creating Marxist critiques accessible to all. Their police procedurals are humanistic and humorous, with plots carefully crafted to entertain and flawed detectives with whom any reader can empathize. Their detectives hem and haw at the demands of the state, try to get out of riot cop duty, and try to solve as many real crimes as possible. When it is winter, and a character smokes too many cigarettes, he gets a cold.

Their vision has endured; forty years after their original publication, their work is still in print. Their message is as immediate and urgent as ever, and their combination of humor and humanism is still unmatched by their peers. Read them in order for the best experience, but to get hooked, start with The Laughing Policeman.

For fans of:

Henning Mankell, Stieg Larsson, Craig Johnson, Carl Hiasson, and or any TV show about cops. Seriously, any. They all draw from this series.