From Public Books:
We begin, as usual, with a dead body. In April 2020 an 84-year-old Swedish woman died in the happily unsuspicious circumstances of old age. Her name was Maj Sjöwall. But to readers of a certain dark bent, she was “the godmother of Nordic noir,” beloved for her creation of a new kind of detective novel. With her partner Per Wahlöö (who died in 1975), Sjöwall wrote the 10-volume Martin Beck series: a set of novels, published between 1965 and 1975, that attempted to map the whole of Swedish society through the ostensibly conservative form of the police procedural.
These were crime novels that dared to be boring. The protagonist Martin Beck—unlike the cynical demigod detectives of American hard-boiled noir—suffered from constant colds, worked on a team rather than alone, and spent most of his time on the job combing through stacks of paper. Patiently realist and sociologically astute, the Martin Beck books presented crime as emanating not from individual pathology but from rips in Sweden’s tightly stitched social fabric. Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s Beck series laid the foundations for one of contemporary literature’s most dominant popular forms: the Scandinavian crime novel.
The Martin Beck books were thoughtful works of art disguised as mass entertainment. In the novels, political critique drew warmth from lovable characters; passages of austere description heightened suspense. This marriage of the realistic and the thrilling, the political and the popular, turns out to have been a fragile achievement. Much has changed since Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s idealistic beginnings. The Scandinavian crime novel has all but abandoned the artistic and political aspirations that once served as the genre’s bedrock.
When “Nordic noir” exploded onto the global literary scene around the time of the financial crisis, the genre did so not in the mode of Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s realism but in a new key of ultraviolence. In the atmosphere of ambient unrest that accompanied the plunging markets, an inked-up, chain-smoking hacker named Lisbeth Salander burst into world literature, her face piercings glinting. Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2008) inaugurated a hunger among readers for tales featuring torture chambers, comeuppance against rapists, and snowy landscapes drenched in gore. Publishers, too, smelled blood. A wave of translations ensued, primarily from Sweden but quickly encompassing writers from Norway, Denmark, and (less so) Iceland and Finland.
. . . .
The time has come to ask what lies ahead for Scandinavian noir, and whether Sjöwall’s passing marks the end of an era. Since its origins in the 1960s, the genre’s visibility and violence have increased. Yet its excellence has faded, and its commercial success seems to be falling off. No great artistic practitioner of Nordic noir has emerged since Henning Mankell, whose 1990s-era series following the moody, introspective policeman Kurt Wallander offers both intelligent rumination on Swedish national identity and a complex portrait of the protagonist’s troubled interior. As for sales, Larsson has come to look like an anomalously titanic figure, with more than 100 million copies of his Salander books sold worldwide. Jo Nesbø, the most successful living author in this genre, has by comparison sold about 40 million copies across more than a dozen novels—spectacular numbers on the order of Mankell, but trending downward; Nesbø’s latest installment, Knife (2019), has sold just over 30,000 print copies in the United States since coming out a year and a half ago.
A mystery of our own, then. Is the Scandinavian crime novel alive and well, at large in some modest disguise—flinging chum and straining at the ropes on a fishing vessel beyond the fjords? Or is it lying dead, tongue swollen, behind a locked door? And if the latter: Who killed Nordic noir?
Link to the rest at Public Books
I don’t know who killed it but I do know a hard-bitten, divorced, ex-cop ex-drunk PI who can look into it for you.
Hmm. The “dared to be boring” books don’t seem to be doing all that well in the US marketplace. (Although some of that is likely due to overpricing the ebook.)
Maybe they did better in Sweden? I do seem to remember that it was a Swedish author who had some minor success by writing his daily life in excruciating, tedious – and occasionally disgusting – detail.
Given your – correct – comments about overpricing in the US it would be interesting to compare the performance in the UK where, for the examples I’ve examined, the prices seem pretty reasonable (a bit more than I’m paying for my indie published SFF but a lot lower than US prices). I’ve always found this a bit odd when the same Big 5(4) conglomerates are setting the e-book prices.
As for the books current UK performance, I’ve unfortunately not been able to work out how they are selling (I don’t understand Amazon’s rankings – or its classifications, as all the top sellers in Scandinavian Crime seem to be books by UK authors set in the UK).
Although it’s a bit of a moving target (with new books being published every day), here’s a handy tool from Dave Chesson for a quick way to see how many of any book is selling worldwide PER DAY:
https://kindlepreneur.com/tools/amazon-kdp-sales-rank-calculator/
I just put in both Larrsson’s TGWTGT and Nesbo’s Knife and got 30 and 20 (per day), respectively. Again, that’s total on Amazon around the world. As an author, I can go into my Amazon dashboard and break out each market’s sales separately, but I can’t see how others’ books are doing in each market.
I also don’t know if Chesson is keeping his calculator up to date, and after putting in a couple of my books just now, he seems to be overstating a bit. But it’s a rough guide and a way to compare on a global basis.
P.S. I think the ABS rankings are global vs. country/market based, but now I’m not so sure. Anyone know?
Well, I got a couple of things wrong…
1. That KindlePreneur calculator *is* being kept up to date. They just responded to an email questioning that.
2. BUT: that calculator (and a couple of others I saw) ONLY work on Amazon.com (the U.S. store).
3. And it appears that Amazon’s Best Seller Rankings (BSR) are independent across different Amazon marketplaces. That they’re not “global.” So those numbers I give above are for the U.S. Amazon marketplace. I don’t have the final answer on that, but that’s what some are telling me. Kinda makes sense.
I don’t know – but when looking at international books, you have to realize that you are probably only looking at the English language sales. That’s why I don’t assume that the subject books aren’t still selling like hotcakes – in Sweden, to Swedish readers.
In any case, I stopped using the calculator when I realized that it doesn’t account for genre. Being #1,000 in Romance is almost certainly far better than being #3 in New Short Science Fiction / Fantasy. (As I was, briefly. Five sales of that title…)
“In any case, I stopped using the calculator when I realized that it doesn’t account for genre.”
But that’s (genre) a separate issue. The “Best Sellers Rank” is a comparative ranking for ALL books (in that marketplace, apparently). Then there are the three Genre Rankings under that. And that’s where you get into the marketing weeds of: “Do I list genres I can rank high in but have a small audience, to do I go for bigger audiences where I may not rank as high but the pool of readers is larger?” (you can ask Amazon to list you in up to 10 categories, but only the top 3 show up on the Product Detail page) It’s an ongoing debate in book marketing circles.
UPDATE: Amazon KDP Customer Support just confirmed to me that the Bestsellers Rank is independent and “differs from marketplace to marketplace.”
“What” might be a more appropriate question.
And the answer is probably over-exposure, which is what did in techno-thrillers, “tough chick” urban fantasy, magic schools, sparkly vamps, mommy porn, et al. None of which are actually dead as a sub-sub-genre but aren’t the gold mine they were expected to be.
Because that’s where tradpub’s “the same as but different” version of writing to market invaribly leads to. What starts out as fresh and interesting gets cloned out of both into “yet another” whatever. Few sub genres can survive an endless glut.