Locating Nordic Noir: From Beck to The Bridge by Kim Toft Hansen, Anne Marit Waade (review)

This ambitious volume is based on research conducted through a 2014– 2018 project funded by the Danish Council for Independent Research | Humanities (FKK). In addition to drawing on work done by the researchers participating in the What Makes Danish Television Drama Series Travel? project, the authors received information and assistance from many in the Nordic media industries. As its title indicates, the study investigates the origins of Nordic Noir through literary texts and media productions, incorporating evidence from literary-critical sources, multiple theoretical models, and information on the increasingly complex array of stakeholders on the production side. Its adherence to multiple methodological approaches and investigation of several topic clusters makes Locating Nordic Noir an informative, complex study for scholars to engage.

The study is organized into four parts, each with three constituent chapters; the volume also includes a substantial introduction and conclusion, several infographics and photo illustrations, and an index. Bibliographic information is included with each chapter, and there is no overall bibliography. The index is problematic, particularly given the broad range and complex structure of the volume. It includes no topics or subjects, only names and titles. Even within those limits, the index is unsatisfactory. The index’s exclusion of authors whose work is discussed in the text—including Henning Mankell, Åsa Larsson, Stieg Larsson, Helene Tursten, and Ragnar Jónasson among others—is puzzling. Series titles are included, but they are not accurately represented by the index entries: for example, fewer than half of the pages on which the Fjällbacka Murders series is discussed in the book are included. Finally, given the volume’s subject, why are place names excluded from the index?

In their introduction, Hansen and Waade set out the first of many numbered engagements with their subject. For the study as a whole, they explain that it “takes its point of departure in four associated methodological approaches: location studies, production studies, policy studies and genre studies” (p. 18). Within that methodological framework, “three areas of interest will be scrutinised through the book: (1) the specification and qualification of the concept Nordic Noir as crime fiction, (2) a historical outline of the development of Nordic television crime drama from the 1990s until today, and (3) a general analysis of the increasing transnationalization of Nordic television drama production and funding throughout the period in question” (p. 19). The tendency to offer numbered segments under broad topic headings becomes distracting at times. In establishing their “theoretical and methodological framework for the study of locations” (p. 54), they offer “five important perspectives” (p. 58) from a 2014 study, which are immediately supplemented by “our four off-screen factors” (p. 58), all of which then emerge as a model featuring “six dimensions of analysis” (p. 60). The table showing the off-screen factors (p. 57) is helpful, but in this section, the reader is left charting the numbers to figure out what the model is, rather than being absorbed in its functionality. These elaborate organizational schemes recur throughout the book and are often distracting.

While there are some evocative insights, such as the observation that Nordic Noir has “become the landscape paintings of today, attracting just as much international attention as did the nineteenth century painters” (p. 265), the interpretive dimensions of the study are less compelling than its informative functions. When the authors turn to analysis of Nordic Noir’s characteristic locations, their analysis proceeds as a surface-level taxonomy of locations that “may clearly indicate certain specific genre traits” (p. 63) but never interrogates their significance to the genre. The bulk of the chapter describes locations such as the police station, the investigator’s home, the crime scene, and public places as being important in the genre, mentioning examples of these from media productions of Nordic Noir but offering little interpretation or insight. The tendency toward gathering information rather than offering insight into the significance of...