Contemporary French and Scandinavian Crime Fiction: Citizenship, Gender and Ethnicity by Anne Grydehøj (review)

The title of Anne Grydehøj's book Contemporary French and Scandinavian Crime Fiction: Citizenship, Gender and Ethnicity raises an obvious question: What might a study of this combination of crime fiction texts contribute? The book was sparked by Grydehøj's initial interest in French critics' obsession with polars polaires—northern thrillers, or more generally "Nordic Noir"—since the 2000s (pp. 1–2). Yet in her inquiry into their critical interest, she came to see a connection between Scandinavian and French crime fiction's articulation of social criticism. Writers in the respective traditions are concerned with the relationship between citizen and state and in particular the devolution of this relationship under a series of social and political conflicts and related crises of the last decades: conflicts related to decolonization, retrenchment of the welfare state, the rise of neoliberal globalization and Europeanization, racialization, and the rapid gains of the populist right, from Le Pen's National Rally to the Sweden Democrats. Yet even if there are some parallels in the types of crises that have occurred, there are incongruities in the foundational ideas of citizen and state in France and Scandinavia. Also, the respective crime fiction traditions follow divergent paths. Grydehøj's study of the similarities, differences, and the disparate ways in which writers represent and seek to intervene in their political moment tells us about the cultural politics of crime fiction and how cultural texts can contribute to the understanding of society and the formation of identities. The book makes this case in several sections, studying the interweave of cultural politics and genre in some classic examples from the 1960s, in the representation of conflicts related to gender and sexuality, and finally in relation to racialization and ethnicity. The latter sections take up examples from the 2000s.

French and Scandinavian crime fiction are two of the most well-known and vital European crime-fiction traditions, yet their histories differ. The French roman noir and le polar (the thriller) are part of an old and robust crime fiction tradition, with classics stretching from Eugène Sue to the Walloon Georges Simenon, who count among European crime fiction's most significant writers. The more contemporary French polar helped establish the salience of the violent European crime novel set in the city and tense with threat (p. 22)—also loosening the hold of the English mystery story with its isolated settings, eschewal of violence, and narrative emphasis on reasoning. The recent flourishing of Nordic Noir does not have an equivalent history to its French counterpart. It kindled in 1965 with the procedurals of Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, sparking again with Jan Guillou's spy thrillers in the 1980s and Henning Mankell's globalized police procedurals in the 1990. It truly ignites with Stieg Larsson's conspiracy thrillers and many varieties of print and television police procedurals of the 2000s.

Grydehøj could have focused on these differences, comparing periods and scope of vitality, as well as generic tendencies, or divergences in the cultures, societies, and political institutions underpinning French and Scandinavian crime fiction. A great strength of the book is Grydehøj's refusal to get caught up in a sprawling account of differences. Her comparisons are focused and brisk, and she does not get sidetracked with enumerations and elaborations. She analyzes crime fiction's imagined worlds and the ways in which the texts she studies voice social criticism. Such analysis concerns authors' development and criticism of discourses, ideas, norms, and values. It is also here that she finds the pivotal equivalency that motivates the study. "The socially critical dimension of the polar scandinave concerned with the relationship between the citizen and the welfare state [… has] a parallel in French crime fiction, but in the form of a much more fundamental critical engagement with the relationship between citizen and polity. … It is primarily the republican state and the egalitarian philosophical ideals underpinning it...