(Photo: Alex Gallafent)

The success of Scandinavian crime novels by the likes of Stieg Larsson and Henning Mankell has prompted a flood of books in the same mold.

Now, as a symposium on the genre gets underway at UCLA, we ask: how can the Scandinavian crime novel stay fresh?

New Sleuth

Perhaps we need a new detective.

A sleuth who is not driven by data, or tired out by a crushing bureaucracy or weighed down by some kind of pervasive Scandinavian melancholy.

Claus Andersen, who teaches Scandinavian literature at UCLA, suggests a happy sleuth, a well-adjusted family man.

I asked him to help me to come up with an idea for a new novel, and a new blockbuster detective character. We were joined by Andrew Nestingen, a Scandinavian specialist at the University of Washington.

We begin with the name: Sven Svensson. He’s Swedish, we decide, and has three kids, a symbol of his family’s affluence and comfort.

Svensson always puts his family ahead of his detective work, getting home on time at 6.30 p.m., or earlier.

“Yes, 4 p.m., I was going to say”, laughs Nestingen.

Sven Svensson is married to Anna Svensson, and she earns significantly more money than him. Perhaps she works as a financial exec in Stockholm?

“Or it could be set in Gothenburg or Malmo and she could be some kind of important municipal official,” suggests Nestingen.

Anna, we imagine, is privy to secrets that Sven Svensson has to uncover later on; she knows the people he’ll encounter in his investigations.

Gothenburg also gives Nestingen an idea for the social backdrop to our new novel, something any self-respecting Scandinavian crime thriller has to have.

“One of the things about that city is its industry: Volvo, Saab. There are huge factories there,” he says.

Sven Svensson — our fictional detective — grew up in that decaying industrial world but left it behind when he got married.

“Or perhaps his wife could have made money off the decline of this industry,” offers Claus Andersen.

‘The Vic’

Next step: the murder victim.

We go for an elderly man, a former factory worker now living in a retirement home.

“Yeah, secrets of the past that this person held and needed to be taken care of as a consequence,” imagines Nestingen.

Our victim is called Bengt Kuosmanen — a Finnish last name — in a nod to the many Finns who worked in those Swedish factories in the 1950s and 60s, a time when Finland’s economy was in trouble.

Doom and Gloom

Finally, before we give our book a name, we consider the atmospherics.

Most Scandinavian crime fiction seems to be set either in the summertime of never-ending light or in the unrelenting gloom of a dark, dark winter according to Linda Haverty Rugg, who chairs the Scandinavian department at UC Berkeley.

“The wind is blowing and the rain is falling and there’s sleet and there’s snow”, says Rugg.

So we go for something different and set our novel in the springtime, a potent moment for people starved of sunshine.

“Things actually explode into bloom or explode into green. And that is a really exciting time for the Swedes: they start to take off their clothes and go outside,” Rugg says.

“Setting a crime novel in the springtime might also have to do with the rush of excitement and blood pumping that comes with the advent of spring in Scandinavia.”

As the snows melt, things forgotten are uncovered.

“And,” Rugg continues, “if we’re dealing with an elderly person being killed, something about that person’s past which had been buried and is now coming to light would be an interesting parallel to the spring idea.”

All we need now for our new Scandinavian crime novel, set in the spring against a backdrop of industrial decay, is a title.

Spring … spring …

Nestingen has the answer:

“You could call industry to mind with ‘The Volvo Spring’. That has a dissonance between the car and the blossoming that’s a part of the novel.”

With all that taken care of, let’s start the story.

“The Volvo Spring” begins with our victim, old Mister Kuosmanen, reminiscing in his retirement home about his days on the industrial production line.

And then he is murdered …

Postscript

Just in case Hollywood is reading: the panel suggests Sven Svensson and his wife ought to be played by Matthew Broderick and Charlize Theron in any movie adaptation.

Audio Extra: Author Henning Mankell on Melancholy Detectives

• Scandinavian Crime Fiction symposium at UCLA
• A Guide to Scandinavian Crime Fiction

I resist the rule that books for the beach have to go down as easy as piña coladas. My eccentric and eclectic list of summer reads is made up of fiction in translation that demands and repays close attention. In addition, I feel that the intrepid group of small or university presses that publish books in translation should be rewarded for their courage. Thus I haven’t included first-rate books from major publishers but highlight offerings from less mainstream presses.

Note that many of the books covered by World Books over the past few months, from “Crossing the Hudson” and “The Foundation Pit” to “The Ninth,”  are worth considering as well.

Feel free to send in other suggestions of worthwhile international fiction, especially those from the smaller publishers.

1) The Halfway House by Guillermo Rosales. Translated by Anna Kushner. New Directions. Rosales destroyed most of his work before he committed suicide in 1993, but the anguished Cuban writer left this short novel, a masterful kick-in-the-teeth. The plot revolves around a man who, after his release from a Miami psychiatric ward, struggles to maintain his sanity in a hellish halfway house. An unconvincing note of sentimentality in the book’s final pages doesn’t dilute the story’s gaunt, gut-wrenching impact.

2) Courtesans and Opium: Romantic Illusions of the Fool of Yangzhou by Anonymous. Translated from the Chinese by Patrick Hanan. Columbia University Press. You want a racy, nineteenth-century epic about sex, sin, drugs, and prostitution set in China? Here it is, a bawdy journey by five brothers through the gaudy brothels of Yangzhou. The novel’s alleged purpose was to serve as a cautionary tale. The book’s sensual gusto overwhelms any taint of moralism.

3) In the United States of Africa by Abourahaman A. Waberi. Translated from the French by David and Nicole Ball. University of Nebraska Press. Waberi, a French-speaking African writer, makes expert use of an acidic satiric set-up worthy of Swift. History has reversed itself: millions flee the poverty of the United States and Europe for the prosperity of Africa. A short, bittersweet, and amusing mediation on multicultural reversals of fortune.

4) The Essential Yusuf Idris: Masterpieces of the Egyptian Short Story by Yusuf Idris. Various translators. Edited by Denys Johnson-Davies. The American University in Cairo Press. Surprisingly, this is the first volume in English that brings together a selection of short stories by one of Egypt’s finest writers (a giant of Arabic literature), rumored to have been on the short list for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Idris’s tales are often straightforward psychological studies of the frustrations and desires of society’s have-nots; the author brings a clear-eyed power to his depictions of individuals grappling with controversial sexual and political issues, from homosexuality to the threat of religious fundamentalism.