The History of Nordic Noir

Scandinavia’s obsession with crime fiction

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“Miniature world,” Imaginary Realities. Photograph by Astrid Kruse Jensen.

Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme was brutally gunned down on a Stockholm street in 1986 while walking home from a movie theater with his wife. The hunt for his killer—who was never brought to justice—turned into one of the largest murder investigations in history, comparable to the Kennedy assassination.

As author Robert Ferguson writes in his book Scandinavians: In Search of the Soul of the North, “a generation of Swedish crime writers have been trying to put things right ever since, writing book after book after book in which the murderer always gets caught.”