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Sep 1st 2012 | from the print edition
BUSINESS in the Nordic countries has suffered a series of humiliations in
recent years. Nokia is a shadow of its former self. Volvo has been passed from
one foreign owner (Ford) to another (the Zhejiang Geely Holding Group), and
Saab Automobile has collapsed. Iceland s banking industry has imploded. But in
one business, at least, Scandinavia is sweeping all before it: the production
of crime thrillers.
Two Swedes, Stieg Larsson and Henning Mankell, have established the region as
world leader in this popular genre. Larsson s Millennium trilogy has sold more
than 60m copies and Mr Mankell s Wallander books have also sold tens of
millions. Larsson died in 2004 before his novels went global and Mr Mankell has
consigned his hero to Alzheimer s disease, but there are plenty of other
claimants to their thrones across the region most obviously Jo Nesbo (from
Norway), but also Arnaldur Indridason (from Iceland) and Camilla Lackberg (from
Sweden).
The northern crime boom is spreading from the written word to the screen.
Martin Scorsese is planning to produce a version of Mr Nesbo s The Snowman ,
to add to the store of adaptations of Larsson and Mr Mankell. The Killing , a
Danish television series, took Europe by storm last year. Scandinavian crime
fiction has transformed itself into a global brand in much the same way that
British rock n roll did in the early 1960s, and become a global industry that
stretches all the way from writers garrets in Stockholm and Oslo to Hollywood
studios. Like other worldwide success stories, it is worth drawing lessons
from.
The first lesson is that the next big thing can come from the most unexpected
places. Scandinavia is probably the most crime- and corruption-free region in
the world: Denmark s murder rate is 0.9 per 100,000 people, compared with 4.2
in the United States and 21 in Brazil. Scandinavians are also lumbered with
obscure and difficult languages. A succession of mainstream British publishers
rejected The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo , Larsson s first book, before
Christopher MacLehose decided to publish it. Mr Indridason at first had poor
sales because people found it hard to grapple with Icelandic names.
Yet Scandinavia has a number of hidden competitive strengths: a long tradition
of blood-soaked sagas; an abundance of gloomy misfits; a brooding landscape;
and a tradition of detective writing (Per Wahloo and Maj Sjowall, a
husband-and-wife team, enjoyed local success in the 1960s with their ten-volume
Martin Beck series). There are prizes and classes galore to help crime writers
on their way: Ms Lackberg started by taking an all-female crime-writing class.
Even before the current boom, crime writing was so remunerative that it sucked
in talent from everywhere. Mr Mankell started out writing mainstream plays and
novels. Mr Nesbo was a footballer, stockbroker and rock musician before
creating his hard-bitten detective, Harry Hole.
The second lesson is that place matters more than ever in a globalised world.
The conventional wisdom on globalisation is that it produces a flat world in
which everybody consumes the same bland products in the same bland settings: a
universal airport lounge. But the Nordic crime writers understand that the more
interconnected the world is, the more people crave a sense of place the more
distinctive and unusual the better. Mr Nesbo provides us with maps of Oslo and
obscure details of Norwegian history. Mr Indridason entertains us with
descriptions of Icelandic delicacies such as sheep s head and pickled haggis.
That Wallander copes with horrific crimes in small-town Ystad rather than a big
nowhere like Los Angeles is essential to his appeal.
The third lesson is that innovation is the essence of global success. The
Scandinavians have taken the convention of the defective detective to new
heights: Wallander has all Philip Marlowe s gloom without any of his glamour.
He is just as likely to douse his misery with meatballs as with scotch. But
they have also added new elements. Larsson invented a completely new sort of
detective a tattooed, computer-hacking she-punk. The Scandinavians are in
general more interested in the sociology of crime than in the goriness of it.
Mr Mankell is obsessed by the way that the smug Swedes respond to disruptive
forces like immigration and criminal gangs. The Killing focuses as much on
the impact of a horrific crime on society as it does on solving the crime.
Planes and pants
These principles are as good as any for explaining recent business trends. Some
of the great success stories of recent years have come from out-of-the-way
places: who would have thought that Brazil would produce one of the world s
most successful aircraft-makers (Embraer) or that New Zealand would give birth
to a colossus of underwear (Icebreaker)? John Quelch of the China Europe
International Business School in Shanghai argues that place matters more, not
less, in a globalised and virtual world. Real Madrid has transformed itself
into one of the world s most popular football teams by emphasising its Madrile
o identity. Newcastle Brown beer has a silhouette of the Newcastle skyline on
its label and features its local nickname a bottle of dog in its ads. And as
for innovation being the secret sauce of success, Embraer demonstrated this by
doing its more sophisticated work at home rather than in advanced America; and
Icebreaker by producing underwear that you can wear for days without washing.
The final lesson is more uncomfortable for the Scandinavians: that success is
more fleeting than ever. Their formula is already wearing a little thin: Mr
Nesbo s Harry Hole is more resonant of Sylvester Stallone than Ingmar Bergman.
Publishers are scouring the world for the next crime wave: a few summers hence
we may all have forgotten about Oslo and Ystad, and be reading about les flics
in Paris and Lyon instead.
Economist.com/blogs/schumpeter
from the print edition | Business