Stockholm Noir

Starred review from January 11, 2016
Grouped under three headings, the 13 stories in this outstanding entry in Akashic’s noir series capture the gloomy underside of Sweden’s capital, portraying the hopelessness of those trapped in what Larson and Edenborg in their introduction call the city that “devours your soul.” The first section, Crime and Punishment, focuses on what the editors call “places of immense spiritual corruption,” as scathingly illustrated by Åke Edwardsson’s “Stairway from Heaven,” which consists of the bitter musings of a housing-project hit man. The second section, Fear and Darkness, presents the horrors of aging in suburbia, most notably in Inger Frimansson’s horrifying “Black Ice.” The highlight of the final section, The Brutality of Beasts, is Carl Johan De Geer’s “The Wahlberg Disease,” set in the city’s center, “a sea of ruins.”All stories unsparingly testify to the degradation through human vicissitude of idealistic social planning.

December 15, 2015
Larson and Edenborg manage to unearth a dark side to a city that "is verdant, clean, and surrounded by crystalline water." Since Sweden's crime rate is so low, many of these 13 new stories revolve around social issues. Affordable housing is surprisingly high on the list. In Johan Theorin's "Still in Kallhall," Inger Frimansson's "Black Ice," and Carl Johan De Geer's "The Wahlberg Disease," the lust for desirable homes becomes a driving force to crime. Sweden's version of the war on drugs powers Anna-Karin Selberg's "Horse." And co-editor Larson's "10/09/03" offers a Swedish take on good old-fashioned xenophobia. Martin Holmen's "The Smugglers" features more conventional law breaking, and there's plenty of room for tales of love gone wrong, like Ake Edwardson's "Stairway from Heaven," Malte Persson's "The Splendors and Miseries of a Swedish Crime Writer," and Unni Drougge's "Death Star." But "gone wrong" doesn't come close to describing the romantic calamities of Lina Wolff's "Northbound" and Torbjorn Elensky's "Kim." Co-editor Edenborg shows a police officer sliding off the rails in "Nineteen Pieces." And Inger Edelfeldt's "From the Remains" is a testament to what Larson and Edenborg call Swedes' love of "scaring themselves." Stockholm may not be Marseille, but Larson and Edenborg's contributors show that even a verdant place with socialized medicine can have its seamy side.

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February 1, 2016
Akashic's multivolume Noir series returns to Scandinavia, focusing this time on the capital city of Sweden, a country that is famously neutral in time of war but is also a large-scale dealer in arms. Stockholm, the editors say in their introduction, is itself a seriously divided place, the inner city associated with prosperity while the suburbs are viewed by some as a tumor, a fungus and are, if not riddled with crime, at least darker and more dangerous. Each of the stories, all published for the first time and mainly written by writers not widely known in the U.S., takes place in a different community or neighborhood; the characters range from a PI hired to find a missing man, to a gang of bootleggers, to a would-be crime novelist whose girlfriend is murdered (almost too fortuitously for his writing career). The bulk of the stories are translated by Laura A. Wideburg, who has a real knack for preserving the rather ornate structure of Swedish prose while rendering its idioms and grammar in the familiar North American style. Another worthy entry in this globe-trotting mystery series.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)