Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
Bleak landscape and gruesome murders - setting the standard for Nordic crime fiction.
Tell me about Sidetracked.
Sidetracked has this Kurt Wallander as the central character and he’s the classic miserable cop in the tradition of Ian Rankin’s Inspector Rebus. It has one of the most brilliant openings. He’s great at setting up stories, it’s always really visual. There’s a young woman running through a field of rape, and you can just imagine this woman and the yellow rape and she sets fire to herself. Kenneth Branagh bought the rights to this series of books and I think he’s filmed three of them. The setting is very important. These ones are set in Sweden, always away from the centre, isolated, in rural settings. One is on a nature reserve, and there’s one in a deserted farm house. You’ve got these small communities where everyone knows each other’s secrets. Mankell has quite an interesting political perspective too. He was quite left-wing and this really comes out in his writing. This one has a plot involving immigration and corrupt politicians. There isn’t a lot of light relief. Very few jokes. He was one of the first Scandinavian writers to be translated into English so he’s the standard – gruesome murders and bleak landscape.
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Ann Cleeves, a celebrated crime writer and winner of the 2006 Golden Dagger, finds inspiration in Nordic crime fiction and is gripped by the sense of loss and isolation that permeates the rural communities in the novels she has chosen. She began writing when she and her husband were the only residents on an island nature reserve in the Dee estuary.
