The Swedish decks are still a commercial wonder

The Swedish decks with their social-realistic and socially critical undertones have been big sellers ever since the 1960s when the literature duo Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö wrote their books about the police Martin Beck. But it was only when Stieg Larsson debuted with his Millennium triology in the 1990s that the genre became an unprecedented cash cow.

- Scandinavian criminal literature was great abroad even before Stieg Larsson, but with his monumental successes it came to a new level. Stieg Larsson was one of the best-seller lists in the United States and it then spilled over into the entire genre. It created a huge suction. That significance cannot be underestimated, we would not have had the same wave of Nordic noir but Stieg larsson, says literature researcher Karl Berglund to the Culture News.

According to Karl Berglund, Stieg Larsson, and his Millennium successor David Lagercrantz, follow the same literary tradition as Sjöwall and Wahlöö. The books claim to write about the actual Swedish society and describe its problems, and paint a bleak picture of Sweden which generated the name nordic noir.

The combination of the spectacular intrigues of the Nordic noir stories with violence as entertainment and its description of Swedish reality has painted an alarmist picture of Sweden exaggerating how dangerous it actually is in the country, says Karl Berglund.

- Just because the books also contain realism, it becomes easy to interpret the stories as a true description of Swedish reality as corrupt and dangerous. Many commentators abroad seem very fond of this trope, that Sweden's home building does not go so well.

- The Swedish decks can be used in such an argument, and it has probably also been done.

As the Millennium series has come to an end, the genre has also largely been predicted to take its last breath. But according to Karl Berglund, it feels as good as before, both in Sweden and abroad, at least from a commercial perspective. The difference is that the genre is now more diversified and covers many different types of stories.

- The very scene - a murder and its investigation - is still there. But then a Swedish decker can look almost a bit anyway - and still become very popular, says Karl Berglund.