Anyone who’s walked through a bookstore or scrolled through the offerings of a streaming service knows that when it comes to crime novels and TV shows, the USA hasn’t been #1 in decades. “Scandicrime” and “Nordic noir” have an imperial dominance over the genre, and names such as Stieg Larsson, Henning Mankell, and Hakan Nesser are now as familiar to fans as Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett.
What is less widely appreciated is that the genre has always owed as much to Northern Europe as to the United States. There is a direct line of succession from the ultraviolent Old Norse sagas to the 19th-century Norwegian writer Bjornstjerne Bjornson to Bjornson devotee Knut Hamsun to Hamsun devotee Ernest Hemingway. The “hard-boiled” American style is about 1,000 years old and might just as well have been called “frozen stiff.”
This patrimony is on proud display in the Norwegian Jo Nesbo’s new thriller The Kingdom, which isn’t, strictly speaking, a procedural but is both a crime thriller and a family saga. Nesbo has a bit of Hemingway-lite energy himself. Along with being an internationally famous crime writer, this bearded, grizzled 60-year-old has practiced a number of other ostentatiously manly arts: He is a former professional soccer player and stockbroker and a current mountaineer and rock musician. But The Kingdom, though set in present-day Norway, has a strong family resemblance to saga literature with its grim fatalism and casual violence.
A stand-alone novel (Nesbo is most beloved for his series about alcoholic detective Harry Hole), The Kingdom is about two brothers, Roy and Carl Opgard, who have done some very bad things in the name of revenge and making sure that sleeping dogs lie. Indeed, it opens with Roy killing a dog that Carl doesn’t have the stomach to put out of its misery. He has always been the protector, the problem-solver, who looks out for Carl and cleans up his messes. In the present day, Carl has just returned from abroad to the podunk Norwegian hamlet where Roy leads an undistinguished life as a gas station manager and a mechanic. Carl, true to form, has a dangerously stunning wife, Shannon, and a new mess in mind: a real estate development scheme that threatens to excavate the worst of the Opgard family secrets.
But this account isn’t quite fair to Carl, whose life was set in downward motion by grown-up iniquity when the brothers were still children. If Carl is an inveterate screw-up and Roy is a Machiavellian thug posing as a simpleton, their circumstances deserve some of the blame. The central mystery: How did Ma and Pa Opgard end up dead in a Cadillac at the bottom of a ravine? And isn’t it odd that the sheriff investigating this accident drowned shortly thereafter? And, come to think of it, why does the son of that sheriff, now the sheriff himself, seem hell-bent on spoiling Carl’s plans for a mountainside resort, the loan for which is secured by the townspeople’s grazing land?
Much of our American crime writing takes place in big cities, and the biggest names in the game are closely associated with their cities: Think James Ellroy’s Los Angeles or Elmore Leonard’s Detroit. But small-town crime affords its own pleasures. Urban space furnishes blind alleys for a detective to get lost in; urban anonymity can help you get away with murder. The Opgards’ Os, an icy doomscape left behind by modernity, replaces space and anonymity with claustrophobia and surveillance. Not even Roy, with the greatest incentive to keep his head down, can resist stepping in when he suspects one of his customers is being sexually abused. What’s the use of hiding your misdeeds if everyone knows your psychology and behavior well enough to put the puzzle pieces together?
The sexual dysfunction at the gnarled heart of The Kingdom is handled with unusual sobriety and delicacy for a book such as this. It belongs with Jim Thompson’s The Grifters as a study of how people try and fail to escape their traumatic pasts. Come to think of it, the sociopathic sheriff masquerading as a folksy dimwit in Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me is the blueprint for Roy, even if Roy is slightly more sympathetic. Nesbo knows the tradition he’s working in, inside and out.
Thompson’s real life was closer to the milieu he wrote about, though, and it must be said that Nesbo occasionally overcompensates for how well-adjusted and successful he must really be. There are violent set pieces, such as a character wearing a dead man’s scalp and a body dissolved in automotive cleaning solution, that are just this side of over the top. But overall, the book, with its steady accretion of sexual jealousies and betrayals, its shifting rivalries and alliances, has a firm grasp of its subject: the facade of civilization and the animal urges and survival strategies that lie beneath it.
Carl and Roy are the sort of tough guys that have always been crime writing’s stock in trade, but they are complicated even by crime writing’s standard. These men are victims, but they’re far from justified. Yet as readers of sagas such as the Njala know all too well, there is great pleasure in watching problem solvers solve problems by any means necessary. Nesbo is as capable as the anonymous authors of those sagas were of inventing catastrophes almost too quickly for his characters to outrun them.
This is what The Kingdom has most in common with the northern saga tradition. It focuses on the tension between social order and the Darwinian machinations of people governed by greed, desperation, and passion. It is appropriate that the literal facade of Carl and Shannon’s doomed resort becomes a plot point. Shannon, an architect in the vein of Frank Lloyd Wright or Howard Roark, won’t stand for nostalgic regional touches such as carved trolls and artificial logs. Her vision, like Nesbo’s, is of the frozen mountain of human nature: concrete and glass. A sight to behold, if we can stand it.