Contemporary French and Scandinavian Crime Fiction. Citizenship, Gender and Ethnicity.

Anne Grydehøj Contemporary French and Scandinavian Crime Fiction. Citizenship, Gender and Ethnicity, Cardiff : University of Wales Press, 2021.

Anne Grydehøj's study deals with crime fiction written in France and Scandinavia from 1965 to 2021 (the year when the book was published) and gives detailed analyses of 12 novels. The "detective story" as a genre has undergone significant transformations, in both content and form, since it emerged in the middle of the 19th century. Grydehøj views those transformations not as a result of accumulative development, but as "generic revolutions", which in turn are "bound to socio-historical critical moments" (p. 19). That basic assumption is neither a thesis to be demonstrated nor an unquestioned postulate. Instead, the author focuses on crime novels that fit into her perspective. Nevertheless, she points out that while being products of their time, they are generally not just passive reflections: they also play an active part in contemporary societies. They engage on contemporary topics and critically analyse the – often unspoken – rules that underpin the reality they observe, thus contributing to general debates going on in their countries. "These exponents of the genre function as catalysts in various ways" (p. 44).

The generic revolution of the crime story begins in the 1960s and accelerates in the wake of the 1968 students' protest movements. The genre takes on political positions, it turns "from viewing crime as an expression of an individual aberration to understanding crime as a manifestation of social malaise" (p. 16). At first, critique is mainly aimed at the state and its institutions, viewed as supporting capitalism and the social injustice it induces. Simultaneously, the new brand of the genre challenges the traditional form of detective fiction. Due to those developments, its status is heightened from low-brow entertainment to high-brow literature.

Grydehøj analyses novels in the context of their national culture. Each crime fiction writer deals with general questions on the background of the image that the nation has formed of itself. At the outset, France is associated with "republican universalism", while Scandinavians identify their countries with the welfare state. The national difference produces differences both in the content and in the form of fictions.

The 56 years between 1965 and 2021 are not a homogenous time. A change in political expectations and debates takes place around 1980. Part I of the book is dedicated to the first period, parts II and III to the second. The 1960s and 1970s are characterized by a politically leftist and anti-establishment revolt, by demands for more social justice and redistribution. The corresponding crime stories may be qualified as "modernistic" or, as Grydehøj suggests, "pre-postmodernistic". Postmodernity enters crime fiction after 1980, at a time when the main demand no longer is redistribution but recognition; then, identity issues become dominant. Part II deals with "Gender and Genre", Part III with "Cultures in Migration".

In Part I, Grydehøj analyses Jean-Patrick Manchette's Nada (1972, _I_Nada_i_) and Maj Sjöwall's and Per Wahlöö's Roseanna (1965, _I_Roseanna_i_) and Den vedervärdige mannen från Säffle (1971, _I_The Abominable Man_i_). Nada is in the first place an attack on "the repressive power of the bourgeoisie as the dominant class feeding on the global economic order of capitalism" (p. 29). It focuses more on the perpetrators than the police and partly blurs their respective roles. Den vedervärdige mannen från Säffle has the traditional form of the police procedural, but the figure of the detective is replaced by a collective of investigators, whose work exposes the formerly hidden power structures. The transformation of crime fiction by Manchette and Sjöwall/Wahlöö is inspired by the hard-boiled American tradition and the roman noir, or polar, in France and by the police procedural in Scandinavia. The ensuing two sub-genres have been richly used up until today.

The book then deals with two novels belonging to those new sub-genres, Dominique Manotti's Bien connu des services de police (2010, _I_Known to Law Enforcement_i_) and Arne Dahl's Europa Blues (2001, _I_Europa Blues_i_). The focus has then shifted from a socialist perspective, where the central problem was redistribution, to the question of identity, or identities. Historically, that question emerges in the 1980s and gets more and more attention after 1989 and the beginning of globalisation. In France and Scandinavia, the representation of a homogenous nation state loses its validity and legitimacy. In France, the old national representation of the country as the universalist republic of equal citizens, defined regardless of ethnicity or religion or gender, collides with particularisms asking for legal recognition. In Scandinavia, the image of the nations as homes of the welfare state is threatened by increasing "heterogenous external forces" (p. 83). Manotti's and Dahl's books discuss changing societies, focusing on inherent problematics in the first case and external developments in the second.

The emphasis of Grydehøj's study lies on questions of identities, to which three quarters of the book are dedicated. Having exposed the issue in its general terms, she proceeds to an examination of different types of unrecognized, or problematically recognized identities, as they are depicted in crime fictions.

Part II of the book is centred on gender and sexual identities. It looks back at the tradition of the polar au féminin (in France) and the femikrimi (in Scandinavia). The terms have never been clearly defined, they may refer to texts written by women, or for women, or with a woman as the main investigator – or to all that together. Grydehøj demonstrates how authors use the genre to deal with gender and sexuality. She analyses Anne Holt's Salige er de som tørster (1994, _I_Blessed are Those Who Thirst_i_) and Det som aldri skjer (2004, _I_The Final Murder_i_) and Maud Tabachnik's Un été pourri (1994, _I_A Rotten Summer_i_). Tabachnik's fiction represents women committing crimes to avenge oppression they had to suffer, as a response to male dominance and violence. Holt's texts are written in a Scandinavian context where gender inequality is supposed to belong to the past and practical problems can be discussed peacefully; her characters are thus significantly less confrontational than Tabachnik's.

The prostitute is an important figure in the polars au féminin and femikrimis. Traditionally, she is a symbol of female submission and marginalisation. In Katarina Wennstam's Smuts (2007, _I_Dirt_i_), the (mostly Eastern-European) prostitutes are depicted as submissive objects. The reader never gets to know their point of view. Grydehøj interprets the novel as a metaphor representing the "penetration" of Sweden and its welfare state by globalisation and "raw capitalism" (p. 129). She also notes that Smuts is rather close to the police procedural in its form. On the other hand, in Virginie Despentes's Baise-moi (1994, _I_Baise-moi_i_), things are seen through prostitutes' eyes, and they are consciously and practically discussing gender and sexuality in a male dominated society. Despentes's text proceeds to a radical disturbance of the common notion of gender – and disturbs the form of the polar as well. Whereas Wennstam describes submission, Despentes promotes subversion. "[T]he discussion of [...] gender and sexuality in the Scandinavian examples is addressed from a central and non-controversial position [...]. The French crime novels [...] articulate their critique from a peripheral position with a subjectification of the marginalised as an essential feature." (p. 141–142)

Grydehøj means that a similar peripheral position is to be found again in the discussion of ethnic and cultural issues by French polars. The first chapter of part III is called "Bled and Banlieue in French Crime Fiction". Turning to the postcolonial crime fiction, the author analyses examples of the polar francophone, a crime novel written in the Francophonie (French speaking areas outside France) and of the polar urbain, located in a city, or rather in the outskirts of the city, in suburban neighbourhoods. Grydehøj points out that Francophone literature is depending on the metropolitan (actually, mostly Parisian) publishing system and often marginalised by that system. The book she then deals with is Roger Fodjo's, a Cameroonian author's, Les Poubelles du palais (2011, _I_The Bins of the Palace_i_). The main character Cyprien Guézo, a Beninian student, is working on an archaeological excavation at the Versailles palace. He discovers a hidden inscription mentioning an African slave dating back from the 17th century. When he tries to investigate the past, he encounters on the part of French institutions a general will to silence him and keep everything possible secret. The "hidden", the "unnoticed" is a central element in France's relationship to its colonial history. The banlieue, the suburban areas, as shown in Rachid Santaki's Les Anges s'habillent en caillera (2011, _I_Angels Dress in Riff-Raff_i_), is also a blind spot in France's perception of itself. It is a separate space with its own rules, but also with a sense of community. The novel looks at it from an insider's perspective.

Both Fodjo and Santaki belong to former French colonies or ethnic minorities in France and write in French. In Scandinavia, crime fiction writers are almost exclusively "white, ethnic Scandinavian", even those who write about minorities. Grydehøj notes that in Henning Mankell's Wallander series, the protagonist often feels uneasy when confronted with members of minorities, and at the same time he tries to understand them and to adapt to the changes in his country. For him, Grydehøj means, the migrant is 'the Other', even when he shows understanding or solidarity. A decade later, there is no expression of nostalgia for the former brand of Scandinavian national identity in the crime novels of the Norwegian Roy Jacobsen and the Dane Paul Smith, authors of, respectively, Marions slør (2008, _I_Marion's veil_i_) and Mordet på imamen (2008, "The Murder of the Imam"). Both novels introduce the (Muslim) Other in the role of the investigator. Both use "counter-stereotypes", which make assimilation possible. But such images "unwittingly propagate an ethnocentric vision and reproduce some of the tropes that they themselves oppose" (p. 194). "[I]mmigrants are generally represented as anonymous and voiceless (Marions slør) or adapting to the normativity of the majority culture (Mordet på imamen)" (p. 196). Jacobsen's and Smith's novels express the wish, or maybe the possibility of a new form of welfare state, contrasting with Fodjo's and Santaki's texts which reflect critically and transformatively on the "republican model".

The identities described in the novels analysed by Grydehøj, whether they are gender or ethnic or religious or cultural identities, seem in many cases to be in the first place attempts to get rid of ready-made identities imposed by dominating stereotypes in the dominant society. Of course, one might doubt if such counter-identities are real identities.

Anne Grydehøj's study is not a history of the genre between 1965 and 2021, as it deliberately focuses on a few books and ignores others. It systematically parallels crime fiction with socio-historical phenomena. The criteria for the selection of the texts are slightly tautological. The author has chosen texts that make the parallel possible, and indeed quite convincing. Readers might mean that she is significantly more interested in newer questions of identities than in older concern with redistribution. On the other hand, the second period she examines (1980–2021) has actually produced much more modernistic and postmodernistic crime fiction than the first one. The genre has blossomed in over 40 years, a time of blossoming that also is the time when multiculturalism and questions of identities became more and more central in Europe. That simultaneity is noteworthy. And could be worth further research.