Weekly best seller list for Scandinavian Crime Fiction

[Ehsan Ehsani]

Thanks to a tattooed, adventurous , bisexual computer hacker named Lisbeth Salander, Scandinavian crime fiction is now one of the most popular categories among mystery readers around the world. So far Noir-flavored books from Scandinavia have sold more than 6 million copies in the United States and 35 million copies worldwide and have become a publishing phenomenon.

Given the increasing interest in the Nordic works of crime fiction, Mystery Tribune has started to release the list of Best Sellers in this category, based on the sales data in the United States. The list is updated on a weekly basis and separate Top 5 lists are also provides for titles from Denamrk, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden. For viewing the individual country lists, please click here.

[Ehsan Ehsani]

Hi Cammy,

 

I think you have reason in some parts of your arguments. Working in the financial industry I know that when you have a product like film or book which has become successful, the probability of success (meaning sales volume) for similar titles/sequels tremendously increases. That's why we see Terminator 1, 2, 3 or Star Wars as a series and the same goes with the book.

Publishing houses are for profit entities and I think we shouldn't blaim them for this. In respect to Scandinavian crime, if there was no substance in writings of the new authors, the books wouldn't stick. So I think there was some good work of fiction being produced there and people didn't know about it. Stieg Larsson gave some of the authors the chance to become more visible...Many of them like Henning Mankell were already famous even before the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. 

 

Also this is not the first time this is happening: From Historical perspective, it happened to British Crime fiction, South American Literature and Belgian as well.  

 

One interesting dynamic is ebook trends: Scandinavian authors have low presence there because they are small countries. That might be one area to compete for authors.

[Cammy May Hunnicutt]

I sometimes get the impression that the book industry is hiring burnouts from Hollywood.  THAT is where I expect to see people thinking "Hey, we had a hit with that Swedish mystery, so let's slam out more mysteries from Sweden."

Instead of something like, "Hey, got any really great hacker characters?"  or something that makes some sort of sense.  Was it being in Scandinavia that made this a great story?   Not hardly.

I really liked the movie "Man on Fire" and I saw it in Cancun with some Mexican writers and ex-pats with some time in country.  They were really impressed with how well the film captured nuances of Mexican crime and justice that most American writers miss while they are cartoonifying the country up.  Same goes for "Traffic"--the scenes in Mexico, at least.

I found out both films were based on novels written in and about Europe.  

So... what's the point in this?   Why not try to identify what people liked and try to get more of THAT?

Or are the readers so stupid they are gobbling up ScandiFiction hoping to get something else like the Dragon Tat girl?  Which is pretty unlikely.