=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-2364/30_paper
|storemode=property
|title=The internationalization of Sjöwall and Wahlöö.
A quantitative study of Scandinavian Noir
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2364/30_paper.pdf
|volume=Vol-2364
|authors=Ovio Olaru
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/dhn/Olaru19
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==The internationalization of Sjöwall and Wahlöö.
A quantitative study of Scandinavian Noir==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2364/30_paper.pdf
The internationalization of Sjöwall and Wahlöö.
A quantitative study of Scandinavian Noir
Ovio Olaru
Institute for Scandinavian Languages and Literature
Babeș-Bolyai University
Horea Str. 31, Cluj-Napoca
o.v.olaru@iln.uio.no
olaru.ovio@gmail.com
Abstract: This paper aims to illustrate the pattern of internationalization of Scandinavian Noir, the popular trend that succeeded
in permeating popular culture in recent years. In doing this, we have chosen as starting point the now famous Swedish crime
fiction duo Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö. This paper attempts, on the one hand, to demonstrate that their popularity is not
merely a matter of critical consensus, but that it can be backed up by empirical data, and on the other hand, that the recent
revival of Scandinavian crime fiction pays homage to the two and acknowledges their contribution by critically reassessing
them and retranslating them to other languages. The present quantitative research aims at showing that their internationalization
also points to a shift in European cultural trends the likes of which has been noted by Pascale Casanova in her World Republic
of Letters, but not empirically demonstrated.
1. Introduction
Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö are generally considered the first internationally renowned
detective fiction authors from Scandinavia1. They have been invoked as such by many
researchers and the model they helped shape has proven itself greatly influential for the way in
which Scandinavian Noir has emerged and evolved. What we shall attempt to outline is the
general path of their translation to other countries. Their case will constitute an attempt to test
the long-held opinion that they represent the most exported authors of crime fiction from
Scandinavia before the emergence of Scandinavian Noir in the 2000s and, regardless of whether
or not we confirm this hypothesis, the test will be a success inasmuch as it will help us determine
the languages to which they have been translated the most.
Why is that relevant? First of all, Scandinavia in the 1960s – as the Swedish couple
began publishing their now famous Roman om ett brott – was relatively unknown on a global
cultural scale. Peripheral both from the point of view of political influence (with a population
of 7,48 million in 1960, relatively wealthy, but far from being the industrial Moloch that West
Germany was soon to become during the Wirtschaftswunder fueled by Turkish-imported
1 As claimed by nearly all researchers that have written about the phenomenon of crime fiction in Scandinavia, both before
the more recent internationalization, as well as in the 80s. The list includes Andrew Nestingen, Kerstin Bergman, Andrew
Pepper, Ellen Rees, Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen, Michael Tapper, Barry Forshaw, David Geherin, Bo Lund, Jost Hindersmann,
among others.
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workforce), as well as under the aspect of cultural production, Scandinavia’s only chance at
international literary recognition was bound to take place through the highly competitive and
demanding center. In the now famous yet extremely cynical words of Immanuel Wallerstein,
“fierce intercapitalist rivalry is the name of the game. And only the strongest and the most agile
survive.” [Wallerstein 27] Politics and economics aside, however, Pascale Casanova and
Franco Moretti are the ones that most convincingly show that, in order for peripheral literature
to exist beyond its borders, it must be validated by the center. Their contributions to the matter
are already a question of academic consensus. Since the center has historically delegated itself
as the sole entity capable of defining the concept of literary work (and, if we broaden our terms
of reference, of defining entire genres and delimiting literary periods2) and has thus laid claim
over the theoretical borders of literature as such, every translation from a peripheral language
to a language of canonical literary circulation becomes an acknowledgement of innate potential
or worth. Pascale Casanova:
Writers from languages that are not recognized (or are recognized only to a small degree) as literary are
not immediately eligible for consecration. The condition of their works’ being received into the literary
world is translation into a major literary language. [Casanova 135]
The center thus accepts, through translation, a literature that is simultaneously exotic enough to
be interesting and similar enough to be aesthetically comprehensible. Casanova again:
from the point of view of a major target language, […] the importation of literary texts written in «small»
languages or ones belonging to neglected literatures serves as a means of annexation, of diverting
peripheral works and adding them to the stock of central resources. [Casanova 135]
Returning to the crime fiction duo and to the question we set out to answer, identifying the
major languages to which Sjöwall and Wahlöö were translated can help us determine a series
of dominant cultural spheres in the decades following the publication of Roman om ett brott.
The patterns of internationalization the ten novels of the series have followed can accurately
point to the European literary centers at that time and – presumably – up to recent times, thus
making visible the cultural spheres that have imported and legitimized the periphery,
transforming its cultural production into a universal good, valuable to the extent that it
possessed recognizable traits and returned a slightly altered image of itself.
We have considered this element of self-recognition highly relevant. It arguably owes
its presence to the fact that Sjöwall and Wahlöö drew inspiration from the classic police
procedural, made famous by the likes of Ed McBain, by then already renowned and massively
read in the English-speaking world and several of whose books the couple had by then
translated to Swedish. And, as always when faced with very powerful foreign models of writing,
2 Regarding this, see also Arjun Appadurai’s concept of Eurochronology, mentioned in Modernity at large. Cultural
Dimensions of Globalization (University of Minnesota Press, London, 1996) and further discussed by Christopher
Prendergast (Prendergast 6).
335
an author belonging to the periphery can either copy and utilize the former’s formula to his own
means or, starting from it, develop a whole new mode of writing. We invoke Casanova again:
On the one hand there is assimilation, or integration within a dominant literary space through a dilution
or erasing of original differences; on the other, differentiation, which is to say the assertion of difference,
typically on the basis of a claim to national identity. [Casanova 179]
Between these two poles, Internationalization takes place, which is nothing more than the
assimilation of difference, the universalization of local materials, the ‘glocalization’ of
literature, bizarre as the term may sound:
Even the most purely popular crime fiction shares important features with elite works of world literature,
especially the characteristic of combining universal themes with local settings. At once highly stylized
and intensely localized, crime fiction is a preeminently “glocal” mode of literary creation and circulation.
[Damrosch, D´Haen, Nilsson 4]
With regard to commercial literature, this internationalization gains a totally different
momentum, and it is interesting to see how the dynamic of literary life expresses itself in this
case. While the reception of high literature is distorted firstly by preconceived ideas about the
concept of Literature as such and by the inherent delays of aesthetic approval via
institutionalized literary criticism, a literary work that seeks out and accepts the confines of a
commercial genre is to be enjoyed and validated immediately. In other words, a masterpiece of
high literature is the result of critical consensus, which may take years or decades to crystalize
and which can be quantified in terms of sales only after a certain period of time has passed.
More so, the so-called high literature is dependent on critical authority, which then influences
the book market in the same way that art critics decide the value of a painting whose inherent
worth is opaque to an outside viewer. In the case of commercial literature or genre literature, it
is solely the book market – expressed through readers’ preferences – that decides the value of
a literary work.
Ideally, we could quantify the relative effect of a literary production in terms of its
critical reception, its reviews, the immediate response that it generated within the cultural field
or, as is the case with crime fiction, within its readership. Nevertheless, crime fiction occupies
a whole different position in the hierarchy of literary production. A crime novel, irrespective of
its intrinsic literary qualities, remains subdued to the logic and needs of the book market. As it
is, it is rather a literary product than a literary work of art. Its aesthetic dimension lingers in the
background and is brought into question barely as the works begin to gain appreciation within
an increasing circle of connoisseurs. Whereas intentionally aesthetic and literary (in contrast to
the commercial) works are validated through cultural institutions and by voices with critical
authority, crime fiction goes through a process of internal canonization. It is the crime fiction
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authors themselves who read other crime novelists, and their personal tastes, expressed in
interviews or through intertextual referencing, bring the aforementioned authors to new light.
This concept corresponds, in part, to David Damrosch’s shadow canon3, a body of literary
works which exist simultaneously with hypercanonical literary productions, yet who
remain unknown despite their value, which is opaque to the general public.
The entire 20th century was dominated by an unseen and barely remembered
canon, made up by the detective and the dime novel, a corpus of literary works that took no
heed to the literary masterpieces hailed by highbrow literary criticism. The 20th century
remembers two hundred books that have helped shape literary evolution. Let us say five
hundred. Or let us concede to a thousand. It is all the same, since these books, however
valuable, cannot possibly compete with the tens of highly popular weekly series of thriller
and detective novels that appeared all throughout the century in nearly every European
country. Millions of books were published, millions were read weekly, monthly, yearly. In
contrast to the historically determined ‚Great Unread’, which is to say, books that have
never come to the focus of contemporary literary critics, or that have mainly gone
unnoticed even in the eyes of their contemporaries, crime fiction represents ‘The Great
Read’: a resource so generally accessed that it became superfluous; a body of works
encompassing hundreds of thousands of titles, an even greater number of translations and,
more importantly, millions of sales. A resource spanning approximately a century, but
that has yet to be fully indexed and researched. A transnational phenomenon unfolding
parallel to the official canon reinforced by literary criticism, yet infinitely more
successful.
The names that stuck? Dashiell Hemmett, Raymond Chandler, P.D. James, the
American hardboiled tradition and, of course, Agatha Christie. Moving locally, each
country has its Doyle. Friedrich Dürrenmatt in Germany, Georges Simenon in France,
the British Agatha Christie, the Swedish Maria Lang and an incommensurable list of
authors who were massively read and enjoyed, yet remain unknown. The German Desch-
Verlag sold 1,5 million books in the three years between 1958 and 1961, in its
Midnight Books series (Mitternachtsbücher). [Schmidt-Henkel 151]. An approximate
number for the German book market in 1971 would point towards 15 million sold copies.
[Schmidt-Henkel 151]. Even earlier, as the Luftwaffe was bombing London during the
nightly raids of 1940, the capital’s eight million inhabitants were forced to take shelter
in the city’s now legendary Tube, the underground metro system. Difficult at first, life
shortly took on the face of normality. People exchanged goods, developed a strong sense of
community and solidarity in the face of adversity,
3 David Damrosch, World Literature in a Postcanonical, Hypercanonical Age, in Haun Saussy (ed.), Comparative
Literature in an Age of Globalization. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore (2006), 43-53.
337
but most importantly, they passed the time. What did they do for the long hours when they
could neither sleep because of the noise nor move because of other people similarly trying to
rest? They read detective novels. [Haycraft vii].
In case of Sjöwall and Wahlöö, employing text-mining tools on literary reviews
assessing their reception in different parts of the world would be ideal, yet extremely difficult.
Moreover, the effort of such an endeavor would most probably not outweigh the end-results.
And that is because: 1. There was probably hardly anything written about Sjöwall and Wahlöö
in the European (non-Swedish, that is) cultural press of that time, considering the fact that
it represented such a narrow selection among other works of translated literature. More than
that, book reviews dedicated to translations tend to occupy a rather small portion of national
literary criticism, usually more prone to focus on autochthonous works of literature. 2.
Secondly, not nearly all of the literary magazines that would have hosted such reviews have
been meanwhile digitized in European countries, not to mention countries outside of Europe.
If they have been, it would be difficult to hierarchize them in order of relevance within the
respective cultural system and within their respective theme of interest (which are the most
visible and relevant Czech literary magazines dedicated to crime fiction, for example?) 3.
Thirdly and lastly, even if all this material would be digitized and open-access, the text-
mining tool would require from our part at least a basic knowledge of the language in
question for us to be able to rigorously and correctly assess whether or not the reviews were
critical, appreciative or neutral. In light of this, the only real indicator of their overall success
is the number of times they were reprinted, how many translations they enjoyed, how many
languages they reached. We are dealing, as previously stated, with a literary genre with a
profoundly mercantile character, whose only end-goal is revenue and whose quantifying
agent is sales. The interest in Sjöwall and Wahlöö is directly proportional to the number of
languages they reached and to the number of reprints they enjoyed internationally.
Hypotheses
Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s books are interesting and worthy of being put into perspective because
of several reasons. First of all, the distribution of Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s translations from 1962
to 1989 in a Europe deeply polarized and partly dominated by communist regimes has the
potential of exposing key ideological positions both in regard to foreign crime fiction, as well
as in regard to the literary export of a democratic country such as Sweden. Admittedly, in order
to visualize the magnitude to which democratic countries managed to export their cultural
production to countries belonging to the Communist East, or rather which enclaves of foreign
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literature were deemed suitable for import in Communist states requires the study of a relevant
control group, a literary corpus against which we could then compare the performance of
Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s series in Communist countries. Since that would constitute a project too
ambitious for the confines of this paper, we will limit our ambitions to questioning whether a
difference between performance in a communist vs. in a non-communist land truly exists. As
pointed out by nearly all those who have discussed Sjöwall and Wahlöö in their contributions,
the duo has consistently expressed a great deal of Marxist-Leninist critique in regard to both
the welfare state and the increasingly growing Americanization of Swedish society. Did their
ideological position and implicit anathematization of capitalism influence the way they were
received by countries with communist regimes? This is a question that begs an answer, but that
will sadly be addressed another day.
Secondly, once a cultural phenomenon starts to grow in popularity, a tendency to inquire
and bring to light that what led to its emergence makes itself clear. Several of the popular
Scandinavian crime fiction authors today have named Sjöwall and Wahlöö as a powerful
influence on their writing and character creation. Is there an increase in recent translations of
the two visible since Scandinavian Noir started to reach an international readership?
Thirdly and lastly, did other Nordic authors contemporary or prior to Sjöwall and
Wahlöö enjoy such a great, if any, international success? Did the interest in their writing
encounter a revival after the year 2000, such as presumably is the case with the two? If the
answer is yes, it becomes clear that the two, albeit acknowledged as the most influential within
the genre, are not the single inspiration for the new wave of crime fiction authors from
Scandinavia. If, on the other hand, they have been the only ones to enjoy new editions and
translations in recent times, the claim to their exceptionality holds true.
2. Steps
First of all, we shall create a list of autochthonous editions of the now famous 10-volume novel
Roman om ett brott, as to see how the novel performed internally. Since the number of copies
sold within the Swedish market corresponding to each of the ten books is hardly an available
information, we shall be looking at the number of reprints each of them enjoyed in order to
grossly quantify their success. We will then analyze this in comparison to other Swedish crime
authors that made their debut prior or around 1965, the year the first Swedish edition of Sjöwall
and Wahhlöö’s Roseanna was published, and see how their books performed over time. A
second stage will then logically include an analysis of international performance. By looking at
339
how and where the novels were translated, we will put the general claim that the duo
represents the most translated and internationally renowned Scandinavian crime fiction
authors of the second half of the 20th century to the test.
Secondly, what is the background against which we choose to compare the two?
Which are the crime fiction authors whose works constituted a stable enough canon during the
1960s as to be reshaped by the two? We have identified these authors in the same way
we have identified Sjöwall and Wahlöö as the most cited and invoked names in the genre,
namely by consulting a series of researchers, scanning their bibliographies and observing
the recurrent names on which they idled in their considerations.4 For the Swedish history of
crime fiction, the following authors have been most often named: Prins Pierre (pen
name of Fredrik Lindholm, considered by Bo Lundin the first ever Swedish author of
detection fiction), Robinson Wilkins (pen name of Harald Johnsson), S. A. Duse, Jul Regis
(Julius Petterson), Frank Heller, Maria Lang, Vic Suneson, H-K. Rönblom, Stieg Trenter
and several others. These authors are so-called classics, authors that have first of all written
consistently within the genre’s conventions and, secondly, which had come to be regarded as
uncontested figures in Swedish crime fiction prior to the two. We concede to the fact that
we have been unusually generous in choosing these authors, precisely so as to have the
broadest control group possible, yet not so broad so that a comparison becomes redundant.
We have included the classics – and a few more. We have refrained from including
authors that have been only superficially discussed. This has proven to be a correct
decision, since attempting to search after their books in the catalogues of the Kungliga
Biblioteket (The National Library of Sweden) returned modest, if any, results.
Thirdly, what are the main lines along which we shall pursue the two research objects
we aim to compare, the ‘before S&W’ and the ‘S&W duo’, as it were? The first one is inherent
to any study on evolution, be it biological, historical or literary. Time. We shall refer to the
yearly distribution of editions, regardless if they are first editions, first translations or reprints.
The second axis is place. Now, regarding the second axis: in nearly every small or middle-sized
country, the entire book publishing industry is dominated by a small number of book publishing
houses, usually located in the country’s capital. Does it matter if Sjöwall and Wahlöö were
published more in Stockholm than in Göteborg? Hardly. Does it matter if the strongly
politicized Roman om ett brott was reprinted more times in Leipzig than in Berlin? As we have
previously mentioned, it most surely does, since Leipzig was then part of East Germany (The
German Democratic Republic, to be exact), while Berlin aligned itself politically with the
4 As they are to be found in the following books:
Skei, Hans. H.:Blodig alvor. Om kriminallitteraturen, Aschehoug, Oslo (2008).
Bergman, Kerstin: Swedish Crime Fiction. The making of Nordic Noir. Mimesis International, Milan (2014). Broberg, Jan:
Mord för ro skull. Deckarens debut och dilemma. Bo Cavefors Bokförlag, Malmö (1964). Heggelund, Kjell, Nordberg, Nils
(eds.), Kriminallitteraturen, Gyldendal Norsk Forlag, Oslo (1978).
K., Arne Blom (ed.): Tankar om mord. Zindermans, Göteborg (1978).
Broberg, Jan: Mordisk Familjebok. Zindermans, Göteborg (1972).
340
Western, truly democratic Federal Republic of Germany. As we can see, the matter is more
complicated than simply assigning a number of editions and reprints to a certain cultural space,
be it based on language or location.
3. Research methodology
In researching the Swedish crime fiction classics prior to Sjöwall and Wahlöö, we have relied
on data provided by LIBRIS, the Swedish library search provider run by The National Library
of Sweden.5 LIBRIS is a joint catalogue covering all the Swedish academic and research
libraries, updated daily and whose database covers 6.5 million titles. In researching the process
of internationalization undergone by Roman om ett brott, we have chosen first to turn our
attention to the Karlsruher Virtueller Katalog6. We have made several specialized searches
using criteria such as country of publication and language and then followed the links to each
and every national library indexed in the KVK catalogue, so as to obtain a more accurate search
result. We have then mined the bibliographical data from the online catalogues of 32 countries
(including Sweden) with the help of Zotero, as well as with the Zotero Chrome Plugin. Each
book entry mined by Zotero included several information, only a few of which were of
particular interest for this research: the original and the translated title, author number 1 and
author number 2 (author 3 as translator in the particular case of Sjöwall and Wahlöö, otherwise
the translator was listed as the second author), language, publication year, publication place,
publishing house and the particular catalogue from where it was obtained. We have then
exported the Zotero entries as CSV extensions and imported them in separate Excel worksheets
where, after eliminating duplicate entries, we organized the tables based on city of publication.
From then on, the process of generating graphs and visualizing the patterns of translation was
fairly simple.
4. The graphs
We unsurprisingly begin by analyzing the market performance of the classical crime fiction
authors of Scandinavia, the control group against which we shall then compare Roman om ett
brott. The analysis returned the graph bellow:
5 LIBRIS homepage, http://libris.kb.se/, last accessed 2018/09/20.
6 The Karlsruher Virtueller Katalog
homepagettps://kvk.bibliothek.kit.edu/?kataloge=NB_UNGARN&digitalOnly=0&embedFulltitle=0&newTab=0,
last accessed 2018/10/02.
341
Before Sjöwall and Wahlöö (based on country)
1200
1000
800
600
400
200
0
Fig.2. Distribution of translations of classic Swedish crime fiction authors based on land.
If we leave out Sweden entirely, since all the books we are currently taking into consideration
are written by Swedish authors in Swedish, only Denmark, Germany, Norway, Finland, The
Netherlands, France, the Czech Republic, the UK, the former USSR and a few others, which
constitute a barely noticeable rest, remain. As for the internationalization of Sjöwall and
Wahlöö, it can be visualized in the graph bellow:
Internationalization of Sjöwall and Wahlöö
250
200
150
100
50
0
The Czech…
USA
France
Turkey
Iceland
Latvia
Denmark
Israel
Serbian
Italy
Norway
Hungary
Spain
Russia
Poland
China
Croatia
Korea
Ukraine
Germany
England
Japan
Slovenia
Catalunia
Sweden
Slovakia
The Netherlands
Portugal
Estonia
Lithuania
Finland
Romanian
Fig. 3. Distribution of translations of Sjöwall and Wahlöö based on land.
For now, let us concentrate on whether or not there is a noticeable difference between authors
preceding Sjöwall and Wahlöö and the particular success of the two. Authors preceding Sjöwall
and Wahlöö had an input of 976 Swedish editions and an output of 897 translations. This gives
us a 91,9% return rate. That means that, on average, for nearly every book published in Sweden
there was one corresponding translation available to foreign readers. As for Sjöwall and Wahlöö
themselves, their input surprises through its modesty. 194 Swedish editions spanning 1965 to
2018. The difference between this and the input corresponding to the authors preceding them
342
is easily explainable, firstly through the fact that in the latter case we are considering several
authors, while the former is regarded as one single author, and secondly through the
considerably wider time span across which the authors preceding Sjöwall and Wahlöö are
distributed. The single most important fact that we must not forget is that the control group we
have chosen had at the time of the duo’s debut already amassed a considerable symbolic capital.
Nonetheless, the real surprise occurs when we take a look at the rest of the graph. Albeit
having merely 194 Swedish editions, Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s international output amounts to
729 editions, representing a 375% increase in number. This means that, for each edition of
Roman om ett brott in the original Swedish, 3,75 translations were published. The graph speaks
for itself:
Comparison of editions
1200
1000
800
600
400
200
0
Swedish Translations
Authors before Sjöwall and Wahlöö Sjöwall and Wahlöö
Fig.4. Comparison of international performance.
What this tells us is that, first of all, authors preceding Sjöwall and Wahlöö performed quite
poorly on an international level. Strictly speaking, their internationalization was not necessarily
limited to European countries (Kerstin Ekman, for example, enjoyed a Japanese translation in
1998, and several of the books in question were published in New York), but in quantitative
terms, the dominant areas of distribution are either Germany or the three other Scandinavian
countries in Sweden’s immediate vicinity, Denmark, Norway and Finland. France is situated
further down the list, with 31 translated novels. In stark contrast to this, the duo owes its
internationalization to several European countries, yet to none of the Scandinavian states so
eager to translate the previous Swedish classics. Denmark occupies a mere fifth place in the
hierarchy of translations, Finland seventh place and Norway eighth place.
343
In other words, whereas the classical crime fiction authors enjoyed a local distribution,
proving to be significantly more popular in the Scandinavian world than in the rest of Europe,
the countries where Sjöwall and Wahlöö were most translated are Germany, the Netherlands,
the Czech Republic and England. Let us consider them step by step, beginning with the latter.
In England, Sjöwall and Wahlöö enjoyed 70 editions, whereas the classic authors
preceding them only reached 22. In Czechoslovakia/The Czech Republic, the duo reached 58
editions, while the classic authors amassed merely 26. We must idle here for a second and
make a few observations. The fact that Czechoslovakia, a land that between 1948 and 1993
was part of the Eastern Bloc, welcomed so many translations of Sjöwall and Wahlöö, is truly
a surprise. We have previously casted a doubt over the importance of ideology in translating
Sjöwall and Wahlöö to communist countries. We must however concede that the subject of
translation in sensitive political contexts is too complex to be addressed here, albeit it
would be very interesting to see whether or not the cliché of the fully self-sufficient
communist literature holds true also in regard to commercial literature. Is the preconceived
idea that countries belonging to the Soviet Bloc saturate all enclaves of national literature
with translations from Russian actually true? The example set here by Czechoslovakia would
lead us to think otherwise.
Regarding the Netherlands, the classic authors enjoyed 80 Dutch translations. Sjöwall
and Wahlöö totaled 77. In Germany, the 10+ classic crime fiction authors, with
translations distributed over the course of nearly a century, amassed a total of 137 editions.
Comparatively, over a considerably shorter time span, the Sjöwall and Wahlöö duo has
enjoyed 128 German translations. For a single author, that is indeed enormous. Albeit the
British, the Dutch and the Czech editions together suffice in demonstrating without a doubt
the fact that the two have surpassed all of the authors preceding them in terms of popularity
and European distribution, it also shows that the main reason for this unprecedented success
represents their entry on the German book market.
The following graph illustrates the yearly distribution of the duo’s books, both internally
as well as in translation:
344
Swedish and foreign editions of Sjöwall and Wahlöö
40
30
20
10
0
1995
1965
1967
1969
1971
1973
1975
1977
1979
1981
1983
1985
1987
1989
1991
1993
1997
1999
2001
2003
2005
2007
2009
2011
2013
2015
2017
Translations Swedish editions
Fig. 5. Swedish and translated editions of Sjöwall and Wahlöö
The two have unsurprisingly begun to enjoy significant popularity starting with 1976, when
the last of the novels belonging to the series was finally published (Terroristerna, in the
Swedish original). It had already enjoyed a significant number of translations during the 70s,
as the graph suggests. The 80s saw a decrease in Swedish editions, but a surprising spike in
translations in the decade’s latter half. Yet by the beginning of the 1990s, it seems that
both the Swedish readership, as well as international audiences had forgotten the two, since
both Swedish, as well as translated titles fall behind. It is only starting with 2002 that the two
enjoy new international retranslations, and the period between 2003 and 2012 proves to be the
most fruitful. Yet, nota bene, this occurs only in regard to translations, since the number of
Swedish editions does not change.
The reason for this spike has already been mentioned and does not come as a surprise.
The period grossly corresponds to the birth of Scandinavian Noir, the transnational
cultural phenomenon that has swept through Europe since the turn of the century and has in
short time developed a cult following. One of the reasons for this cult – albeit we will not
idle on the subject – is the existence of highly professional book markets that prompt
immediate and quality translations of foreign literature, which in turn quickly make their way
to the shelves, are expertly marketed and consequently sell at an incredible pace. This well-
planned strategy for the dynamization of the book market is the reason behind the massive
success of Stieg Larson in Germany, whose Millenium trilogy was translated and
published as paperback between 2007 and 2009 and became an instant bestseller for a total
of 482 weeks7. Moretti:
What more powerful agent of selection can there be than the choices of contemporary readers? Sure, there
are publishing, and distribution, and their various appendices (reviewing, advertising, etc.); but even in
the film industry, where their role is clearly much greater than in the book market of a century ago,
genuine hits don't acquire their typical momentum when these external pressures are at their strongest
(that is to say, right away), but only weeks later, when they have largely been replaced by a chain of
informal exchanges. [Moretti 141]
7 According to Buchreport Express, a weekly magazine that compiles general information about the German publishing
industry, financial statistics and the bestseller lists featured in Der Spiegel, Spiegel Online and Literatur Spiegel, three of the
most trustworthy German publications. https://buchreport.de, last accessed 2018/09/20.
345
Returning to the two authors in question, perhaps the most striking fact is that there have been
more translations in recent years than there have been in the decade following the books’ initial
publication in Sweden, which serves to prove that the correlation between the rise of
Scandinavian noir and the revisiting of Roman om ett brott cannot be treated as a fortunate
coincidence or as a naturally random occurrence in the dynamic of translated literature. Indeed,
as we have previously claimed, the success of a literary or cultural trend raises questions about
its evolution, ultimately leading to a critical reassessment of its origins. The same cannot be
said about the Swedish crime fiction classics, whose international performance do not enjoy a
spike in recent years. The following two graphs illustrate the total performance of Sjöwall and
Wahlöö, as well as that of their classic counterparts, both within the Swedish book market, as
well as in translation.
Swedish classics
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
1985
1999
1965
1967
1969
1971
1973
1975
1977
1979
1981
1983
1987
1989
1991
1993
1995
1997
2001
2003
2005
2007
2009
2011
2013
2015
2017
Fig. 6. Yearly distribution of Swedish classic crime fiction authors’ editions prior to Sjöwall and Wahlöö
346
Sjöwall and Wahlöö
50
45
40
35
30
25
20
15
10
5
0
1977
2017
1965
1967
1969
1971
1973
1975
1979
1981
1983
1985
1987
1989
1991
1993
1995
1997
1999
2001
2003
2005
2007
2009
2011
2013
2015
Fig. 6. Yearly distribution of Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s editions
We shall not be looking at the numbers, but at the abnormal mutations over time, and we shall
be referring only at the period spanning 1965 and the present time, because of obvious reasons.
Whereas the classics encounter a general increase in total published editions between 1989 and
2004, approximately, Sjöwall and Wahlöö encounter a spike precisely beginning with 2005, a
spike that lasts for approximately ten years. Which is to say, as the classics succumb and cease
to be reprinted, the two are reclaimed by contemporary readerships and their literary value is
once again confirmed through critical consensus. In this way, our main hypothesis is now
confirmed: the crime duo Sjöwall and Wahlöö is indeed the greatest influence on the authors
belonging to the contemporary Scandinavian crime fiction scene.
It hardly comes as a surprise. However, to a certain extent, precisely this is the scope of
Digital Humanities. Deconstructing or confirming preconceived ideas, correcting long-held
claims once made by figures of critical authority, which have survived uncontested, have been
quoted, repeated and soon became regarded as fact. Which brings us to another fact. At the very
beginning of this paper, we have mentioned Pascale Casanova in regard to the different power
plays that are enacted between the literary center and the periphery. In her book, The World
Republic of Letters, France plays a crucial role as historical literary center for the entire world.
French was the language that dethroned Latin as lingua franca of literary exchange and
recognition, Paris soon afterwards became the symbolic center of cultural production. With
time, argues Casanova very convincingly, French imposed itself as a literary language par
347
excellence, meaning that literature, in order to be regarded as such, need to pass through a
process of littérisation:
Literary transmutation is achieved by crossing a magic frontier that allows a text composed in
an unprestigious language – or even a nonliterary language, which is to say one that either does
not exist or is unrecognized in the verbal marketplace – to pass into a literary language.
Accordingly, I define littérisation as any operation – translation, self-translation, transcription,
direct composition in the dominant language – by means of which a text from a literary deprived
country comes to be regarded as literary by the legitimate authorities. [Casanova 136]
Yet both in the case of the Swedish classic crime fiction authors, as well as in the case of Sjöwall
and Wahlöö, the French translations represented a very modest portion of the overall sum of
the translations. That is to say, the duo’s internationalization took place not through the French
cultural sphere, as the pervasive idea of French cultural hegemony would make us think, but
through the German one. Casanova’s claim that “certain languages, by virtue of the prestige of
the texts written in them, are reputed to be more literary than others, to embody literature”
[Casanova 17] continues to hold true, yet the lacking French reception of the duo raises an
important question.
A hypothetical counterargument regarding the proliferation of commercial literature is
that different cultural spheres are more prone than others to cultivate certain enclaves of popular
literature. Casanova’s claim regarding the exceptionality of French Letters sui generis perhaps
holds true also at a formal level, in the sense that French literature, for example, regards certain
genres as trivial, or that the French everyman does not indulge in the guilty pleasure of reading
detective novels. Yet, according to a report authored by Armelle Vincent Gerard and Natacha
Chomet and commissioned by the Centre National Du Livre, titled Les Français et la lecture
(http://www.centrenationaldulivre.fr/fichier/p_ressource/13913/ressource_fichier_fr_les.frana.
ais.et.la.lecture.2017.03.20.ok.pdf), 43% of all books read in France during 2015 were detective
novels. According to the same study, 91% of French citizens had read at least one book during
the previous year, and the detective/thriller novel was the second most popular genre after
works of classical French and Universal literature. That is to say, crime fiction is the second
most popular novelistic form in present-day France. Of course, this does not suffice in order to
launch historical arguments regarding the proliferation of Swedish crime fiction within the
French literary space during the second half of the 20th century, but it illustrates that the genre
presently enjoys a popularity similar to that it enjoys in other countries. Yet this popularity did
not excite a revival of translations the likes of which can be observed in Germany or Great
Britain, for example.
348
Either the French book market should not be taken as indicator for
the internationalization of so-called trivial literature (and indeed, Casanova does not once
make the explicit claim that French exceptionality covers all categories of literary
production), or it has indeed lost its hegemony in face of the more powerful and more
efficient market strategies of Germany. Whether or not this is true remains to be further
speculated, either by comparing the French performance of Sjöwall and Wahlöö with the
performance of a selection of authors representative for other niches of commercial literature
(such as Science-Fiction, for example, or Fantasy), or – what we intend to do in a further
study – by adding new Scandinavian crime fiction authors to the equation and analyzing the
resulting distributions and, most importantly, the processes that turn once uncontested centers
into shadows of their former glory.
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