A passion for the whodunnit

In the midst of the emulsifying homogeneity of modern retail culture there are still little bastions of shopping independence, like plucky Gallic villages holding out against the Roman Empire. And chief among them, of course, are the dwindling but brave band of second-hand bookshops... The ability of second-hand bookshops to open a window on to a place’s soul isn’t restricted to England. In Stockholm [I] stumbled into a couple and was surprised by what they revealed. The largest amount of space devoted to a single author wasn’t there for Strindberg or some other Scandinavian national hero. No, the author who seemed to have the greatest purchase on the Swedish soul was Agatha Christie. There were yards of Olde English whodunnitry stretching far further into the recesses of the shop than any collection of bleak Nordic dramaturgy.

Indeed, the deeper I delved, the more Swedish and English literary tastes seemed to intertwine. For both countries the detective novel is the defining national genre. The Swedish authors who succeed abroad, and are devoured most energetically at home, are the crimewriter Henning Mankell and the husband-and-wife detective novelists Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo. Mankell’s Kurt Wallander and Sjowall/Walloo’s Martin Beck, like P.D. James’s Adam Dalgliesh, or Miss Marple [are] the fictional creations who define a nation. Other countries have different defining genres. For Spain, it is swashbuckling action romps (from Don Quixote to Arturo Pérez Reverte’s Captain Alatriste). For Italy, it is intellectual games-playing disguised as fiction (Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco), for France it is essays in deep cultural pessimism laced with a huge amount of bonking...

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