I just got back from a wilderness road trip in Iceland with a cadre of adventurous book lovers and we were up to our eyebrows in Icelandic noir.
Yes, it’s separate from Scandi-noir, the snow-blown dark tales coming out of Sweden and Denmark and Finland.
“Dark and stormy” doesn’t begin to cover Nordic noir – the weather in these novels is its own character: foreboding, malevolent and as bleak as a Bronte moor on a January day – for months!
Icelandic noir incorporates that capricious, ill-natured weather and lets it blow over a landscape that is pocked with simmering volcanoes, bubbling geysers and blackened fields of lava.
When I created the reading list for the trip to Iceland, I recommended a classic Iceland literary novel titled “Heaven and Hell” and an excellent novel about a volcanologist who is confronting deep fissures in her personal and professional life titled “The Fires.”
But a noir novel called “Snare” by Lilja Sigurðardóttir inspired me to plunge deeper into the frosty genre of Icelandic noir.
So, here are three more novels from the land of fire and ice that are must-reads if you like your crime fiction with a side of sleet and snow.
Read the series that Yrsa Sigurðardóttir has created around Thora Gudmundsdottir.
She’s a courageous and crusading lawyer who solves crimes that often expose inequities in contemporary Icelandic society. And you don’t have to start with book one.
One of my favorites is “The Day is Dark,” the fourth in the series.
“The Fox” by Sólveig Pálsdóttir was a big hit in Iceland.
It features a Reykjavik police officer who is seeking redemption far away from the big city. But no sooner does Guðgeir Fransson arrive in a one-horse town in eastern Iceland, he learns about the unsolved disappearance of a woman who was new to the small town.
Last, I’m a big fan of Ragnar Jónasson's work.
He’s a younger writer who launched his career in 2015 with “Snowblind” after spending years translating Agatha Christie novels and others into Icelandic.
Jónasson clearly picked up some tips.
I listened to the audiobook and could smell the scent of the frothing sea and feel the forbidding dark of winter far from the lights of Reykjavik.
Tell me what you’re reading and what you’ve loved this summer. Email me at kmiller@MPR.org.
— Kerri Miller | MPR News
