A Bluestocking Knits

It is a tradition in Norway at Eastertime, I learned recently, to read mystery and crime novels over the long holiday from Holy Thursday to Easter Sunday.  Now, I like Norway, and I like reading, so this just seems too good a tradition not to adopt!

(A little too blurry to read most of the titles, worse luck, here in an Oslo bookshop called Ark, from an article in an Oslo news-site.)

This tradition is of fairly long standing, dating from 1923 when writers Nordahl Grieg and Nils Lie decided to write a crime novel — but instead of the publisher releasing their book in the autumn as usual at the time, the story ran in an advertisement in a Bergen newspaper just before Palm Sunday, under the headline-looking title "Bergen train looted in the night".  This caused great excitement and even consternation — shades of Orson Welles — in those who didn't notice the "advert" in fine print at the bottom, and the whole thing proved to be so popular that a number of crime and mystery novels began to be published in the spring.  As well as books, radio mysteries were broadcast, and later television shows — often the great British shows such as the Lord Peter Wimsey series in the 1970s, "Miss Marple" and "Poirot", the Adam Dalgliesh series, and more latterly, "Foyle's War".

Apparently, Påskekrim — the å is pronounced like the RP "aw" in "law" and "jaw", but "POHS-keh-krihm" is pretty close — remains to this day a puzzle to the "outside world".  The Norwegian Wikipedia writes a little bemusedly, "Not even the Swedes have been infected with the Norwegians' penchant for murder mysteries and suspense."  I can't think why, really — a long holiday, inclement weather, a juicy murder mystery, it sounds like a perfect combination to me!

These are the most popular Norwegian crime writers available in English:

Karin Fossum
Jo Nesbø
Kjersti Scheen
Gunnar Staalesen
Anne Holt
Kjell Ola Dahl

some of whom are discussed at Elusive Moose and in more detail at Scandinavian Books.  I have, I confess, only one book by one of these authors — Karin Fossum's Inspector Sejer novel Black Seconds — mostly because when I went back to the bookstore the other two titles were already gone!