2020 Book Prize Runner Up: Noir in the North: Gender, Politics, and Place

The second runner up to be reviewed by ​Dr. Linda Ledford-Miller is Stacy Gillis and Gunnthórunn Gudmundsdóttir's edited collection, Noir in the North: Gender, Politics, and Place​ (2020). 

​Once again, we would like to congratulate all of the authors and editors of these outstanding volumes of crime fiction scholarship. 

​Gillis, Stacy, and Gunnthórunn Gudmundsdóttir, eds. Noir in the North: Gender, Politics, and Place. Bloomsbury. 

Stacy Gillis and Gunnthorun Gudmundsdottir’s Noir in the North: Genre, Politics and Place (Bloomsbury, 2020) demonstrates the rather surprising truth that there is still much to be said, and much of great interest, about Nordic noir, a genre that has arguably received more than its fair share of public and critical attention. An insightful forward by Icelandic crime novelist Yrsa Sigurðardóttir and a very useful, even comprehensive introduction to ‘Noir in the North’ are an excellent beginning, and the collection’s fourteen chapters offer a fascinatingly diverse set of readings of a fascinating, and unusual set of texts (on both screen and page) as well as more theoretically oriented material on the genre. 

The fourteen chapters are organized into five Parts. “Part I: Gender and Transnational Dimensions,” includes essays on The Fall and The Bridge, The Killing as adaptation, and Lilyhammer. “Part II: Space and Place,” examines the “optics of Noir” in The Bridge, the legacies of Danish colonialism, and “complex nostagias” in works by Indridason and Cleeves.  “Part III: Politics and Morality,” maps the diversity of morality, the representation of the child, and attributes the origin of the socio-political critique inherent in much noir to Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s early works. “Part IV: Genealogy and Genre,” contains five chapters, including a challenge to the term “Nordic noir,” its relationship to nineteenth century French novels, noir as contemporary epic, the “new Swedish police thriller of the 2010s,” and Norwegian noir.

Noir in the North concludes by returning to the people who make crime fiction, with an interview with Val McDermid and a short Coda by Gunnar Staalesen. All of this makes for a very rewarding volume. 

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Author Biography
Dr. Linda Ledford-Miller recently retired from teaching and committees, but not from academic endeavors. She continues to work across cultures and continents according to where her interests take her. She has published widely on Travel Writing and American Minority writers. Her recent work focuses on Crime Fiction, including Robert Downey Jr.’s interpretation of Sherlock Holmes, gender roles in the In Death series by the American J.D. Robb, the village mysteries of the Canadian Louise Penny, the philosophical Inspector Espinosa series by the Brazilian Luis Alfredo Garcia-Roza, and the stand alone crime novel by the Mexican Laura Esquivel, best known for the smashing success of her first novel, Like Water for Chocolate (1989)