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International Crime Fiction
270 Plays1 year ago
To kick off Season 4, Brook and Sarah discuss mysteries with international sleuths and settings. The discussion includes mysteries from South America, Europe, Asia, and Africa. We'd love to hear your recommendations. Send us an email at hello@cluedinmystery.com or drop us a message on social media @cluedinmystery. Correction: In this episode, Sarah referred to The Missing but meant to refer to The Killing.
Discussed in order
AUTHORS AND BOOKS
Agatha Christie
Arthur Conan Doyle
Arsène Lupin (created by French author Maurice Leblanc)
Edgar Allan Poe
The Mystery of the Yellow Room (1909) Gaston LeRoux - France
Kurt Wallander (created by Swedish author Henning Mankell)
Jo Nesbø - Norway
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2005) Steig Larsson - Sweden
Death Going Down (2017) María Angélica Bosco - Argentina
The Devotion of Suspect X (2011) Keigo Higashino - Japan
Malice (2015) Keigo Higashino - Japan
Accra Noir (2020) Akashic Books - Ghana
Vancouver Noir (2018) Akashic Books - Canada
Deon Meyer - South Africa
Ovidia Yu - Singapore
TV
The Bridge (2011-2018) Sweden/Denmark
Spiral (2005-2020) France
Midsomer Murders (1997-2022) UK
Lidia Poët (2023) Netflix - Italy
Trapped (2015-2019) Iceland
The Killing (2007) Denmark [Note: Sarah referred to this as Missing in the episode]
Hinterland (2013-2016) Wales
For more information
Instagram: @cluedinmystery
Contact us: hello@cluedinmystery.com
Music: Signs To Nowhere by Shane Ivers – www.silvermansound.com
Website: https://cluedinmystery.com/
Transcript
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Transcript
Introduction & Love for Mysteries
00:00:11
Speaker
Welcome to Clued in Mystery. I'm Sarah. And I'm Brooke. And we both love mystery. Hi, Brooke. Hi, Sarah. How are you? I'm great. Thanks. How about you? Yeah, I'm great too. And I'm looking so forward to talking to you today.
International Mysteries & Crime Fiction
00:00:28
Speaker
Yeah, today we're going to talk about international mysteries. And I'll start us off with a little bit of an introduction.
00:00:35
Speaker
So I think there's a couple of ways that we can think about international crime. Thrillers, where the action takes place in multiple countries. Spy and political thrillers are really good examples of this. But there are also books that are written by authors from outside North America and the UK. And often, you know, these are written in languages other than English, and so we get to read the translations.
00:00:56
Speaker
Popular fiction is translated as a way to reach broader audiences. Agatha Christie's works have been translated into 100 languages and Arthur Conan Doyle's into 70.
Influence of Christie & Doyle
00:01:08
Speaker
And just as they inspired generations of authors writing in English, I think we can safely say that they have inspired many international authors. We learned in our Villains episode about our Saint-Lupin, who was created by Maurice LeBlanc,
00:01:22
Speaker
in 1905, and several of his stories feature a character that was directly inspired by Doyle's detective, Sherlock Holmes. But earlier detective stories were also translated. In France, Baudelaire translated Edgar Allan Poe's stories in the 1850s. And perhaps some of Poe's stories inspired Gaston Le Roux, whom we mentioned in our locked room episode.
Rise of Scandinavian Crime Fiction
00:01:46
Speaker
His book, The Mystery of the Yellow Room, appears on many lists of great locked room mysteries.
00:01:51
Speaker
It was originally published serially in France in 1907, and the first English translation was made available in 1909, and an English theatrical adaptation was performed in 1920. Jumping ahead, the 1990s and the early 2000s saw the rising popularity of crime fiction from Scandinavia with readers outside the Nordic countries.
00:02:12
Speaker
Henning Mankel's Kurt Wallander series in the 1990s was one of the first of these darker, grittier books, and there are television adaptations both in English and in Swedish.
00:02:26
Speaker
Other authors include Jonasba from Norway and Holt, also from Norway, but I thought we could start talking about the wildly popular Millennium series by Stig Larson.
Millennium Series & Translations Discussion
00:02:38
Speaker
That series has sold over 80 million copies. It's been translated and published in 50 countries.
00:02:45
Speaker
What I think is really interesting is that all of the books, both the Swedish and the translated versions were published after his death. The first Swedish edition was published in 2005 and that's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Then movies followed that in Swedish and English with three Swedish films released in 2009 and two English in 2011 and 2018. I think there might be another one that's in the works.
00:03:15
Speaker
The rights to the original books were recently sold and another author has been commissioned to write three more books in the series. Brooke, are you one of the 80 million people who has read books from the series?
00:03:29
Speaker
I am, I am. I believe I've only read the first book in this series, but I loved it. I thought it was a really great story. And I remember feeling immediately sad to think like Larson had no idea what a huge sensation his book was. I also remember thinking how well the translation was done because
00:03:56
Speaker
Sometimes that's a challenge, reading something that's been translated, but the book read really well.
00:04:03
Speaker
Yeah, I agree. I read, I think I read all three of those books in the trilogy. And I think there might be, there might've been a few more that were released. Cause I think when he died, there were notes of future stories. And, you know, I think perhaps that's what, and I don't have it in front of me, the name of the author who's been commissioned to continue the series.
00:04:30
Speaker
I have read some of what is considered, you know, scandinoire in addition to these books. And I'm not sure that I would necessarily lump them all together. And perhaps it's unfair for us to categorize all of the books from a particular region as belonging to a single category.
Scandi-noir & Dark Themes Exploration
00:04:56
Speaker
because most of the other ones that I've read, and I haven't read any Walnutter, but I've watched the Swedish and the English versions, they're police procedurals. They are slower paced, but they're certainly darker than a lot of what we might consider fiction coming out of North America or fiction coming out of the UK.
00:05:21
Speaker
Um, I think in the like early 2010s, uh, there were several series from Denmark, from Iceland, um, and maybe from Sweden that, um, that, that we watched that, yeah, they were, they were very dark. Um, so I don't know if you saw the bridge.
00:05:44
Speaker
So that is set, I think it's a co-production Danish and Swedish and it's the premise is that there's a crime that's committed right on the border. So there's a bridge that links the two countries and like in the middle of the bridge there's a crime and so they need investigators from both countries to be involved.
00:06:05
Speaker
And I remember watching it and thinking, I have never seen anything that is like this before. And then we watched a show that was a French crime procedural called Spiral. And it was even darker, both literally and figuratively. All the scenes were dark.
00:06:32
Speaker
But the content was also very dark. So, you know, this is not Midsummer Murders or Murder, She Wrote in terms of the kind of content that we're that we're talking about. And, you know, I don't have any numbers, but I would guess that they are not as popular right now where everything in the world seems pretty dark.
00:07:01
Speaker
And I think we've talked about that in the past, right, where I think it was Francis from Chronicles of Crime who said that during the pandemic, it was Agatha Christie and cozy mysteries that people were really looking to to read. So it'd be interesting to kind of map the popularity of of some of these genres against things that are happening in the world and kind of the mood generally of of populations.
00:07:28
Speaker
Absolutely. And I think you're right. We shouldn't lump, uh, an area together in, you know, a sub genre, so to speak of like the, the Scandi noir, but
Cultural Exploration Through Crime Fiction
00:07:39
Speaker
Then again, you can't deny the fact that that is, when you pick up a book from a Scandinavian mystery author, you know what you're going to get. I've read some articles about why that is and maybe their theories, but the long cold winters, there's a lot of darkness and that grim feeling when you're in those places of the world. That's something that international
00:08:08
Speaker
mystery fiction in general can do for us. You can actually sort of travel when you're not able to travel and go to those different places in the world and you know that's what you're going to get if you go to Scandinavia.
00:08:22
Speaker
No, that's a great point, Brooke. And that is one of the appeals certainly for me as a reader. If I'm picking up something originally written in another language, I'm hoping to learn a little bit more about the characters and the place and how they live and how that might be different from what I'm familiar with.
00:08:49
Speaker
for sure. I feel like that this is probably a hole in my reading. As a native English speaker, it's the pro and the con. We have so much to read, right? So much that's accessible to us in English. But the bad thing about that is we don't really ever have to think about
00:09:10
Speaker
the work that's being published in other languages. So it's a whole, I will admit, in my reading. But this week I picked up, so this woman's name, the author is Maria Angelica Bosco, and she is actually known as the Argentinian Agatha Christie.
Book Recommendations & Author Highlights
00:09:28
Speaker
And so I thought, okay, I've got to try reading this. And she was with us from 1909 to 2006. And so I read Death Takes the Elevator, which is also entitled Death Going Down. And I could see why she was referred to, you know, compared with
00:09:48
Speaker
Agatha Christie, she writes very economically, very concise language. And there was that feel to it in the way she told the story. But it was really fun to, as you say, go to Argentina. This was right after the Second World War, when we had lots of Europeans that were coming to live in Argentina.
00:10:14
Speaker
So, it was an apartment building filled with Germans and other people from European countries that had convened in this Argentinian apartment building where a murder takes place. So, I would recommend it. I really enjoyed it and we definitely got the, you know, speaking of like the types of activities they take during the day as far as like the
00:10:38
Speaker
the way their meal structure went, what they were eating, you know, you got you got a little international flair there. Oh, that's that sounds really good. I've never I've never read anything by her.
00:10:51
Speaker
I've read a couple of books by Kigo Hikashino, who is Japanese. So one of my favorite reads last year was The Devotion of Suspect X. So I think Hikashino is one of Japan's leading authors. He sold over 800,000 copies of his books in Japan.
00:11:15
Speaker
has more film and TV adaptations than many authors that were familiar with and Tom Clancy, for example, and definitely gave a glimpse into daily life for his characters. I really, really enjoyed that book.
00:11:36
Speaker
And then a long time ago I read his book Malice, which if I remember correctly is a locked room mystery and it was also very, very good. So I would, yeah, I would definitely recommend either of those books.
00:11:55
Speaker
I think that one thing that if you're going to dive into picking up a translation, you have to almost take it as if you're reading, I liken it to reading something in English that's from an older era. You're going to have maybe some of the same struggles with some of the language and just sayings and things like that because it's translated. It may not come across exactly to what we expect to hear.
00:12:25
Speaker
It's some time and you settle in then you'll get acquainted with the rhythm and the language and it's just so worthwhile To get these other perspectives different flavors of crime fiction because there's going to be different cultural flavorings that are really fun and To recognize that mystery is not just a Western world phenomena. This is a worldwide
00:12:51
Speaker
thing that psychologically we love a good mystery no matter where we are in the globe. And I was really happy referring to the Bosco title that I read, Pushkin Vertigo. This is a portion of Pushkin Press.
00:13:09
Speaker
are working to translate some of these older mysteries that were written by authors around the world. So their website has a great selection of all international titles and they say best of crime fiction from all four corners of the globe.
00:13:26
Speaker
before we were going to do this episode, I came across what I now realize is quite a lengthy series of short stories. So Akashic Books, which I believe is based in Brooklyn, has published over 120 titles of short stories featuring crime fiction set in different countries.
00:13:53
Speaker
So for this episode, I started reading a few of the stories from Accra Noir and they give a taste of crime and life in Ghana. But I had previously read Vancouver Noir, which is part of the same series.
00:14:13
Speaker
As someone based in Vancouver, I can say it does give a sense of being in the city. I'm so excited that there are so many more books and places in this series to explore, and several are in North America.
00:14:30
Speaker
in the US and there's a couple of others that are set in Canadian cities, but I'm most excited about the ones that are set in other cities and they're written by people who either live in or have very strong connections with those places.
International Crime Fiction on Screen
00:14:48
Speaker
Oh, those sound fantastic. I love that. You know, so far we've just been talking about reading, but we can also get international mystery from the screen and a new series that I'm just loving on Netflix is
00:15:04
Speaker
the Lydia Poet. She is an Italian attorney sleuth. This is a historical series. And I watched one episode and I'm hooked. It's really good. The premise is that this young Italian woman has gone to school and is an attorney, but in the era that it's set in, she is unable to practice law. And so she is
00:15:32
Speaker
amateur sleuth who is solving crimes and her brother is also an attorney so she can use his connections a little bit to solve her cases and it's great it is obviously in Italian but as I've mentioned before I love the fact that you can now choose your language in Netflix so if you'd rather not read the subtitles you can listen to it in English or in your home language and it's a great great series.
00:16:01
Speaker
Oh, I have that on my list, Brooke, of Netflix titles that I want to watch, but I haven't had a chance yet to start it. But after hearing that, I think I'll have to bump it up and watch it soon.
00:16:16
Speaker
But you're right, there are lots of examples of mysteries that we can watch on the screen from other countries. And so I mentioned the bridge and around the same time was missing. And then there is also a series from Iceland that is, I think it's called Trapped.
00:16:38
Speaker
And both the bridge and missing were so popular that there were English adaptations of those stories, so set in the US. I don't know that they...
00:16:56
Speaker
I think there's a challenge when you change the setting. It changes the the feel of the stories. And so I'm not sure that they were as popular or achieved the same success that the originals did. But, you know, certainly I think those are available for people to find if they wanted if they wanted to watch.
00:17:21
Speaker
And another series that I'm going to mention that kind of fits in this category is Hinterland. So it first aired in 2014, and it's actually Welsh. And so, you know, Wales is part of the UK. But the reason I wanted to mention it is because the same actors filmed the English and the Welsh versions.
00:17:45
Speaker
So they recorded each scene in both languages, which I'm not familiar with any other production that has done that because in the example of The Bridge or Missing, it's a totally different cast and a totally different setting.
Unique TV Productions & Series
00:18:02
Speaker
But with this, it was the same actors just performing each scene once in Welsh and once in English, which I think is fascinating.
00:18:14
Speaker
Wow. I had never heard that and what an undertaking. That would be a huge project, but super, super interesting. I'm going to have to go back and watch some episodes of that and take that into account. Yeah, no, it is pretty dark. I think
00:18:35
Speaker
Like you mentioned with Scandinavia, I think the surroundings are pretty rugged and can be pretty harsh. And so I think that lends itself to some of those darker themes. But yeah, it's definitely worth a watch. And I think it might be on Netflix, but I'm sure you can track it down.
00:18:59
Speaker
I'm wondering if our DNA plays a part at all into the stories that we're drawn to because, you know, according to the online service, uh, I'm, you know, majority Northern European, and I love all those dark brooding, uh, slow storytelling. And my husband, uh, is
00:19:21
Speaker
Germanic descent and he cannot take it he wants some action he wants some gritty you know. Fast-paced storytelling so i don't know i just have to wonder if there's something in our DNA.
00:19:36
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know. I wonder. But I think you said this earlier, like you can kind of say if a book or a show is from a particular place and you'll have an expectation of what that pacing is going to be like, right? So yeah, maybe there's something to that.
Post-apartheid South African Series
00:20:00
Speaker
Another author that I wanted to mention is Dionne Meyer. And so he has written several books, and he's got a police procedural series. All of his books are set in post-apartheid South Africa, and they were originally written in Afrikaans, which is one of the official languages in South Africa.
00:20:23
Speaker
I really have enjoyed the police procedural series. So his character, Benny Kreisel, is a character who is a detective with a prestigious murder investigation unit. And it definitely gives some insight into daily life and frustrations and some of the issues that people
00:20:42
Speaker
in the country are wrestling with. And one of the things that I like about his books in particular is the characters. This is true of the way a lot of people in South Africa speak and a lot of the television programming that comes out of there.
00:21:00
Speaker
The characters speak in multiple languages. So everybody, when they're going to school there, learns English, learns Afrikaans, and may learn some other languages just because of their home communities. And so a lot of people will move very fluently, very easily between these languages when they're speaking. And that happens a little bit in the books, which I think is really, really neat to see.
00:21:30
Speaker
Oh, I love that. I live in a community where we have a lot of people who move between Spanish and English interchangeably, and you have to keep up with the conversation. So I just love knowing that about that part of the world as well. And I think that that brings up a really good point, Sarah. We've mentioned before that
00:21:51
Speaker
Yes, we're talking about genre fiction. We're talking about entertaining books and shows. But that doesn't mean that these stories aren't also teaching us about the world or making really important points about the struggles of different people or making political statements, for instance, or
00:22:11
Speaker
There's messages in these stories, whether or not it's primarily for entertainment or not, and that's definitely something that we get from these stories from around the world, which is where I started out saying it's worth it to read some of these books that
00:22:27
Speaker
maybe they've been translated from another language or they're just set in a different area, it's worth it to go out there and find these stories because you're going to learn about the world. You're going to learn about different people and it's valuable. I agree. And if nothing else, it's entertaining.
Cozy Mysteries & Listener Engagement
00:22:45
Speaker
So Brooke, most of the examples that we've talked about so far have been pretty dark, and a lot of them are police procedurals. But if someone is looking for a lighter, cozy mystery, they might enjoy the Auntie Lee series by Ovidiya Yoo. So these are set in Singapore, and I don't actually think that these are translated. I think they're originally written in English, but they certainly are set in Singapore and give a really good sense of, you know,
00:23:12
Speaker
the food and the lives that some people living in Singapore are experiencing. Oh, those sound like a lot of fun. Brooke, as ever, we have just touched on a few examples of international crime fiction, and there are so many others. We'd love to hear from our listeners if they've got any recommendations of some international crime fiction that we should be checking out.
00:23:37
Speaker
Yes, absolutely. I definitely have added some categories to my TBR list through this research. So it's going to be fun. And I'm sure this is a topic we'll revisit in the future. But for today, everyone, thank you so much for joining us on Clued In Mystery. I'm Brooke. And I'm Sarah. And we both love mystery.
00:23:57
Speaker
Clued in Mystery is produced by Brooke Peterson and Sarah M. Stephen. Music is by Shane Ivers at silvermansound.com. Visit us online at cluedinmystery.com or social media at Clued in Mystery. If you liked what you heard, please consider subscribing, leaving a review, or telling your friends.