Kerstin Bergman

From Conflicted Mother to Lone Avenger: Transformations of the Woman Journalist Detective in Liza Marklund’s Crime Series

Other than Stieg Larsson’s Lisbeth Salander, the best-known woman hero in modern Swedish crime fiction is Liza Marklund’s journalist detective, Annika Bengtzon. Marklund is regarded as a pivotal figure in the breakthrough of women crime writers in Sweden in the late 1990s and early 2000s (see Bergman 2012b, 296–9). One of the more feminist writers of the Swedish crime fiction tradition, she has been prominent in discussing and criticizing the abuse and oppression of women in Swedish society (Bergman 2012a, 136; Karrholm 2011, 135). Marklund also inscribes herself within an Anglo-American crime fiction tradition in which ‘most liberal feminist writers have chosen the female amateur as their series detective’ and where ‘[a] favourite choice has been the investigative journalist’ (Munt 1994, 52–3). Furthermore, Marklund’s woman hero is in many ways one of the genre’s forerunners that inspired Larsson’s Salander (Bergman 2012a, 136–7, 140, 142).

The Good, The Bad, and the Collaborators: Swedish World War II Guilt Redefined in 21st Century Crime Fiction

In recent decades, it has become public knowledge among the post-war generations that Sweden was not as neutral during World War II as had been previously claimed.1 This belated realization has been dealt with in different ways in the Swedish public arena, to which crime fiction is an important contributor. Swedish crime fiction has a long tradition of conveying social criticism, and continuously scrutinizes topical issues. It is currently the most popular fiction genre in Sweden, and attracts a large Swedish (and international) readership.2 Accordingly, crime fiction is an important voice in the Swedish public arena. One of the increasingly popular themes in Swedish crime fiction has concerned the memory of Sweden’s role during World War II. Through these late twentieth and early twenty-first century fictional depictions, Swedish crime writers have taken part in reshaping Swedish collective, or social, World War II memory into a history that lets Swedes feel better about themselves and their past. In this chapter, Swedish crime fiction from the first decade of the twenty-first century will be examined in order to identify how this is done.