<b>Mihir S Sharma:</b> Death up north

In a world short of good news, there's something to look forward to: Robert Galbraith's second book, The Silkworm, has apparently arrived. Mr Galbraith, of course, is an exciting new addition to detective fiction. Early reviews of his first book, The Cuckoo's Calling, had noted quite an uncanny ability to write the complicated internal lives of his female characters; the plotting was remarkably self-assured for a debut author. When it was eventually revealed that Mr Galbraith was, in fact, J K Rowling, some of these anomalies were explained.

Ms Rowling famously declared, to the amusement of fantasy fans everywhere, that she didn't really think she was writing fantasy when she wrote her Harry Potter series. (Terry Pratchett responded: "I would have thought that the wizards, witches, trolls, unicorns, hidden worlds, jumping chocolate frogs, owl mail, magic food, ghosts, broomsticks and spells would have given her a clue?") Even if Ms Rowling has a disdain for "genre" fiction, it would be tough for Mr Galbraith to declare that "his" books are anything but squarely within the crime genre. There are, after all, murders. Not to mention a private detective with an intriguing past, a beautiful and under-appreciated assistant, and a slightly grotty office.
 

But then crime fiction is considered far more respectable than fantasy or science fiction. This is largely born of prejudice - there is a continuing belief that science fiction and fantasy, or SFF, is written with spotty teenage boys in mind, while fans of novels of crime detection are elderly ladies with a fondness for afternoon tea. The second set is, obviously, innately more respectable than the first. (Such generalisations about readership are increasingly untrue. Recently, in an English-language SFF bookshop in Stockholm's Old Town, I took a quick age census, and discovered the average was 37; almost half the browsers were women.)

But one way in which crime fiction is indeed more respectable is in its political orientation - usually. Science fiction and fantasy require acts of world-building that are acts of destruction as much as creation: in their sub-creation of alternative social and political contexts is, inevitably, embedded a clear opinion about the faults or virtues of real-world arrangements. They are usually plotted around disruptive acts - the narrative force comes, usually, from moving an imagined history along in some way. Detective fiction is often the political opposite: it is about restoring order after it has been violently destabilised by murder.

This is why a great deal of the most compelling detective fiction comes from the most organised societies. In the Golden Age mysteries of Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Dorothy L Sayers and Margery Allingham, the tidy world of the Empire's upper class would be disordered by murder. By the last page, the natural order was restored - the bad egg found, the foreigner sniffed at and the patriotic young couple married off.

And is this why we all want to read Scandinavian mystery novels? Because those societies are, after all, so wonderfully organised, so extremely civilised that the trauma accompanying violent crime stands out more?

In Bhutan for the rather wonderful Mountain Echoes literature festival last month, I was fortunate to discover Norway's K O Dahl. One of Norway's favourite writers, he told me he hides by living on a farm in the icy north with his computer and an improbable number of sheep. The first book he wrote, Lethal Investments, has only recently been translated into English. The book, which I bought eagerly, is an extraordinarily cynical take on humanity in general, and Nordic humanity in particular. I loved that - especially as Mr Dahl himself is one of the most genial individuals imaginable.

That is what is so intriguing about the Nordic revolution in detective fiction: it is born of contrasts. These societies have obsessively tried to minimise injustice, to counteract the effects of man's inhumanity to man, to organise their way out of the constant disruptions that accompany the act of existence. A novel about murder in such a society provides the reader with the limits that human vices impose upon such grand projects. Inhumanity stands out more in a humane society.

But that is not, of course, how the Nordics themselves see it. Sometimes, when speaking to someone from the region, you get the idea that what to the rest of the world seems like a relatively successful social and political experiment looks to them like a society in free fall. (Do look up a minor YouTube hit from a few years ago, the Helsinki Complaints Choir - an earnest and tuneful anticipation of the hashtag #FirstWorldProblems on Twitter.)

Last fortnight I was in Stockholm, a city where even elderly people hold the door open for you if they reach it first, and where everyone politely looks away, noticeably but not obviously, when you enter your credit card PIN. It is almost impossible for someone from Delhi, the home of incivility, to discover signs of a society on the brink of collapse. But I was, at the time, reading the original Swedish crime novels - the Martin Beck series from Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo, set in the rapidly changing Stockholm of the 1960s. They're masterpieces. They're also masterclasses in political agitation. Sjowall and Wahloo were hardline communists. Through writing about murder and its investigation, they wanted to reveal how the social-democratic state was, in fact, a facade. The Swedish society was falling apart - they don't make it obvious, but you're led gently to that conclusion.

I read their bleak diagnoses in soft sunlight, in well-maintained parks amid pensioners and children and officegoers relaxing with Dahl and Henning Mankell novels in their lunch breaks. Naturally, I found Sjowall and Wahloo's claims unpersuasive. But the edge it gives their books - as with the edge of controlled, extremely political anger in all Nordic detective fiction - is also what makes reading them so worthwhile.