Bill Valgardson Reviews Beck Lecture on the Icelandic Crime Novel

Torfi Tulinius is Professor of Medieval Icelandic Studies at the University of Iceland. On March 16, 2025, he delivered a talk as part of the Beck Lecture Series at the University of Victoria in Victoria, British Columbia. The title of his talk was The Stranger. Who is the Criminal in Arnaldur Indriðasonʼs stories? W.D. Valgardson attended the talk and shares his experience.

Anyone and everyone who enjoys crime/detective novels should have been at the University of Victoria this past Sunday.

Not only would they have been treated with a history of crime writing in Iceland, but a deep look at the particular writing of Arnaldur Indriðason, the author of 28 novels, 14 of which belong to the so-called Erlendur series.

Iceland is a small, even tiny, country, with a population no larger than Victoria's. When someone is murdered, it is usually a kitchen murder. There is a party, people get drunk, get into an argument, grab a knife from the kitchen, and stab someone. When the police turn up, the person who committed a crime is sitting in the kitchen holding his head, waiting to be arrested. There is no mystery. I remember one actual murder with a mystery attached to it, and that was the murder of a young woman by a member of the crew of a visiting ship. Despite this reality, crime fiction set in Iceland has blossomed and the biggest blossom of all is Arnaldur Indriðason. He has had unparalleled commercial success on the national and international stage.

There has been Scandinavian Noir for some time. It blends together crime conceived as a result of social dysfunction, both national and international, and the existential difficulties of the policeman dealing with crime.

Icelandic crime fiction begins with Jóhann M. Bjarnason in 1910. Arnaldur starts in 1997. There are many others following but the one I know best because I spent some time with her when she came to lecture, Yrsa Sigurðardóttir.

Erlendur's first major success was a novel, Jar City. There is a sordid crime, a mysterious note on a body, the victim is an unpunished criminal. What is particularly interesting is the role of the DeCode controversy. DeCode is relatively recent history. The DeCode company with the support of the government, used the small population, its long, documented history and genealogy (genealogy is Iceland´s major hobby), established the Human Genome Project. They did DNA sequencing thanks to super-computing. A lot of people invested in the company. Investors lost a lot of money.

Arnaldur, in an interview said, “I want to really understand Erlendur.” That has meant that he needed to understand his father and Iceland’s recent history. Over the past 60 years Iceland has been transformed from a poor, essentially peasant country to an extremely affluent modern society.

Erlendur’s father was one of the generation that moved to the city and, since he was a writer, wrote about the generation that made this move.

Often in Arnaldur’s fiction there are disruptive, destructive, out-of-control fathers, mothers as victims, sons who kill their criminal fathers, and a main character filled with guilt and rage.

Torfi explained the Oedipus complex to us. Sounds like a reasonable way to look at family dynamics. He told us that when Indriðason was three he couldn’t sleep and went into the living room where his father was watching Little Caesar on TV, It might have been all right for his father, a prominent Icelandic novelist, to watch but this crime drama had a lifetime effect.

Torfi told us the story of Búkolla, its appeal to children and its role in socializing children.

He also told us about the effect of WWII. Iceland had a population of 120,000. Reykjavik was 45,000. May 10th 1940 the British forces arrived. July 17th, 1941, the American forces arrived. By 1943 there were 50,000 allied troops in Iceland. This created an economic boom. A housing crisis. As many of us know how the “Ástand” or the “Situation” was created. American troops were going to marry and take away all Icelandic women. This created deep fractures in Icelandic society, with public shaming, imprisonment, enforced isolation for women. Torfi used an example from his wife’s family of the stresses created.

Indriðason explores family dynamics in his stories, the conflicts with sons and daughters, the conflicts between men and women, including the recent your-body-my-choice from the American right. This is regression, back to the child wanting to possess the female body of its mother, not recognizing that the mother is an individual, separate from the child and the offender.

At the end Torfi showed us a picture with the question "Who Is the Criminal?" in life, in Indriðason’s fiction, and the answer was it is us. In a way, I thought, to that message, that is true, certainly when I was a child, I wanted my mother for myself, but gradually as I learned more and developed more so that I was capable of doing many things and not dependent, that faded and my mother became a separate person. However, not everyone grows up emotionally. An old conflict but one that Indriðason has mined in depth.

And afterwards, after the applause, Helga served us a delicious, scrumptious, fabulous, gluten free cake and coffee. And with cake and coffee, the audience stayed and asked questions and got to know each other. I think that Dr. and Mrs. Beck would be greatly pleased by the lecturer, by the lectures, by our coordinator, and by the coffee and cake. It felt like what I have read many times of the early years in Victoria when there was an Icelandic community in Fernwood and on Sundays people gathered for literature and sweets.