Euro Crime website mentioned in the Washington Post

A few weeks ago I was contacted by journalist Malin Rising who was asking questions about Scandinavian crime fiction in translation. I passed the questions onto Euro Crime's Scandinavian experts Crime Scraps and Petrona who of course replied swiftly and informatively (for which I thank them most heartedly). The resulting article has now been published in the Washington Post (I've bolded the Euro Crime reference!):

[Stieg]Larsson is the latest of many Swedish crime writers to win international acclaim, from the team of Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo in the 1960s to the more recent Henning Mankell, creator of the gloomy detective Kurt Wallander in such books as "Faceless Killers," "Sidetracked," "Firewall" and "Before the Frost."

The Scandinavian crime writing tradition also includes Denmark's Peter Hoeg, whose "Smilla's Sense of Snow" became an international best seller in the 1990s and a movie starring Julia Ormond, Vanessa Redgrave and Gabriel Byrne.

Set in a scenic Nordic landscape of serene lakes and lonely red cabins, Larsson's trilogy follows computer hacker Lisbeth Salander and journalist Mikael Blomqvist as they get entangled in a series of murder mysteries. Like Mankell, Larsson weaves in social commentary, with democracy and women's rights as prominent themes.

That, the exotic setting and an introspective streak are what set apart Swedish crime writing in a genre dominated by U.S. and British novelists, says Maxine Clarke, a critic at the Britain-based Web site Euro Crime, which specializes in European crime literature.

In Swedish crime novels, Clarke says, "one gets to know the characters' domestic lives and concerns as background to the plots, one feels they are real people rather than, in some other thriller genres, characters who only seem to exist to take part in the novel's main story."

The whole article can be found, here.