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Thursday, March 03, 2011

Pesky Stickers & Pesky Comparisons

Petrona, aka Maxine, and I spent a lovely afternoon today in Waterstone's Piccadilly branch. In the crime section there is a large display of Scandinavian crime fiction:


Closer inspection reveals the expansion of the sticker range on the theme of "the next Stieg Larsson" which is on Jo Nesbo's books, with these two offerings:

Winning the CWA International Dagger (ahead of Stieg Larsson) isn't enough of a pull apparently.

And there's no comparison between Lackberg and Nesbo, Harry Hole would eat Patrick Hedstrom for breakfast.

Here's another baffling comparison - for The Day is Dark, which is published in July:

4 comments:

  1. The other day I saw that a literary agent encouraged prospective clients to ´sell their works in one sentence´ - perhaps I should try ´the new Yrsa Sigurdardottir´?

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  2. Anonymous9:03 pm

    Karen - I must admit, those comparisons sometimes completely baffle me. I understand, I suppose, why a publisher might encourage such a thing, but.....

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  3. It was a lovely day, but as you say, those stickers! It was nice to see that Karin Altvegen has been re-released with new covers (without any stickers!) - One of her books, "Missing", covers similar themes to The Girl Who Played With Fire but is much shorter, and possibly even better...certainly as good! So I recommend that to anyone who wants a Stieg Larsson-like fix. Altvegen's other books are also very good, and different from each other.

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  4. I ran into one of those Larsson stickers here in the US on the rerelease mass market of Henning Mankell's Faceless Killers.

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