The Wallander books, and movies, are part of a whole recent genre of super-popular Swedish detective novels that have all made it onto TV or the cinema screen or both. It’s not just the Swedes of course. For example, the Danish TV series The Killing and the Danish-Swedish collaboration The Bridge both feature a lot of the conventions of Swedish noir: women detectives, the sadistic murder of women, dead or traumatised children, political corruption, numerous plot twists, and a preoccupation with the mental states of women and the paternal identities of men. The Killing and The Bridge both have endings that make the final scene of Hamlet look cheerful. Perhaps Shakespeare had a hunch about Danes.
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