The Nordic Crime Wave rolls on...

The Nordic Crime Wave has reached the shores of the British Isles, and its impact is felt all across the British criminal world, as the shortlist for this years CWA's International Dagger award bears witness to.
Of course, the Nordic Crime Wave has been relentlessly pounding the British shores for years now; so brutally and mercilessly, in fact, that the Brits decided to construct a special breaker along the coastline after Iceland's Arnaldur Indriðason´s Silence of the Grave wrestled the Golden Dagger out of the bloody grip of british crime-writers back in 2005.
No more Golden Daggers for bloody foreigners, they decided (which, to be fair, I think is perfectly in order) and promptly created a special award for translated crime-literature: The Duncan Lawrie International Dagger, and thereby excluding foreign writers from the top-prize...

And this year - well, on a shortlist of six authors, no less than five of them hail from the Nordic countries.

Arnaldur, again (double Glass-Key winner for Jar City (Mýrin) in 2002 and Silence of the grave (Grafarþögn) in 2003), is shortlisted with his Arctic Chill (Vetrarborgin), as is Jo Nesbö from Norway (Glass-Key winner of 1998 for his novel Flaggermusmannen (e: The Batman), for his novel The Redeemer (Frelseren). And then there are the three Swedes: This year's Glass-Key winner Johan Theorin, for his debut novel Echoes from the dead (Skumtimmen); last year's Glass-Key winner Stieg Larsson for his second crime-novel, The girl who Played with Fire (Flickan som lekte med elden), and last, but not least, the winner of the 2001 Glass-Key, Karen Alvtegen, for her novel Shadow (Skugga).
So, the only shortlisted author from outside the nordic region of crime, french Fred Vargas, faces 5-1 odds against her...



UPDATE: Against all (or 5:1) odds, Fred Vargas was awarded the Dagger - for the third time in four years. Wellwellwell, the Brits do like their Freds...
For more information on the nominated/shortlisted novels - and the International Dagger - click
here.