Traces of Gothic Fiction in Scandinavian Crime Fiction: A Study of Jo Nesbø’s Oslo Trilogy

Abstract

Introduction: This assertion prompted a critical reflection on whether the reverse may also hold true: Can crime narratives be shaped by Gothic aesthetics, and to what extent can crime fiction incorporate Gothic conventions, motifs, and tropes? To explore this hypothesis, I intend to examine the extent to which Gothic tradition can be identified within Scandinavian crime novels of Jo Nesbø, often acclaimed as “Norway’s most popular crime author today” (Brunsdale, 2016, p. 243) and “today’s king of Nordic crime writing” (p. 330). My analysis is going to focus on the Oslo Trilogy – The Redbreast, Nemesis, and The Devil’s Star – and set forth to uncover, most probably, a marked presence of Gothic features throughout these three crime novels. This is motivated by the concept of a dynamic intertextual “mobility of genre”, which, as Jesper Gulddal and Stewart King observe in The Routledge Companion to Crime Fiction, emphasizes “the experimental and transgressive aspects of crime fiction and, in particular, locates the dynamism of the genre in a constant tension between the affirmation and negation of genre norms” (2020, p. 17). This understanding of an intertextual symbiosis between Gothic and crime fiction is further reinforced by Spooner’s inquiry in Contemporary Gothic: “In what other ways can the contemporary Gothic revival be said to relate to those of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries?”