Bo Tao Michaelis, Naja Marie Aidt, Jonas T. Bengtsson, Christian Dorph, Simon Pasternak, Susanne Staun, Helle Helle, Georg Ursin, Klaus Rifbjerg, Gretelise Holm, Kristian Lundberg, Kristina Stoltz, Seyit Ozturk, Benn Q. Holm, Gunnar Staalesen, Lene Kaaberbol, Agnete Friis
Copenhagen Noir
© 2011 Akashic Books
Translated by Mark Kline
Copenhagen map by Aaron Petrovich
Akashic Noir Series
– Dan Turell
INTRODUCTION
THE SEAMY SIDE OF MODERNISM
The French word for
Noir is the story of the fateful coincidence, the precarious absurdity and bitter nonchalance of life. It speaks of loss of control and lack of insight, of irrationality’s impact on what seems to make sense-the throw of the dice that didn’t win, to put it simply. The style is minimalistic, open, and terse. It attempts to describe an unpredictable calamity rather than any act of clear rationality. Capturing the murderer is neither what’s necessary nor important. Because noir is seldom interested in illuminating a valid truth or forming clarity, it rarely seeks a transparent understanding that it doesn’t believe in anyway. Noir is the crime genre’s bleak nostalgia and, at the same time, its unsentimental vision of modern times; without degenerating into cheap puritanism or bigoted abstinence, it often includes sexuality, and more in the light of being used destructively than as any romantic idealism. A noir story seldom has a happy ending. When it does happen, such as in Chandler’s Philip Marlowe books, it is with a bittersweet taste of compromise or bargaining. Life goes on with a wounded soul, and only that which is lost is eternal. Past, present, and future melt into one synchronous now, which cancels out every hope that times change and things will be better. As a famous title from a noir writer, Horace McCoy, puts it: kiss tomorrow goodbye, because nothing will be there at daybreak.
Noir is disillusionment and melancholy in relation to the big city, the melting pot of modernism. Some classic noir stories do take place in the country, but the metropolis appears either as modernism’s revenge or as temptations fallen for in the past that now must be paid for; it often involves cold revenge, heated confrontation, old love, or as all three at the same time and place.
The most archetypical noir short story is Ernest Hemingway’s “The Killers,” originally published in
Noir loves flight, ill-fated love, the cold avenger. You could say that Alexander Dumas’s classic novel of revenge from 1844,
No matter. The important point is that noir only
Europe’s End and the Gateway to Scandinavia:
Copenhagen As Noir
Copenhagen: the Little Mermaid, H.C. Andersen, Soren Kierkegaard, and Karen Blixen, a big city that perhaps more than any other is the absolute capital, origin, and center of northern European romanticism of the 1800s. Denmark’s Copenhagen, with its ramparts and moats forming the shell of the city and suburbs, has retained a glint of back then, that world of yesterday. To be exact, the city’s archaic Middle Ages center, with the beautiful buildings, squares, and streets that tourists meet from their hotels, a comfortable inner circle with Tivoli as its midpoint and King’s Square its end. At one point our metropolis was presented as an idyllic, modest-sized big city, where police stopped traffic when a mother duck guided her ugly ducklings across the street populated by cars, bicycles, and streetcars. But naturally, and quite unfortunately, such is the case no longer. Copenhagen long ago abandoned its Sleeping Beauty slumber for a cosmopolitan night and day that never sleeps, neither in a good nor bad way. Four-wheel drive vehicles, limos, and expensive sports cars now sail down the boulevards and avenues that were once characterized by girls bicycling on dirt paths and healthy boys briskly walking to work or to girlfriends. Those times are gone forever.
The main character of Naja Marie Aidt’s noir story, “Women in Copenhagen,” returns to the city after seventeen years and realizes that the place has become more multicultural, turbulent, and global than the Brooklyn where he lives. Everything is in flux, in a variety of colors. Gone is the provincial city appointed as capital; instead, one is confronted with a metropolis where the food is from the Middle East, the wine from California, the women from Africa, and the mafia from Russia. Mafia! A new word at these latitudes, where crime formerly took place among bands identified with city neighborhoods and regions. Beatings were bloody noses from a few punches, not like now with knifings and shotgun blasts in the gut and an unmarked grave out in the sticks or under the deep blue sea. Between the wars, in the 1930s, we in Denmark spoke of “white slavery,” poor women kidnapped to a life of prostitution in foreign brothels-today it’s called trafficking, and now we speak of the vile import of East European women. And moreover, we are indeed the last country in Scandinavia to criminalize the customer of such activity, the buying of a hooker.
The short stories in