Best Nordic Noir books of all time to get your Scandi crime thrills

Pathetic fallacy is one of the first major literary devices we learn of at school, and it’s much more than a simple sentence along the lines of “raindrops fall like tears from my eyes.” The technique sees the natural world and human emotion work in symbiosis – something that the best Nordic Noir books have in buckets full. If there’s one genre which has restored my faith in the overarching narrative power of weather, it’s this one. Otherwise known as Scandi Noir, the often murderous and crime-fuelled genre was kickstarted in the 1960s by Swedish authors Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö. Their Roman om ett brott (‘Report of a Crime’) series about police inspector Martin Beck began with the novel Roseanna and lasted a further nine books. The inherently dark literary genre was later popularised by