ABSTRACT
The short cartoon contains almost every image of the Arctic in popular culture. It is gendered in a complex manner as a feminine space available for conquest but a landscape that fights back, emasculating its conqueror. The dominant paradigm throughout the nineteenth and most of the twentieth century is that the Arctic is open for conquest by national, polar heroes, but alongside this there is an alternative tradition where the North Pole as the ultimate Arctic symbol is represented as an anti-climax and the explorer as an anti-hero. Crime fiction is however a genre that makes no sense without the various legal and moral systems that governs a society, which means that the emergence of Arctic detective stories is gradually changing both the genre of crime writing and the character of Arctic literature. The conventional format for Arctic fiction is "human-against-nature", followed by the plot pattern "human-against-human" in frontier stories.
