ABSTRACT
Academic studies of contemporary and late twentieth-century crime fiction have rightly emphasised how such writing frequently uses occluded memories of conflict to destabilise more reassuring narratives of national memory, studying the ways in which it complicates and pluralizes these through counter-memories associated with individuals and groups marginalised in, or excluded from, mainstream discourses about the past. Few have fully considered the ethical implications of these writings, however, and their impact upon their European readership. This essay redresses this critical imbalance to highlight the pertinence of a range of novels by French and Scandinavian authors and their value as a form of committed literature designed to shape the actions of the present-day European reader through a genre, which in terms of its readership and thematic scope is increasingly transnational. France, Sweden, and Norway all share a memory of the Second World War rendered ambiguous by the half-occluded memory of collaboration with Nazi Germany often in the name of a fascist Europe. This chapter examines a selection of novels by Didier Daeninckx, Henning Mankell, Asa Larsson, and Jo Nesbø, for example, which centre on a crime committed in the present, which then reveals, through the investigative process, individual as well as collective, national responsibility for collaboration. In the connection made between individual guilt and collective responsibilities, these texts offer both an ethical and political reading of the relationship between present and past, and therefore merit our attention as far more than expressions of a troubled national memory. Furthermore, by locating the crime within a contemporary European neo-Nazi milieu, they raise the persistent spectre of a form of transnational fascism. This spectre in turn raises questions as to the responsibilities and ethical duties of the contemporary reader. These novels by left-leaning authors ultimately offer a form of politically engaged literature that seeks to rescue a version of the European project lost in diplomatic and bureaucratic wrangling and threatened by the alternative model of European cooperation being forged, so these authors fear, in the criminal neo-Nazi milieu.
