Chapter 13 - The Mountains and Death: Revelations of Climate and Land in Nordic Noir

Summary

This chapter investigates the uses to which climate is put in a range of Nordic noir novels and films. In the majority of such texts, climate functions as both a feature of particular locales (usually, the stark meteorological and ecological settings associated with the Nordic lands) and a way to emphasise or otherwise give aesthetic expression to human actions. Strikingly, however, a small number of texts could be identified as what Linda Rugg terms ‘ecocrime’ fiction. In these, non-human nature appears as an actant in its own right, for it figures as the victim of crime. However, criminal investigation in these texts is displaced from non-human to human victims, thus deferring inquiry into the non-human and underlining non-human nature as an aporia of meaning or as the site of trauma.