Anyone who’s walked through a bookstore or scrolled through the offerings of a steaming service knows that when it comes to crime novels and TV shows, the USA hasn’t been #1 in decades. “Scandicrime” and “Nordic noir” have an imperial dominance over the genre, and names such as Stieg Larsson, Henning Mankell, and Hakan Nesser are now as familiar to fans as Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett.

What is less widely appreciated is that the genre has always owed as much to Northern Europe as to the United States. There is a direct line of succession from the ultraviolent Old Norse sagas to the 19th-century Norwegian writer Bjornstjerne Bjornson to Bjornson devotee Knut Hamsun to Hamsun devotee Ernest Hemingway. The “hard-boiled” American style is about 1,000 years old and might just as well have been called “frozen stiff.”