https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/a-darker-shade-ed-john-henri-holmberg/

I got this in advance of Worldcon 75 because John-Henri Holmberg was one of the guests of honour in Helsinki. I know him vaguely because we have ended up on panels together at all three European Worldcons this century, but this was my chance to get into his work. Which I then failed to do in advance of the convention – who knew that running the Hugo Awards takes up quite a lot of one’s spare time???

It’s an anthology of seventeen short stories by Swedish writers, all of them about crime and detection rather than sf or fantasy. Authors include a couple I had heard of, Henning Mankell and Stieg Larsson, and lots more whose names were new to me. Good gender balance. Almost all the stories are set in Sweden, which has been on my mind recently because it is about to assume the EU presidency.

Going back to the anthology, the weakest story is unfortunately the one by Stieg Larsson, later famous for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and its sequels, but he was only 17 when he wrote it (and would probably have blocked its publication if he had still been alive). But the rest are generally good, some very good. At short length you can’t fit in a lot of detection, so more often than not the stories are from the perpetrator’s point of view, but with some interesting twists. The cold revenge of the protagonist of Inger Frimansson’s “In Our Darkened House” will linger with me. A good read. ( )

I was disappointed in the quality of writing in this book as I was looking forward to reading it. ( )

This anthology was interesting to me as I have much enjoyed reading many of the Swedish Authors. (in translation)

The quality of the stories is mixed with the best toward the last for the most part.

The best stories certainly deserve 4 stars. ( )

Terrific collection of Swedish authors, many of them are already well-known in North America due to the popularity of Swedish crime fiction. This book introduced me to many new authors whose books I will be seeking out, such as Johan Theorin, Tove Alsterdal and Hakan Nesser.

Another author included in the collection is Cilla Borjlind, who wrote one of the stories along with her husband, Rolf. This couple have created many crime dramas for television and they have also written numerous scripts based on the characters (Martin Beck series) created by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo. Cilla has a novel being released in July of this year, Spring Tide, that has had rave reviews. I pre-ordered the book and cannot wait to read it.

The only story I thought perhaps did not belong in this collection was by Sara Stridsberg. Her story is more abstract & avant-garde. In my opinion it did not fit well with the crime writer theme and would have been better placed in a general collection of Swedish/European fiction.

When you read the stories in this collection, do not skip the author introductions before each tale. Many of them give insight into Swedish customs and clarify parts of the story that might otherwise be confusing to non-Scandinavians.

All in all, a wonderful collection and a great introduction to new authors. ( )

When a book states “original stories from Sweden’s Greatest Crime Writers” one ( or I) would assume that the stories in the anthology would be mystery stories. But you know what happens when you ‘assume’. So, as you can guess, many of the stories in A Darker Shade of Sweden were far from mysteries, most glaringly a story about brain transplants from Steig Larsson, who apparently preferred science fiction to mystery, regardless of his huge selling Girl With the Dragon Tattoo series.

A Darker Shade of Sweden, indeed, contains stories from some of Sweden’s greatest crime writers including Larsson, Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo, Henning Mankell and Hakan Nesser, Asa Larsson and Eva Gabrielsson (Larsson’s partner). And it does have some good mysteries such as Katarina Wennstam’s Too Late Shall the Sinner Awaken about someone explaining a murder 25 years after the fact or Veronica von Schenck’s Maitreya about stolen artifacts.

The most notable odd, non-mystery story was clearly Steig Larsson’s Brain Power followed by Stowall and Wahloo’s The Multi-Millionaire about a millionaire father who makes his son rough it for a year before inheriting the fortune.

As a huge fan of Nordic mystery TV (The Bron) and books in Arnaldur Indridason’s Inspector Erlendur series, my expectations of this book were not met. What did I get out of this? Well, an author or two that I might try out, primarily Katarina Wennstam and Veronica von Schenck. Other than that, not much. Is A Darker Shade of Sweden going to stay in my library? Probably not. ( )