Stieg of the bookshop

Time to raise the bar of culture in this blog, from the lows of new potatoes on to the heady world of literature. Well I say literature, what I mean is popular fiction and I say popular in the true sense of the word. I'm currently reading a thriller by Jo Nesbo, a writer from the all conquering stable of Scandinavian crime writers.

I'm reliably informed that he's the new Stieg Larsson, a fact of which I am aware of because it says so on a sticker on the front cover. In fact it's not even a sticker, it's directly printed on to the cover but made to look like one of those stickers the bookshop put on to promote sales of 3 for 2 or to alert you to the extra brilliance of the book.

Step into a branch of Waterstones these days and it is statistically very likely that you'll end up buying a book written by a Scandinavian billed as the 'New Stieg Larsson' as it seems every Anders, Sven and Henrik are being linked to the incredibly successful, but unfortunately no longer with us, creator of the Millenium series of novels. A google search for 'the new Stieg Larsson' turns up 9.8m results. Obviously this is a deeply flawed figure as this process is the lazy journalist's tool for judging the popularity of things. One would probably generate hundreds of thousands of results for something as obscure as 'Norwegian monkey finally types out entire works of Shakespeare,’ and the results would be just as meaningless.

And it seems your novel doesn't even have to be that good to ride on the wave of Stieg-mania that will push your sales through the roof. One flash on a book cover read, 'Has been compared to the likes of Stieg Larsson.' It doesn't take much probing to figure out that although this book has been 'compared' to SL but with what conclusion? The next line might read, 'and falls well short as it's total rubbish,'

Still this writer is thoroughly enjoying this surge of decent thrillers and is also learning a good bit of the geography of Oslo at the same time.