When you think of Easter traditions, eggs, bunnies, Peeps and baskets may come to mind. But what about a hard-boiled crime novel? In Norway (and, increasingly, the nearby region), it’s a century-old Easter tradition to read mysteries around this time.
Påskekrim (“Easter crime”) began, as many beloved traditions do, with a viral marketing campaign. Back in 1923, a newspaper allowed a company to take out an ad that covered the front page of the paper that year to promote a book entitled (roughly) The Bergen Train Was Robbed in the Night (more correctly, Bergenstoget plyndret i natt). Naturally, Norwegians saw the headline at the top of the freakin’ newspaper and assumed that the story was true. (See below. Their confusion is very understandable…)
This all created a huge buzz. It also got a lot of folks interested in reading crime novels, in part because they were trying to solve a mystery in real-time! The first run of the book sold out almost immediately.
Apparently, another (fabulous) tradition in the region is that many people take all of Holy Week off work. While spending quiet hours at home, folks were cuddling up to books. Why not this buzzy mystery book everyone’s been talking about? An accidental tradition was born.
Bookstores and libraries began putting out big Påskekrim displays each year. The tradition quickly spread to other forms of media. The brand Tine famously prints a crime comic on their milk cartons around Easter time. There are community theatre productions of crime stories. Here in the States, we know crime, mysteries and procedurals are big in Nordic television, and we couldn’t be more grateful. (Love your grisly, intimate work!)
So, if you haven’t quite filled those Easter baskets, why not do as the Norwegians do and enjoy a little crime this year?