Dan Turèll


Dan Turèll, affectionately nicknamed "Onkel Danny", was a popular Danish writer with notable influence on Danish literature. Influenced by the Beat Generation his work crossed a number of genres including autobiography, beat lit and crime fiction.

Overview

Dan Turèll grew up in Vangede, which at that time was a town outside Copenhagen surrounded by fields; today it is a part of Greater Copenhagen. He died from esophageal cancer and is buried at Assistens Cemetery. On Sunday March 19, 2006, on what would have been his 60th birthday, part of the town square of Halmtorvet in Copenhagen was named Onkel Dannys Plads in Dan Turèlls honour and remembrance.
Turèll was unruly, modern, and experimental when it came to both content and form. He might probably himself have claimed to let the form at all times be a consequence of an interaction between theme and subject, which inevitably would lead to a flood of crossing genres; delightfully difficult to fit into a box.
There is often a touch of autobiography, or perhaps rather self orchestration, to his works. He was very conscious of his own image. Many will remember him for his black nail polish. Thus his major breakthrough was the autobiographical novel, Vangede Billeder from 1975. He shares subjects with the American Beat poets : jazz, metropolis, drugs, and zen. He has an eye for the aesthetic dimensions of decline and degeneration, which he cultivates not least in his series of crime novels. Other recurring topics include Copenhagen, Malta, the teachings of Donald Duck, icons of American culture and the Americanisation, which the United States, for better or worse, had on Denmark.
Turèll loved his city of Copenhagen, its life, its noise and perhaps especially the little stories, that lurked everywhere. This love for the city is portrayed in many of his stories. It must be said, however, that his portrayal of Vesterbro is considerably more romantic than the Vesterbro of real life.
Turèll published quite a bit of his material himself, especially early in his career. He wrote in both Danish and English and has been translated into Dutch, Estonian, French, German, Norwegian, Swedish and Serbian.

Cut-up literature

The so-called Mord-serie consists of ten novels and two volumes of short stories in the "American" school of crime fiction, known from writers like Raymond Chandler. All twelve volumes follow the same protagonist, a nameless detective / reporter, a freelance writer for a fictitious Copenhagen newspaper, plainly called Bladet. In each novel the protagonist is hurled into a new murder mystery, often along recurring characters, centrally among them Politiinspektør Ehlers. The stories are self contained, but settings, relations, and characters evolve as the series progress.
The series primarily takes place in an alternate version of the borough of Vesterbro in Copenhagen, which serves as a backdrop for considerably more criminal endeavours than real life will probably ever match. Also certain aspects of the city's geography has been altered. Certain streets lie differently, for instance.
The following poems of Dan Turèll have been published in English since 2009 when the American writer, Thomas E. Kennedy, began to translate and write about Turèll with his widow’s permission:
Three poems from Storby-Blues with essay, “Uncle Danny Comes to America,” in New Letters, 73:2&3 :126-39; four poems from Storby Blues, with essay, “Smoking Dan Turèll’s 27-year-old Cigar,”in Absinthe: New European Writing 12 :34-58

Adaptations

The square Dan Turèlls Plads in his native Vangede was named for him on 9 March 2007. Onkel Dannys Plads in the Kødbyen area of Copenhagen's Vesterbro district is also named for him.