The Draining Lake and the exceptional crime

I have a full review coming elsewhere of The Draining Lake, so for now I'll restrict myself to a wry observation that Arnaldur Indriðason makes in the book about his native Iceland.

Arnaldur lamented a few weeks ago at Bouchercon that "The biggest difficulty for an Icelandic crime writer is that we don't have much crime in the country." In The Draining Lake he has his narrator muse that the novel's three main police officers

"were more accustomed to dealing with simple, Icelandic crimes without mysterious devices or trade attachés who weren't trade attachés, without foreign embassies of the Cold War, just Icelandic reality: local, uneventful, mundane and infinitely removed from the battle zones of the world."
That passage comprehends both wistfulness and rueful, ironic observation. The novel itself reminds me a bit of Jo Nesbø's The Redbreast, with its excursions decades into the past for the roots of an event in the narrative present.

Is that sort of novelistic excavation more common in Nordic crime fiction than in crime writing from elsewhere? Does brutal crime so shock the placid, civilized surface of life in the Nordic nations that its crime writers are driven more than those elsewhere to probe the past for answers where, say, American authors might seek roots in the present?