“Jo Nesbo is my new favorite thriller writer and Harry Hole my new hero.”
-Michael Connelly

“I am the world’s greatest living crime writer. [Jo Nesbø] is a man who is snapping at my heels like a rabid pitbull poised to take over my mantle when I dramatically pre-decease him.”
-James Ellroy

“Many authors know how to make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. Jo Nesbo´s one of the few who keeps them there.”
-Linwood Barclay

A potted autobiography, a little about books and even less about Harry

    I COME FROM A FAMILY OF READERS AND STORYTELLERS. My mother was a librarian and my father used to sit in the living room reading every afternoon. And he told stories. Long stories we had heard before, but in such a way that we wanted to hear them again. When I was seven I pulled Lord of the Flies off the bookshelf and asked my father to read it to me. Not so much because I had good taste, but because on the cover there was a picture of a pig’s bloodstained head impaled on a pole. My father read it and I thought I could have made the story more exciting myself. I had already begun to impress friends my age, and some older children, with my gruesome ghost stories.
    But my greatest passion was soccer. I made my first appearance for Molde, a Premier League team in Norway, at the age of seventeen and I was sure I would go on to play professionally in England for the Tottenham Hotspurs. So I started skipping school and I think that, if you asked the teachers at my high school, my very existence came to be shrouded in mystery. My grades tanked, but so what? I was going to be a pro athlete…
    Then I blew out the cruciate ligaments in my knees. Probably no loss for Tottenham, but my world came crashing down. School was over and when I got my grades I realized they just weren’t good enough to do the things I had wanted to do. A number of career paths were no longer open to me. So I took a deep breath and signed up to do military service in the far north of Norway. For the three years I was there, I shut myself in every night and every weekend and bulldozed my way through the high school syllabus. And read quite a bit of Hamsun and Hemingway, too. Until then I had always trusted my talent and taken it for granted, and followed the path of least resistance, but now I discovered a new side of myself: self-discipline. When I finally held my high school diploma in my hands that spring, with top-notch grades, I experienced a deep, heartfelt satisfaction I had never felt before, and perhaps not since either. Now I could get into pretty much any school or any program I wanted. The problem was that I didn’t know what I wanted to study. So I enrolled at the Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration in Bergen, a school with a long, illustrious tradition and a prestigious name. I figured it had to be good.
    One day in the cafeteria this guy came up to me and said someone told him I played guitar. That wasn’t exactly true: I knew three chords. But I didn’t contradict him since he was trying to get a band together. And so I became the guitarist for De Tusen Hjem which played the kind of industrial noise rock you get when you’re really bad at playing, have plenty of electricity, big amps and practice in a basement. We sounded so awful our vocalists quit one after another. Eventually somebody pushed me up to the microphone. And since I thought the lyrics for the cover songs we were playing stank and that we might as well be playing actual melodies instead of just angry strings of chords, I started writing songs. De Tusen Hjem never achieved world domination, but we did release a single, which was played frequently on local radio, at least once on national radio, and sold 25 copies.
    When I finished university, I had an economics degree and the glimmering of a notion that I might like to write pop songs. I moved to Oslo and started working in finance, got bored and wrote songs. One night a young jazz bass player I knew listened to some of my songs. The next day we started a band, Di Derre. A year later we were touring. Two years later we had a recording contract. Our second album became the best selling album in Norway in years. Our concerts sold out in hours. And suddenly we were pop stars.
    However, I had seen what happened to other musicians who turned their hobby into a job, and I knew it would demand too many compromises as far as my music, and my life, were concerned. So I hung onto my day job as a stockbroker while we continued playing gigs. I also studied to become a financial analyst. When I got headhunted by DnB Markets, the largest brokerage firm in Norway, to build up their options division, I had to commit to two years with them. In other words, I had more than enough to do. I performed at night and worked during the day. After one year I was so burned out that I hated everything and everyone I worked with, including myself. I told my band and my boss that I needed six months off. Then I hopped on a plane to Australia, to get as far away from Norway as I could. But I took my laptop with me.
    The reason I brought my laptop was that a woman from a publishing company had proposed I write a book describing life on the road with the band. That engendered a whole new way of thinking and I realized I was ready to take the leap and write a novel. It was just a question of getting started. But it had to be a story about what Aksel Sandemose claimed were the only two things worth writing about: murder and love.
    It takes about thirty hours to fly from Oslo to Sydney. And in those thirty hours I came up with the plot for a story I started writing as soon as I got to the hotel. It was the middle of the night, I had jetlag and I wrote about a guy named Harry who landed at the same Sydney airport, was staying in the same hotel and had jetlag…
    When I returned from Australia I had almost finished the book. As soon as I set my suitcase down in my living room, I picked up writing again. I just wrote and wrote and was irritated by disturbances like hunger and the need for sleep. These were the best weeks of my life.
    I sent the manuscript to a publisher, but under a pseudonym to make sure they wouldn’t be tempted to publish a crap book by a pop-star-turned-writer. The manuscript was delivered and my leave of absence was over. My first morning back at work I switched on my computer and realized I had almost everything: an apartment, no debt, an overpaid job and a great band. The only thing I didn’t have was time. My father had died two years before: the very same year he had retired and was going to start writing the book he had been planning about his experiences during the Second World War. But his time ran out. And I wasn’t going to let the same thing happen to me. So, before my computer screen was up and running, I was standing in my boss’s office explaining that I didn’t have time to work for him any more.
    I spent the next three weeks wondering what to do. Until one morning I received a phone call asking if I were Kim Erik Lokker. And then the brief message that my manuscript was going to be published.
    At the publishing house they asked me why I had used a pseudonym and I explained that my name was already well known in Norway. But when I told them my name they didn’t seem to recognize it. So I cleared my throat and explained that I was the vocalist for a well-known band. Still no response. I said the name of the band. Two of them nodded and one started humming a song. By another band.
    The Bat was published in the fall of 1997 under my own name, and with a mix of elation and terror I waited for the reviews to deal with that pop music guy who dared to write crime fiction! But the reviews were on topic, serious and focused on the book, not on me as a person. And, best of all, they were positive.
    I went to Bangkok in the winter of 1998 with the synopsis of what would become The Cockroaches. When I got there I realized things weren’t going to work out: I was planning to stay for two months and I was already feeling claustrophobic. And yet, two weeks later I was in love with the city. I didn’t notice the noise, liked sweating, and felt that air should have a smell, a taste and a color. And once again I was following in Harry’s footsteps—or he in mine—through Chinatown, on boats on the Chao Phraya River and in go-go bars in Patpong.
    I discovered that I had learned a lot from the first book. I was better at the craft of writing and had picked up a few pointers on composition. At the same time, I was under more pressure now because I knew that writing was what I wanted to do, and after The Cockroaches there was no guarantee I would get another book published. From my time in the music industry I knew that the public’s memory was short, and that if The Cockroaches flopped I would be back to square one.
    When I returned from Bangkok my publisher called and told me that The Bat had been awarded the 1997 Riverton Prize for Best Norwegian Crime Novel. I was pleased, of course, but also a little skeptical. It had been too easy! So I counted up the Norwegian crime novels that had been published that year, subtracted the authors who had already received the prize since I had heard people usually only won once, disregarded the books the reviewers hadn’t liked, and realized that I must have won the prize through a process of elimination.
    A month later I found out that The Bat had also been awarded the 1997 Glass Key for Best Nordic Crime Novel. Then I figured maybe I shouldn’t think about these things so much and just enjoy the moment. I was unlikely to experience anything like this again.
    When I saw the headline in the Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet, I knew enjoying the moment had been the right thing to do. I was witnessing my first devastating review. So when I learned that The Cockroaches had been accepted as the main book in the National Book Club’s New Books section—the golden ticket into a commercial and literary elite in Norway—I knew that it was actually thanks to its predecessor, The Bat.
    So I sat down and started writing The Redbreast. It was the story my father had wanted to tell, about Norwegians on both sides of Nazism during the Second World War. About the mythical self-image of the Norwegian people and a nation actively resisting Hitler. About why people make the choices they do and the victor’s privilege of writing history. If writing the first two books was like playing a solo on an acoustic guitar, this was like directing an orchestra. When it was finished I knew that if the critics slaughtered the book or if it failed commercially, I would have to give up writing and find something new. Because The Redbreast was simply the best I had to offer.
    When the book came out, it was more with a sense of relief than pleasure that I gradually realized I had done quite well. The publishers were enthusiastic, the reviewers were enthusiastic and the public was enthusiastic. The book won the Norwegian Booksellers’ Prize in 2000 for best novel of the year.
    In Nemesis, which came out in 2002, I set the plot almost entirely to Oslo, more precisely on the very street where I lived. As a private citizen, Harry gets drawn into the story via a former girlfriend from many years ago, who is found dead. And the tension between Harry and his adversary, his colleague Tom Waaler, continues. In terms of content, Nemesis is an obvious follow-up to The Redbreast and—the way I see it—has more in common with the first two Harry Hole books in terms of its structure and narrative. The book was well received and was awarded the William Nygaard Prize.
    The Devil’s Star picks up where Nemesis left off, set in Oslo during a July heat wave, and once again with Tom Waaler as a central character. But he remains a riddle. The overarching Waaler storyline—a person who in many respects is very similar to Harry and reflects his psyche and moral dilemmas—runs through The Redbreast, Nemesis and The Devil’s Star, and so it would be natural to view them as an Oslo Trilogy. The Devil’s Star came out in fall 2004, became my greatest commercial success thus far, and paved the way for my books to be published abroad. Until that point I had been translated into six languages and was known as “an exciting, exotic Scandinavian crime writer.” But in spite of all that, I sold relatively few books outside Norway.
    I finished The Redeemer in the summer of 2005, after having spent more than two years writing it. The inspiration for the plot came partly from the Salvation Army, partly from the siege of Vukovar on the border between Croatia and Serbia in 1992, and partly from the seedy side of Oslo around the now closed junkie hangout, Plata. I know a little about the Salvation Army after having worked with them on a charity recording and concert. The background story of the young Croatian hitman comes, at least in part, from a dramatic story a Croatian captain told me when I was writing Stemmer fra Balkan [Balkan Voices, non-fiction] in 1999. And you used to be able to stroll over to a war zone closer to home any night of the week—nighttime Oslo at the Plata—and study it close up. You still can, although Plata itself no longer exists.
    I was wildly excited when I finished The Redeemer and was surprised to find more resistance from the publisher than I had encountered with any of my earlier books. I had already cut almost a hundred pages from the novel and I cut even more. The new version felt so pared to the bone that I was afraid I had killed it. At one point I asked my editor what he thought about dropping the book altogether and starting on a new one. Perhaps I had been affected by the fact that we could feel mounting expectations from all sides after the success of The Devil’s Star. In addition, The Redbreast had been voted Norway’s Greatest Crime Novel of All-Time by NRK [Norwegian Public Broadcasting] and the Book Clubs. Suddenly there was a long way to fall.
    So it was with a certain dread-tinged excitement that we launched The Redeemer in the fall of 2005. The critics descended on the book, and the first review appeared the day after the book was released. It was a Saturday and my editor called to warn me that the review in Dagsavisen was quite dismissive. And one bad review usually presages more. I had the weekend to steel myself for the rest. On Monday morning I looked myself in the mirror, knowing I was facing five days of interviews and that I would be looking five years older by Friday. However, when the dust settled, the conclusion was clear: the bad review given by Dagsavisen was the only one; the others were, in a word, overwhelming. And the public was not slow to react. The head of my publishing house called to tell me that The Redeemer was the fastest-selling fiction book in the history of the company. Five days had passed and it was already, for lack of a more precise or profound expression, a fantastic success. And I can remember promising myself I would enjoy the moment without feeling guilty or suffering the paranoia I imagine extremely beautiful women must feel: the feeling that people like you for reasons you actually despise. Quite the contrary, I ordered a T-shirt that said BESTSELLER on it. On the other hand I’ve never found the right occasion to wear it. Well, I suppose I can always beat myself up for being too chicken.
    
    I spent 2006 writing a few songs for Di Derre’s Farewell and Best Of album, and then doing the launch and the subsequent farewell tour. The tour was a heartwarming encounter with a large, loyal audience. But I also discovered something else: in the popular consciousness I was no longer a musician who wrote books, but a writer who played in a band. When I started writing the next Harry Hole novel, The Snowman, I noticed that things were starting to happen abroad. My agent started calling more and more often, and more and more contracts were arriving in the mail from countries further and further away from Norway. My Harry Hole novels have been translated into more than forty languages, but I still get a huge kick out of it when a book arrives in the mail and the only word I recognize is my own name on the cover.
    The Snowman was released in June 2007. Not only was it unheard of to release a book in the middle of summer—after all, it was generally agreed in the Norwegian publishing world that books with a certain sales potential should be released in the fall—but was it really going to be called The Snowman? Yes, of course.
    Again reviews were positive and The Snowman was to become the fastest-selling novel in Norwegian history. And for the first time in many years I took a sort of summer vacation. It didn’t last very long.
    For many years I had been toying with an idea for a children’s book. It had started with my daughter who, as usual, had asked me to make up a story while we were eating dinner. So I made up Nilly—a tiny, red-headed ten-year-old boy with an Elvis quaff and the banter of a used car salesman; his neighbor and best friend Lisa; two fat, nasty twins with a Hummer-driving father; and a fairly eccentric professor who had accidentally invented the world’s most powerful fart powder.
    Doctor Proctor’s Fart Powder came out in October 2007, and I was apprehensive about the reviews. After all, this was a book they were allowed to slaughter. My worries proved to be groundless. The book was greeted with unanimous enthusiasm. Doctor Proctor’s Fart Powder was nominated for Ark’s Children’s Book Award 2007 and sales took off, probably significantly aided by a popular talk show that interviewed me. They flew in the Methane Man, a tall, thin man dressed in superhero spandex. He used extremely audible farts to blow out candles on a birthday cake and “sing” hymns. A quarter of the entire population of Norway, myself included, laughed until we were screaming.
    In November 2007 I published a novella titled The White Hotel. All the revenue from the sales went to Save the Children. And I think I can hear you yawning now as you wait for me to tell you how overwhelmingly positive the reviews were. But it was only reviewed in one place. The reviewer liked the project, but hated my contribution. I read the review twice and I’m sad to say he made some good points.
    All the same, 2007 was a fantastic year for me. I was awarded the Norwegian Booksellers’ Prize for the second time, this time for The Snowman. Furthermore, the Harry Hole books had started appearing on bestseller lists abroad. So what do you do when everything is going so well? Yes, that’s right, you start writing something completely different, forcing yourself to take risks, and thereby discover a new world. This way the fear of failure will increase the pleasure in any success you might achieve. This time the project was a story about a headhunter at a recruitment firm. He uses the FBI’s nine-step interview model on job candidates and is married to a woman who is much too beautiful and whom he must rely on art theft to finance. One day a Dutch man turns up for a job interview. It turns out he has a missing Rubens masterpiece hanging on the wall at home… The title was Headhunters. It topped the sales charts from the moment it came out in the summer, and again the critics were very kind. Apart from one, from my hometown paper in Molde, who just didn’t like the book. I read the review carefully. And even though Headhunters received The Norwegian Readers’ Prize for 2008, I thought—and still think—that the critic in Molde had good arguments.
    I also made a decision that was very important for me. But not until Greedy Jo had had a serious discussion with Decent Jo. The decision was that all the income from Headhunters, domestic and international, would go towards a plan I had been mulling over for a while: basic reading and writing classes for children in the third world. My motivation was principally twofold. I have been privileged enough to be able to travel all over the world, and what this traveling has taught me is that the ability to read is a basic prerequisite for citizens to find their bearings in society so that genuine democracy can exist and so that those same citizens can create a better life for themselves and their families. Besides, I had also realized that I did not have—and would never have—a lifestyle that matched what was gradually becoming a rather large amount of money in my bank account. And there were surely plenty of other very human motives there, too: feelings of guilt that things had gone absurdly well, the need to be liked, to buy myself karma, an indulgence, redemption, etc. But I do not imagine that self-analysis by an overpaid Norwegian writer is very important to an Indian girl who receives ten years of schooling and can return home to her village afterwards, perhaps as a teacher, and be a role model for other girls and mothers.
    So we set up a foundation, the Harry Hole Foundation, which would award an annual prize called A Decent Guy or A Decent Lady, and a stipend that the prizewinner, with the help of a committee, would invest in literacy projects. And the following year, in 2009, we did just that. The Decent Guy prize went to a prison chaplain, Odd-Cato Kristiansen, and the stipend went to the Naandi Foundation that helps provide schooling for deprived girls in India.
    In 2008 I published my second children’s book, Doctor Proctor’s Fart Powder: Bubble in the Bathtub, a flatulent romp through French history, which was short-listed for Ark’s Children’s Book Award, but didn’t win, eliciting the following question from a journalist: “How does it feel to lose for once?” For someone who has definitely not succeeded at everything in life, it feels strange to realize that in some circles I have been branded a kind of golden boy who can do no wrong. But of course there are heavier crosses to bear, and I promise to do everything in my power to make sure that this illusion lasts for as long as possible before the bubble bursts.
    That would certainly have happened in 2009 if I had published the Harry Hole novel that I had just finished writing. To put it plainly, it was bad. And I knew it. I had sent the manuscript to my editors after spending two months writing a first draft that in a way was brave and different, but that didn’t work. It felt like applying make-up to a corpse. So when we met in the summer of 2008 and, as usual, my editors made comments that on the surface might have seemed like minor details, this confirmed for me that they had read the novel the same way I had. I told them I was going to drop the publication. There was a long silence and a couple of gaping mouths around the table, and they argued that these things could be fixed. But, deep down, I knew that the problem was the basic foundation, the scenario, the premise of the whole story. It couldn’t be helped that it was almost two years of work. And as I left the meeting, I felt relieved and confident that I had done the right thing.
    Then I sat down and wrote The Leopard. It was my longest and most labor-intensive book so far. I did research in the Congo and Hong Kong, studied torture weapons and interviewed avalanche experts, scuba divers and rock climbers. And it was also my most brutal book. I had already started Harry’s physical deconstruction in The Snowman, and this continued in The Leopard. Because Harry is like all of us; we fall apart. The only question is how fast. This book was also well received in Norway, but it might have been the first time I noticed that there was so much interest in the books that the reviews probably wouldn’t have that much impact on the sales. In the end, the book broke the previous sales records in Norway and also sold more than ever in most of the other markets.
    I received something in Sweden’s Svenska Dagbladet that I don’t think I ever had before: an unqualified trouncing by a reviewer who felt that the book sensationalized violence. The review seemed so emotionally charged that I could only conclude that The Leopard not only wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but a tea that really stuck in some readers’ craws, a book whose brutality and scenes of violence could truly alienate readers. I received many questions about the use of the torture device Leopold’s Apple in particular. For example, whether it really exists. And another question started coming up: How do you come up with these things? Meaning: What kind of sick, perverted mind could come up with such ideas? I tried to look within myself, to ask if the violence in the book was really appropriately calibrated for the purpose: to say something about the character behind it. Or if I had let myself be lured into sensationalism, effects for the sake of effects and a callous fascination with suffering. There was a time when I flung American Psycho at the wall because it made me physically ill, made me feel polluted just from reading it in all its splendor. Had I now created just such a book, one that had become a sort of guilty pleasure for closet sadists? If there was any comfort, it was that The Leopard was selected as the year’s best crime novel by the Danish Academy of Crime Writers, topped the bestseller lists in Norway, Finland and Denmark, and for the first time Harry Hole made it onto Der Spiegel’s bestseller list in Germany, where it reached as high as No. 3.
    At the same time another piece of news came sailing in. I was on my annual writing trip in Asia when I heard that Nemesis had been nominated for the Edgar Award as best novel in the U.S. The award is viewed as a sort of the Oscar for books, also in the sense that pretty much only American books ever win it. I was surprised since I do not personally consider Nemesis to be my best book. I figured it was a sort of compensatory nomination since my standard prize-winning novel, The Redbreast, had flown under the radar when it was released in the U.S. and hadn’t been discovered until a core group of mystery enthusiasts picked it up later and started discussing the book on the Internet. I was quite sure Nemesis wouldn’t beat out the other five highly qualified nominees, but went to New York with my agent Niclas with two shared goals: to finally have the time and energy to get drunk together and to congratulate the winner in a way that sounded genuine. However, my friend Henrik Mestad, who’s been nominated for a number of acting awards, told me that no matter how sure you are that you won’t win before you go, something strange happens in the seconds before the winner is announced: you become COMPLETELY convinced it will be you. I blew that off, of course, and then of course that is just what happened. In the seconds before John Hart’s name was announced as the very deserving winner, I thought, “Who am I going to thank?” And, “What is the quickest route to the stage?” On the other hand, that gave Niclas and I something to laugh about when we started working on the evening’s remaining goal.
    In the fall of 2010, Doctor Proctor and the End of the World. Maybe, was released, the third in the series. It was clear that both the series and the author now had an established fan base, because the book went right up to No. 1 on the general Norwegian bestseller list, which is unprecedented for a children’s book. The exhibit at the Natural History Museum in Oslo that accompanied the release was also unusual. “Doctor Proctor’s Sensational Exhibition of Animals You Wish Didn’t Exist” was created by Pjotr Sapegin, Kristine Grüner and their employees at an animation studio, and was based on the animals in the Doctor Proctor books: the Mongolian water vole, flesh-eating flying fish, rhinoceroses with colds, toadstools that eat children and other unsavory creatures. The book won the 2010 Norwegian Critics Prize and before the ceremony I got a message from my daughter to say that I should accept the prize on her behalf, since after all she was the one who had asked me to come up with a story about a crazy professor, a tiny, hilarious boy and a very heroic girl who was a little like her.
    The Leopard was released in the U.K. in 2011 and expectations were high, since The Snowman had made it to No. 2 on the paperback list. Both my publisher and my agent were through the roof with joy (let alone myself as the author, although I didn’t have much of a roof where I was at that time) when word came that The Leopard has reached No. 1. When I went on a U.K. tour in March 2011 I realized that something had happened. I had readers! And they were lining up outside the store and around the corner to have their books signed in the same stores where I had sat drumming my fingers a few years earlier.
    As I write this, I’m about to tour the U.S. for the launch of The Snowman there. In spite of the Edgar nomination and reviews, the series has not reached a big audience over there, so it’ll hardly be like in the U.K. Or in Poland where I recently accepted a prize and two teenage girls, who had run away from home somewhere further north in Poland, were standing in front of the place where the ceremony was held hoping to meet and maybe get a picture with their hero. Of course, I’m afraid the hero they wanted to see was Harry Hole and that they were a little disappointed that the author was over fifty years old, shorter than 1.94 meters, and didn’t have a scar extending from the corner of his mouth to his ear. But as we took the picture of the three of us together and I heard the younger of the two let out a timid, contented sob, I felt a little like a pop star again. So now it’s about time to head to the U.S. and come back down to earth, ground myself in reality and start from the beginning again. I’m looking forward to it.
    
Translated by Tara Chace

Norwegian Evil

Interview

    The main protagonist in Jo Nesbø’s crime novels is fascinated by evil. So is the writer – by death and horror. [Sitting at Schrøder’s and waiting for Jo Nesbø.]
The nicotine-stained pictures on the wall stare down at the waitress as she arrives with a helping of biffsnadder and chips [trucker food], and two beers. Red gingham table cloths, fans in the ceiling and lino on the floor. At the table next to mine an elderly man has poured coffee into his saucer. Now he is rolling three sugar cubes through it. It is a March afternoon and the melting snow is splashing into the street. Everything is just as in the books about Harry Hole who debases his life with generous measures of whisky and beer at this table when his hunt for evil has brought him too many trials and tribulations.
It is not hard to imagine Harry walking in through the door with his Doc Martens, a big jacket and a concerned expression on the lined face beneath the short, blond hair. Or sitting down with a Jim Beam and a beer to brood over under the yellowish glare from the table lamps. And thinking: to hell with everything.
    Harry Hole has rattled around in seven novels penned by Jo Nesbø – not blindly, although sometimes it can seem like that, but with the magnetism of a loner, a hard-boiled sensitivity and an intuition that borders on the super-natural. He is the hero of some modern Scandinavian crime writing that draws heavily on the American noir tradition with black humour, quick-fire dialogues and terse prose. But he is also his own man.
Jo Nesbø props his bike against the window and slips off a multi-coloured woollen hat as the door closes behind him. The hat apart, he looks like his hero, though perhaps he is a little more cautious and serious. He orders coffee and Farris mineral water, while starting to explain why Harry drinks.
“From the outset I knew that the main character had to have an Achilles heel, an inner demon, to ensure that he not only experiences tension outside, but on the inside too. And that was to be alcoholism. But I didn’t want the standard, cliché, American, hard-boiled detective clinking ice cubes round a whisky glass and suffering from hangovers the next day. With a cool thirst. This had to be uncool thirst with alcoholism as his kryptonite. He is derailed by it.”
Unlike many of his fictional colleagues, Harry Hole rarely goes on the booze, because his thirst is so uncool, as Jo Nesbø puts it, that there is no room for anything else while it lasts. Not in seven novels, each of several hundred pages. Harry lapses from time to time and Schrøder’s is a fixed venue in most of the books, but he is more often sober than not.

“He’s thirsty, but there’s no reason for him to drink beyond his needs.”

    Why he ended up in the police is a bit of a mystery. He comes from a family of academics based in Oppsal, to the east of Oslo, a comfortable, secure middle class home. His sister has Down’s syndrome. There are alcoholism genes on his father’s side and in Harry’s past lurks a disastrously unhappy love affair with a woman who took her own life.
    “He graduates in law and then goes to Police School, and in some strange way this is his adolescent rebellion, because he comes from an academic background. He joins the police by chance and so that’s that, he continues his career and becomes very interested in the nature of evil. His ambition is to understand evil. That’s what the brunt of his intellectual energy is focussed on: what is evil? What makes someone kill? And he goes on a specialist course with the FBI and takes part in an investigation in Chicago to catch a serial killer. That is perhaps the closest he himself comes to evil. He feels something akin to what the serial killer feels, the same tension and excitement, when he approaches a victim and the same anti-climax after the killer is caught.”
    Jo Nesbø does not have any great crime-writing idols, but he was inspired by the universe created in Frank Miller’s graphic novel Sin City.
    “It has this American hardcore hero and the very character-driven style of narration, an all-out stylised fight between a protagonist and an identified antagonist. The mystery is secondary; the struggle between Good and Evil is what counts. That fascinated me and was what made me write about the struggle between Good and Evil in Harry, and that’s perhaps what makes him seem more and more like the criminals he’s chasing. His colleague, the rogue Tom Waaler, who plays an important role in several book, is a very clear antagonist, but in many ways he is very like Harry Hole.”

Even though Jo Nesbø is famous for his sophisticated, startling plots, it is clear he is most concerned with the development of the main character. To increase the tension, Nesbø makes the crimes impinge more and more on Harry’s private life. His colleagues die, and his great love Rakel and her son Oleg also become drawn into violent dramas.

“Character-led stories are the most interesting to write. The more the action revolves around Harry’s personality, the better. It makes his decisions more existentialist. And that’s the only thing which I think is interesting in novels: what does the protagonist do? That’s what all good stories are about. If you watch a disaster movie, it’s not about burning buildings and explosions, but about what the protagonist does, the decisions he takes. Will he go back up the skyscraper or will he try to save himself? Often they are about people who have to overcome their greatest fear. Like Harry, who suffers from vertigo and has to go up the tower in Holmenkollen. You give your characters moral dilemmas, and the whole thing is about the way in which they tackle them.”

Do you work consciously on creating moral choices or dilemmas when you start a book?
“No, I tend to start books with something more concrete. Stanley Kubrick worked with visual scenes, building blocks that he knew he would use to build up the story. That’s the way I am tending more and more to work. There are some scenes I know I want in the book. They could be quite spectacular, but also quite simple things. And I might be absorbed by a moral question. In The Redeemer revenge was the basic motive, the refined idea of revenge, because there is an invisible line between the revenge we condemn and the revenge the legal system takes care of.”

What do you mean?
”When we remove criminals from the streets and lock them up, this is the modern legal system attending to our need for revenge. It would be extremely naïve to believe that anything else was going on. Imprisoning people or sentencing them to death is society exacting its revenge, and that of course is uncivilised. The line between revenge becoming a crime and revenge being acceptable is very fine, and that is what many modern films and thrillers are about. Batman is a vengeful psychopath, but we approve of that on a moral level, and that is interesting. That is what I wanted to write about. And in The Redeemer Harry takes his revenge, the uncivilised, immoral, unethical version, but I don’t romanticise it. I don’t give readers the arguments to excuse it.”

But you think it is uncivilised?
“Yes, of course it is. Revenge always is.”

Like many other crime heroes, Harry does not have a functional love life. Why not?
”Aksel Sandemose wrote that love was the only thing worth writing about. And it is Harry’s ambition to understand both love and evil. He is a passionate guy in all ways. And he is the type of man who has no control over his impulses. The fact that he cannot set limits permeates his drinking habits and his attitude to his job. He takes on cases and is swallowed up by them. It is the same with his relationships with women. I could have chosen to make them live happily ever after and have children, but then we have a completely different person, one I find boring. I like the fact that he is in transit in his own life, as far as his emotions and his job are concerned. Rakel and he are examples of two people who cannot live with or without each other.”

What made you choose this scenario?
Jo Nesbø squirms on the chair, rubs his large forehead and sighs.
“If you ask a writer why he has done something enough times, he will end up answering it is about his life. In the final analysis it is about what I want. It’s down to something I have thought and felt.”

Is he becoming more and more like you?
“When you make a person a hero you are bound to have some things in common with him – at least a basic set of values if you’re going to understand him. And when Harry says that the film Braveheart, with Mel Gibson, is one of the worst films he has seen, then I agree. He loves the Stones and the Beatles, as I do, but he leans more to the Stones while I lean to the Beatles.”

But are there any tangents between your life and his? Having a child, for example, did that have any effect on Harry?
”Sure. Now I have a daughter, and I had her…… well, that’s crazy……in 1999 and The Redbreast came out in Norway in 2000.” He laughs out loud. And looks surprised.
“That’s the way it is of course.”

What do you set out to do with your crime fiction?
“I look for order in emotional chaos, try to create emotional harmony. It doesn’t matter that some corruption remains, but there has to be an emotional pay-off at the end of the book.”

Your protagonist has had a terrible price to pay to get that far. People he is fond of die and, psychologically, he becomes more and more damaged. Physically, too, in the latest book
“I think it’s important to show that heroes can disintegrate.”

Do they disintegrate for our benefit?
“I don’t know if there’s anything to be learnt from it. But it is a fact. And it is sad that they do so in such an irreversible way. I’m carrying an injury, tennis elbow, and now I’m over forty and I’ll never get rid of it completely. I can train it up, have a massage and all that, but it will always be there. In a way it is a foretaste of death, and it is interesting to put in the book, the beginning of the end.”

How do you think the series has developed in terms of the plot, language, structure and style?
”This is a question of practice. As far as the plot goes, writing the type of book I do now is a bit like steering a super tanker. You can’t just chug full steam ahead and sail away. You must have a course laid down and the whole thing planned. And it’s difficult. To compose a crime novel you need to use a bit of engineering skill. If you’ve completed a couple of projects you learn a lot. And if you got through the first two intact, as I did, that’s good. With the third comes the grand plot.”

The first ones seem like the work of a beginner because there’s just one string. They’re not on the same level linguistically, either.
”I wouldn’t disagree. The third book is more like a symphony orchestra. I’m glad I didn’t try to write The Redbreast straight off. There was only one narrator’s point of view in the two first ones, but in the third there are several timescales and different angles. It was an enormous difference and shows my progress.”
His new novel The Snowman is about a number of women who have been unfaithful. There are several sections where, in the last minutes of their lives, the victims tell the story from their angle, and there are chilling and sickening scenes – some of the worst this reviewer has read. A confession which makes Jo Nesbø smile with pleasure and declare his huge satisfaction.
“Of course, it’s not about what you write, but frequently about what you don’t write. When the woman is trapped in the forest and knows she is going to die there’s not very much about what the murderer does to her, but the chapter closes with his words to her: “Shall we start?” The next thing you hear is that Harry has found a snowman with her head on. And that’s enough for you to fill in the rest with your own fears.” Fears Jo Nesbø knows from his own experience.
“I believe that those of us who were afraid of the dark when we were young have an advantage. If you pretended you were too big to be afraid of the dark, you closed off part of your brain, but if you let your imagination run, it went wild. When I went down to the cellar to get potatoes as a boy, I came back up again with a horror story of novel proportions in my head. And when I’m writing the passage about the woman being chased through the forest, or when Harry gets lost, I draw from the fear and horror I experienced myself. I’ve been lost in a forest myself and felt I wasn’t far away, but suddenly it became darker and darker, and even though I thought the house was close by, it wasn’t. And then you’re convinced you’re lost. Your terror is the fuel for your writing. I was a lot more afraid of the dark and frightened than my brothers, and I’m sure it has given me an extra edge and sense of horror. I was always the one who had to tell ghost stories when we were small because they could hear the terror in my voice. And I was petrified by my own stories.”

In the opening chapter of The Snowman we meet a woman with her husband and child – later she is the first to go missing. The scene was Jo Nesbø’s first idea for the book.
“I knew I would put it in. The wife comes home to a nice family atmosphere. They get the meal ready and then the man remarks on the nice snowman in the garden. They look at him and say they didn’t make it, and then they go over to the window. And there it is in the garden, but no-one can understand how it got there. There’s something odd about it that they can’t quite put a finger on, but the boy sees what it is: instinctively you would make a snowman face away from you, but this one faces into the house. I knew this scene would be the start of the novel.”

How did the themes for the novels emerge?
”The first book was just chance. I decided I wanted to write a detective novel and I was visiting a friend in Australia. In the Australian Museum I saw a lot about aborigines and started getting interested in that. The second one came from huge coverage on paedophilia and incest cases in Norway and I was going to Bangkok to write a book about a sprawling, alien town. So I contacted a sexologist in Norway before leaving and got all the literature on the various forms of paedophilia. But The Redbreast , which is about World War II and the Eastern Front, is mostly personal material, because in my close family there were Resistance men and soldiers on the Front. I grew up with the war as seen from both sides. And when my mother and father married, a family of Resistance fighters met a family that had been on the Germans’ side. The great thing was that there were no problems because both families had made their own sacrifices in the war.”

How did that manifest itself?
”They shared a contempt for those who had sat with their hands in their laps and done nothing. So the story about the Eastern Front is to a large extent my father’s story. His comrade was shot on New Year’s Eve, his head exploded and it was my father’s job to clean the brain tissue and blood off the machine gun. My father ended up in Vienna as a result of an injury from a hand grenade and fell in love with a nurse. He was only 18 years old. I was an adult when I found out, but it was such a dramatic story that I knew I would have to tell it one day.”

But the book also touches on wartime secrets. What’s your stance with regard to that period?
“The main impression Norwegians would like to give is that we won the war along with England and USA. We just did it in a slightly different way, with an extensive Resistance movement and by blowing up loads of German trains. But that is miles away from reality. Most people did nothing, and the claims that there were 20,000-30,000 fighters in the Resistance movement are completely wrong. That was in 1945 when everyone knew that the Germans would lose, but how many members were there in 1942? No-one would say out loud, but there were perhaps fewer than 2,000 in practice while at the same time, in 1942, there were 5,000 volunteers for the Front. Even when things were going badly at the Front, there was no halt to the flow of volunteers.”
He doesn’t make a big thing about it, but his novels do contain blood and guts – heads go flying or are shattered by bullets – and on occasion the description is fairly direct and explicit. And he doesn’t mind admitting that.
”Yes, well, I am attracted and fascinated by that. I write about it because I’m curious. For example, there was a friend of mine who worked as a porter at the morgue. He told me about the body of an old man they had to collect. It had been lying on the floor for a couple of months. On its side. And when they turned it over, part of the flesh stuck to the floor and where he had been lying was all black. I would like to have seen that. And what is it actually I wanted to see? It’s the fascination with death and the grisly. Living in a safe world we are incredibly drawn by pitiless, grisly deeds. It makes us appreciate security more. The hearth becomes a little warmer when you read Jack London. Personally, I’m curious about everything that is human. I’m not fascinated by suffering for its own sake – torture scenes don’t interest me – but I am fascinated by what human beings look like when they’re dead, what a corpse looks like.”
His first two novels take place in Australia and Bangkok, but since then Oslo has been the centre for Harry’s hunt for evil. And Oslo has long lost its innocence – in reality and in Nesbø’s novels. The picture postcard idyll of the nice cobbled streets, the City Hall, Holmenkollen and the Kontiki museum are still there, but now they have company. Foreign beggars sitting in the slush on street corners and Baltic prostitutes shivering in the cold in Skippergata. The world has come to Oslo.
“Yes, Oslo is a cosy little capital town, but it is also what you have seen. It has the highest number of fatalities from drug overdoses in Europe. Last year the number of rapes reported per inhabitant was three times what it is in New York. There is organised crime, hardcore prostitution, trafficking, drugs from the Balkans and the Russian Mafia. It’s a town that has gone through immense changes over the last twenty years. It’s still a very beautiful town in one of the richest countries of the world, a safe town, but there is all the rest, so it’s easier to write about the shady side of Oslo now than it was twenty years ago. I want to describe the contrasts, and Oslo today is a perfect setting for a riveting thriller.”
He shares one point with his protagonist. They are both preoccupied with evil.

Where does it come from? What is at the heart of evil?
”That question elicits a lot of elusive answers. They disappear as you get closer, run through your fingers. The Norwegian criminologist, Christie, says that there are no evil people, only evil actions, but then you can go on to say that your actions define who you are, so if you have committed evil, you are an evil person, but that’s not a constant. You aren’t always an evil person, only for a moment or a second. I’m not interested in the sociological side but in what it is that makes us commit evil deeds. But here, of course, there are lots of difficult questions regarding terminology. What is evil? Today we would see the great warrior hero of Viking times as a sociopath. Criminal actions in one time and culture can be socially acceptable in another. And you can’t be sure you’ll find evil by examining the criminal’s mind. It’s very complicated.”
In The Snowman Harry, lost in the forest, makes an attempt to put words to evil:
”Evil is not a thing; it doesn’t reside anywhere. On the contrary, evil is the absence of things, the absence of goodness.”
“That’s perhaps the closest I have come to describing it. Evil is a passive thing; it is the absence of goodness, empathy, caring.”

How do you work?
”I’m working on novel number eight right now. I’ve written a synopsis of about 100 pages, which took me about six months, and then I start writing from the beginning. I stay close to my synopsis and exploit it to the maximum. When you’ve got a few books under your belt you know what works and what doesn’t. And you notice when something isn’t working because it is illogical, doesn’t fit or because the characters don’t slot into the action. They don’t do what you want them to do. And so you have to throw it away, but afterwards you can see more clearly, and in my experience this comes out when you write the synopsis. So I stick to it very closely when I write. Usually it starts off with a motive. You have to have a murderer who commits a crime he wants to hide. You have a murder, you have a physical scene, you know how it is done and how it can be covered over, but then you realise that all this is academic because you don’t have a credible motive. If you write about a bank robbery it has to be one executed in a sophisticated way because no-one is under any illusions about the motive, but when you write about a murder, you can easily paint yourself into a corner because of the problem of the motive. What caused this murder? You have to have a hidden motive. And it has to be strong enough to kill for. That’s where I begin. What can drive a person to commit such a deed? On the whole no-one in Scandinavia has any need to kill for gain, the most obvious motive. We can get by. You don’t need to kill anyone to earn a million kroner. And almost no-one does. Then you have personal motives, like jealousy, which are often obvious to everyone around and result in unpremeditated killings. So you have to use your imagination and work on the motive.”

Is it difficult to stage scenes in Norway without them becoming far-fetched?
”No, that doesn’t bother me. There should be a splash of adventure. It’s not a question of things not being credible. You have to inspire confidence in the reader and establish a contract in which you say this could have happened, however fantastic it might seem. But just look at what happens in reality, what you read in the newspapers, that is fantastic and yet it is fact. There was the Nokas robbery in Stavanger where more than ten heavily armed men stole over 50 million and shot a policeman. That’s reality’s version of the film Heat. And there are many real cases which outdo even the wildest crime story.”
How does a writer trick his readers?
“Like a magician flourishing the right hand so the audience cannot see what’s in the left. It’s sleight of hand. If you had seen the left hand you would have seen everything. If I feel that the magician before me can trick me with his dexterity, and it’s not an optical illusion, that’s fine by me. It gives me a thrill. And that’s how I try to do it, so that you are left with the same feeling when the denouement comes: Right, it was there for all to see. I was given a chance. Have you seen the film The Usual Suspects? That’s the kind of crime film where you feel you have been duped. The solution was there all the time, but you didn’t see it. That’s the feeling I try to create. In reality, if a woman has been killed, it is almost always the husband or the lover. And I play on that. Sometimes I use it; at other times I think of different motives, and in crime novels that’s often the most fantastic, unlikely things. If you choose to write about someone killing because of sibling rivalry, you have to be incredibly convincing because it really is an unusual story.”

What do you do when you have structured your novel? Do you go back and slip in tiny clues?
“Yes, I might slip in something to give the impression you had the chance to guess the outcome earlier. There is, of course, the technique of focussing the camera on a vase for no reason, making you feel that it is connected in some way with what happens, but if you have someone cut flowers, then go over to the vase and put them in, then the vase is incorporated into the action and it’s a better way of sowing clues – no exclamation marks.”

You often refer to films. Are your books going to be filmed?
”I have received a few offers, but I’ve said no. I love films and would like to see Harry Hole filmed, but not yet. Because I’m in the middle of the writing process and film is such a strong medium that I feel it would intrude and take him away from me.”

How many Harry Hole books are there in you?
“I’m not absolutely sure, but he’s a hero with the seeds of destruction in him. He won’t live forever. He is going to escape from Oslo in the next book. To Hongkong.”

By Jesper Stein Larsen, translated by Don Bartlett

Bibliography

Phantom [Gjenferd]
2011, Crime Fiction

Doctor Proctor And The End Of The World. Maybe. [Doktor Proktor og verdens undergang. Kanskje.]
2010, Children’s Fiction

The Leopard [Panserhjerte]
2009, Crime Fiction

Headhunters [Hodejegerne]
2008, Thriller

Doctor Proctor’s Time Bathtub [Doktor Proktors tidsbadekar]
2008, Children’s Fiction

The White Hotel [Det hvite hotellet]
2007, Short Novel (A Charity Project for Save the Children)

Doctor Proctor’s Fart Powder [Doktor Proktors prompepulver]
2007, Children’s Fiction

The Snowman [Snømannen]
2007, Crime Fiction

The Redeemer [Frelseren]
2005, Crime Fiction

The Devil’s Star [Marekors]
2003, Crime Fiction

Nemesis [Sorgenfri]
2002, Crime Fiction

Merry-Go-Round Music [Karusellmusikk]
2001, Short Stories

The Redbreast [Rødstrupe]
2000, Crime Fiction

Balkan Voices [Stemmer fra Balkan]
1999, Nonfiction (co-authored with Espen Søbye)

The Cockroaches [Kakerlakkene]
1998, Crime Fiction

The Bat [Flaggermusmannen]
1997, Crime Fiction

Frequently Asked Questions

First off, your name ends with a letter that does not appear in the English alphabet.
How does one pronounce your name? Is there an English word that contains this phoneme?
It’s like the German ö. Or the “o” in Peter Sellers’ pronunciation of “bomb” in the Pink Panther-movie.

Who are your favorite authors?
Jim Thompson, Vladimir Nabokov, Knut Hamsun, Henrik Ibsen, Ernest Hemingway, Charles Bukowski, and Frank Miller.

Which are your favorite books?
Lolita (by Vladimir Nabokov), The Killer Inside Me (by Jim Thompson), Pan (by Knut Hamsun), Ham On Rye (by Charles Bukowski)

Which are your favorite movies?
Starship Troopers (no kidding!), The Conversation, Rules Of Attraction, The Usual Suspects and – yes, I’m sorry – The Godfather, The Deer Hunter and Taxi Driver.

Do you have any favorite football teams?
Molde, Tottenham, and always Brazil.

Which are your favorite musicians?
Miles Davis, Jayhawks, Teenage Fanclub, Elvis Costello, Ryan Adams, Tom Waits, Bruce Springsteen, Neil Young and Bob Dylan.

Where do you like to travel?
Buenos Aires, southern Thailand, and Australia.

Do you have any hobbies or interests, besides writing and making music?
A little rock climbing, any kind of ballgame, and watching movies.

How do you pronounce Harry Hole’s last name?
“O” like in “pool” and “e” like in “ethnic.”

Do you and your character Harry Hole have a lot in common?
We’re both romantic, melancholic, and have a mix of chaos and discipline.

How did you start off writing?
I read. And I read. I basically put off writing as long as I could, that was until I was 37. Then I started writing like a madman.

The novel Nemesis has the concept of memory loss at its heart. In thrillers, this is often linked to questions about identity, and the difficulty of accepting the darker side of a person’s character. How did this become so central to the book?
I think the question whether true evil exists – whether it’s an antisocial gene, a consequence of society and culture, or something we simply need to survive in certain situations – is a central theme in all my Harry Hole-books, but maybe especially in Nemesis.

Can you describe your writing routine?
Not really, because I don”t have such a thing as a routine. I write anywhere, anytime. And when I’m supposed to write I often find myself doing other things …

You’re a musician as well as a writer. How does writing differ creatively from your music? Do you find them competing for your attention?
Music for me is more like releasing tension, I don’t really have a method. Writing is about dreaming things up, using your imagination and instantly knowing whether you’re onto something. Writing music has taken the back seat to writing fiction now.

How strong is your connection to Harry Hole?
I used to think him and I were two completely different persons. I see now that’s not true. He may not be my alter ego, but I’ve certainly used a lot of my own person in Harry. Let’s say 70%. The best parts. Well, some of the not so good, too.

Do you sometimes dream of Harry Hole?
Never. Thank God.

Many of your readers are perhaps mainly interested in the further development of Harry Hole, and less in the criminal case. Is this a compliment? Or is it a frustration?
That’s great! I know I’ll get you hooked on the plot anyway.

How important is it to you that your readers can identify with your characters?
I like them to both identify and to be mystified. Like in real life.

Is that why Harry Hole is not a superhero, but a man with a lot of problems?
He is a man with problems because in order to be an interesting hero you have to have problems.

Don’t you think that people sometimes wish that a policeman like Harry Hole had more features of a superhero?
As a policeman – sure. As a character in a story of fiction – perhaps. But it’s just not that kind of story. Harry is a man at war with the world, including himself.

Some would say that an author who writes a dozen books about one and the same character has an easy job. What’s your reply?
That an author whose ambition is to write twelve GREAT books about one character has chosen a difficult job. A series like this has both advantages and disadvantages for a storyteller. I can use a universe that both the reader and I know, but at the same time I have to keep the characters fresh and interesting, and the storyline that binds the books together has to be carefully planned.

How important is it for you to take a stand on topics that are not an important part of the plot – for example, current political topics?
It’s not. I try to be descriptive, not normative. On the other hand I think it’s impossible not to be political when describing society. In writing you have to edit – to emphasize something and leave another thing out – and the choices you make in your editing will automatically be political choices.

Awards

Shortlisted for the 2010 Edgar Award
For Best Novel of the Year (Nemesis)

Shortlisted for the Macavity Awards 2010
For Best Mystery Novel (Nemesis)

The Danish Academy of Crime Writers’ Award 2009
For Best Crime Novel of the Year (The Leopard)

Shortlisted for the 2009 CWA International Dagger
(The Redeemer)

The Norwegian Book Club Prize 2008
for Best Novel of the Year (Headhunters)

Shortlisted for the 2008 Ark’s Children’s Book Award
for Best Children’s Book 2008 (Doctor Proctor’s Time Bathtub)

The Norwegian Booksellers Prize 2007
for Best Novel of the Year (The Snowman)

The Norwegian Book Club Prize 2007
for Best Novel of the Year (The Snowman)

Shortlisted for the 2007 CWA International Dagger
(The Redbreast)

The Finnish Academy of Crime Writers’ Special Commendation 2007
For Excellence in Foreign Crime Writing (The Devil’s Star)

Shortlisted for the 2007 Ark’s Children’s Book Award
for Best Children’s Book 2007 (Doctor Proctor’s Fart Powder)

Best Norwegian Crime Novel Ever Written 2004
Awarded by the Norwegian Book Clubs (The Redbreast)

William Nygaard Bursary 2002
(Nemesis)

The Norwegian Booksellers Prize 2000
for Best Novel of the Year (The Redbreast)

The Glass Key 1998
for Best Nordic Crime Novel of the Year (The Bat)

The Riverton Prize 1997
For Best Norwegian Crime Novel of the Year (The Bat)