INTERVIEW:He's been a footballer, a stockbroker, and a pop star. Now, with his books translated into more than 40 languages and sales of more than 14 million, he's the king of Nordic crime writing. ORNA MULCAHYmeets Jo Nesbo
Jo Nesbo is tucked into a corner of the dining room at the posh Langham hotel in London, but it’s hard to miss him with his Lucozade-coloured shades. His is not a face you forget from the book covers. “Like a cross between Sting and Daniel Craig”, says one lady literary agent who would dearly love to have him on her crime list.
The Norwegian writer, a rock-climber in his spare time, has sold more than 14 million books and Martin Scorsese wants to make a film of his 2007 novel The Snowman. But who’s to say he’s at the top of his game just yet? Before dashing off his first Harry Hole novel, The Bat (conceived on a 30-hour flight to Australia back in the 1997), he was one of Norway’s biggest pop stars, while at the same time holding down a day job as a stockbroker. As a teenager, he played professional football.
Now 52, he looks 10 years younger, and the rather icy blonde woman beside him at breakfast looks a lot younger still. She leaves without a hello or goodbye as I arrive. The lady manager hovers: “Would Mr Nesbo like more coffee, more croissants, more anything?” A woman at the next table leans in a little closer.
Nesbo does have that effect on women, though God knows he treats them terribly in his books. Harry Hole, his brilliant, self-destructive detective, is a disaster zone where women are concerned, his ex-girlfriend is dead, his cop partner murdered, the love of his life pursued by a serial killer. His killers are hideously inventive, like the one who stalks unfaithful wives with an electric noose designed to decapitate animals.
Immediately, I want to get my credentials straight as a fan who’s been reading him for years, way back when everyone was talking about The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, when, clearly, Nesbo’s Oslo trilogy, Redbreast, Nemesis, The Devil’s Star, were far more exciting and extreme. Harry Hole (pronounced Hool-eh if you want to be correct) follows a long tradition of tormented, terrier-style detectives constantly on the verge of being fired. Men with hatchet-faced good looks who drink but don’t eat in their bleak apartments. Who are surrounded by clowns and criminals. Who are compassionate as well as cruel. There are shades of Martin Beck, the grand-daddy of Scandinavian detectives created by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö in the 1960s. There are similarities, too, with Martin Cruz Smith’s Arkady Renko of Gorky Park, and with Ian Rankin’s Rebus.
But alcoholic Harry takes it to a new level, whether he’s prowling the unpronounceable streets of Oslo, or burrowing into the heart of Africa. Outlawed by his colleagues, loved by none but his Down syndrome sister, and the sorrowful Rakel, of whom more later, Harry abandons everyone to hunt down the truth, and the beatings and the bullets along the way. By the end of the last book, The Phantom, he’s so close to death, we don’t know if he has actually made it through.
The New York Times writes that Harry comes “from a long line of Scandinavian crime fiction exposing the dark side of a seemingly ideal society”. Nesbo draws the line as far back as Henrik Ibsen – a major influence on his writing, he says.
“The way his plays are constructed, the truth is revealed bit by bit. At the beginning everything seems normal but there are always dark secrets and the hidden secrets are always about love and greed.” If you want to know more, he says, start with The Wild Duck. And Hedda Gabler.
Nesbo’s English is excellent. He speaks carefully and intelligently and he’s not at all interested in discussing his latest book to hit the shelves, The Bat. That’s because it’s his first book, only recently translated into English.
He had the guts of the story when he got off the plane from Oslo to Sydney, having told his stockbroker employer he needed a six-month break. He’d dreamt up the character of Harry Hole and put him on a plane to Sydney too. Their first stop was a museum where Nesbo became entranced by ancient Aboriginal tales and he wove these through an otherwise grisly tale about prostitutes, transvestites, and a killer with a penchant for long blonde hair.
Back home in Oslo, he handed in his notice and sat at home with his laptop till the book was complete, describing those weeks as the happiest of his life. Then he submitted it to a publisher under an assumed name. In those days, Jo Nesbo was best known as part of Di Derre (translated as Those Guys), the pop group he shared with his brother Knut.
The book was an instant hit, winning the glass key award for best Nordic crime novel, an accolade shared with Peter Hoeg, Henning Mankell and Stieg Larsson. And the awards have been pouring in ever since, though a Golden Dagger from the Crime Writers’ Association has been strangely elusive. The reason for this trip to London was to attend the Dagger Awards. He’s been nominated for one four times, but was passed over yet again this year, for The Phantom in the International category, with Gene Kerrigan taking the top prize for his Dublin-based thriller The Rage.
Nesbo is trying to look on the bright side of things. “They were very nice to me,” he says. “They’re putting me in their hall of fame for not winning so many times.” The judges praised Phantom for being “less savagely violent” than his previous books. and violence is certainly something that Nesbo appreciated from an early age.
He came from a family of voracious 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 told in such a way that we wanted to hear them again.”
At age seven, Nesbo asked his father to read him Lord of the Flies – because he liked the bloodstained cover. “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.”
Gruesome is a word that’s often applied to his books, but the gore is never less than inventive, as in his standalone novel Headhunters, in which terrible things are done to a dog and an outdoor toilet has a use you’d not imagine in your worst nightmare.
Nesbo insists that his characters are imaginary, though some don’t agree. A prominent Norwegian publisher felt he had been used as the model for the villain in The Snowman, while in The Phantom there were some unfortunate parallels with a nymphomaniac female politician he describes, and a real life character in Norwegian public life.
In real life, Nesbo is divorced and the father of a teenager girl. “There is nothing so scary, he says, as being a parent. “I had stopped being afraid of things until I had my daughter, even my own death. When I became a father all my fears came back.
“I was a free man until I had a child. Once, when I collected her from kindergarten and we were crossing a road and I reached down for her hand and it wasn’t there, I had a second of sheer panic. I had to go back to childhood to feel that fear.”
The Bat is published in paperback by Vintage
