Darkness a lifelong companion for Nesbo
Just don’t call him the next Stieg Larsson
Jo Nesbo sells one of his blood-soaked crime thrillers somewhere in the world every 23 seconds.
And how did his success happen?
You need to check out his Norwegian childhood for the answer, and to understand the forces that shaped his explosive emergence on the international writing scene. There you find a youngster who knew how to deal with boredom: “I was the kind of kid who would sit in the car for hours, not saying a word, just staring out the window and making up stories.”
But what kinds of stories? The kind that would freak out his teachers, of course.
He grew up in a literary household. His mother was a librarian. His father loved reading to the children. That prompted seven-yearold Jo to produce a copy of William Golding’s grisly Lord of the Flies and ask his father to read it aloud. The youngster knew nothing of the story: he was attracted by the cover illustration of “a pig’s blood-stained head impaled on a pole.”
You can hear Nesbo laughing quietly across the phone lines from Oslo, as he ponders his lifelong fascination with violence. Some critics think he goes too far, especially with the recent The Leopard, which introduced a unique murder weapon: a steel ball that, when inserted into the mouths of victims, fires razor-sharp barbs if they try to remove it.
His latest novel, Phantom, just published by Random House, begins and ends in a junkies den, where an en- counter between a female rat and a dying man occupies gruesome centre stage. And in the course of the story itself, numerous horrors are inflicted on Nesbo’s ravaged hero, alcoholic cop Harry Hole, in this, Harry’s ninth fictional journey into darkness.
Since we last encountered Harry, he has lost part of a finger and a scar disfigures his face. He’s doomed to more awful experiences in Phantom, including the slitting of his throat while he’s sitting on a bar stool.
Nesbo is matter-of-fact about this violence thing.
“I always thought everybody felt that way,” he says casually. He’s back in his childhood for a moment, recalling the days when he used to terrify his friends by making up ghost stories.
“For me, I think it’s mainly curiosity,” he says after a moment’s reflection.
Curiosity? Well, yes. Nesbo has this insatiable interest in how society works, or rather, doesn’t work — and how it can malfunction appallingly. And in viewing this society through the bloodshot prism of a doom-haunted protagonist who is the most damaged of damaged goods, Nesbo is giving his books the kind of noirish, character-driven intensity that eluded his fellow Scandinavian, the late Stieg Larsson. Speaking of Larsson, Nesbo shrugs off the inevitable comparisons with the enigmatic author of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.
“I don’t really think too much about it. I’ve been asked a lot about it, because they put it on the cover of the U.K. editions — that I was the next Stieg Larsson. I suppose it’s a way of telling people this is another Scandinavian writer, which is OK.”
But not, one senses, completely OK. When he was attending New Zealand’s International Arts Festival in mid-march, he was asked how he felt about the Larsson comparison and sardonically replied: “It could have been worse. I could have been the new Dan Brown.”
He can be acerbic in conversation, but also self-searching. His profile continues to grow: He has bestseller status in 40 countries; the April release of the Norwegian-made film thriller, Headhunters, is based on a non-harry novel; American director Martin Scorsese has acquired screen rights for Snowman; and tourists flock to Oslo for guided tours of the fictional Harry’s haunts.
But Nesbo stresses he’s a latecomer who didn’t start writing fiction until he was 37 and has often been troubled by self-doubt.
Harry came to life when Nesbo was commissioned to write a book about the experiences of a touring rock star. During a long flight to Australia, he started sketching out ideas and, instead, a gritty crime novel started emerging. He experienced an airborne epiphany.
“I’d been writing before that — songs, of course — but writing a novel was the first time I had this sense of ‘arriving.’ This was something I was meant to do. All these things came together.”
He wasn’t presumptuous enough to assume he could be a successful writer, though. “But I knew I had to write. So I thought I had to organize my life and be prepared to be a poor writer. I had some money. I’d been a stockbroker for many years, so I knew I had 10 years where I could just write without making any money.”
He didn’t need to wait 10 years. The 1997 publication of his first Harry Hole novel, The Bat, made him an instant success in Scandinavia; a long-delayed English translation is now in the works. Nesbo has also written children’s books and stand-alone novels, but it is the volatile and tormented Harry who has seized the imaginations of millions of readers.
“The most important thing about Harry is that he’s not quite sure himself what is driving him, because he’s a man of contradictions,” Nesbo says.
Phantom begins with a battle-scarred Harry returning to Oslo from the Far East to try to rescue his surrogate son from the cesspool of the drug trade, and save him from a murder conviction. And then there are the brutalities inflicted on Harry in Phantom — to a degree that leaves fans squirming with anxiety because of the ambiguous climax. Is it possible that this is the end of Harry?
Probably not at this point — not if Harry’s creator has planned an exit for him at some future date.
“It’s always been my plan to end the series at some point, and I do have a story arc for Harry. He will not have eternal life, and I will not tell you, or anyone else, how it’s going to end, except that he will not resurrect!”