Digging a moral Hole
Nesbo continues tale of tortured Oslo detective
Of the Scandinavian crime writers who have become international sensations in recent years, Sweden’s Stieg Larsson (“The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo”) is obviously the best known, but Norway’s Jo Nesbo is catching up fast.
Nesbo’s dark and gripping crime series featuring the Oslo detective Harry Hole has sold more than 20 million copies worldwide. In the latest installment, “Police,” Harry himself is missing and, at least by some, presumed dead. But is he?
We caught up with Nesbo, 53, for a phone interview while the author was traveling in Greece. Here’s an edited transcript of our chat.
Q: It seemed at the end of the last Harry Hole novel, “Phantom,” that Harry was dead. In “Police,” it appears that he isn’t. Is this something like Arthur Conan Doyle killing off Sherlock Holmes, only to bring him back a few years later?
A: No, it’s not like that. Actually the two books, “Phantom” and “Police,” were written as one long book, with a cliffhanger in between. It was always planned that way. But there are clues in “Phantom” that he isn’t dead.
Q: Howdo you pronounce Harry’s last name in Norway?
A: It’s HO-leh. In the first novel, “The Bat,”
‘Police’
By Jo Nesbo Knopf, 436 pages, $25.95 Harry goes to Australia, and I wanted that misunderstanding, that confusion about his name. But it’s a quite common Norwegian name.
Q: It also seems to reinforce the idea of the growing ethical vacuum inside the character.
A: Yes, that was also another reason for the name.
Q: Scandinavian crime fiction has become extremely popular around the world in recent years, which is strange because, as I’ve heard people ask, “Don’t they have a really low crime rate?” Is there a disconnect between the world of Scandinavian crime fiction and Scandinavia as it actually is?
A: Yes, the two things are not connected, but I think there’s no reason why they should be. Crime stories are seldom truly documentaries of crime scenes in Scandinavia or, for that matter, any other country. Crime fiction is a genre for writing stories about people — about conflict, about guilt, about passion, about the human condition.
I actually think the more unrealistic the crime is, the less you have to think about the crime, and about in what way it may actually be connected to the society.
Q: Detective fiction was an American and British invention, and later progressed along different lines in the U.S. and England. Howis Scandinavian detective fiction distinct from these?
A: I’m actually not much into crime fiction, and especially not Scandinavian crime fiction. I guess my work is more related to the hard-boiled American tradition, which is what I read when I was younger —(Dashiell) Hammett and (Raymond) Chandler, of course, and also Jim Thompson, who is the one American crime writer who influenced me more than any Scandinavian writer. Thompson’s “The Killer Inside Me” (1952), told from the point of view of a psychopath, was “American Psycho” written 40 years before Bret Easton Ellis. I liked Thompson trying to be a commercial easy read, but he’s too much of an artist to sell out completely.
Q: There’s a shadowy, grim quality in Thompson’s work.
A: Sure. If you look at my books as a whole, it is a dark journey, about a man who starts out ethically in the right, but who has been gradually drifting toward the dark side. Along the way, he has become a criminal, a man who has committed many of the same crimes as those of the people he’s chasing.
And that’s what you can do in a crime novel — you can ask moral questions and, if not give answers, at least give suggestions.