In an interview on Norwegian Crime Writing

Interview Extract:

And is there a high crime rate there? Is it the type of place where that sort of thing really goes on?

Not really. But these books are huge – they have been translated into 12 languages and now there is a TV series.

Your last choice is The Iron Carriage by Stein Riverton.

This is a classic Norwegian crime story. It was written over 100 years ago. Riverton is regarded as the founder of the modern Norwegian crime novel and he is a great writer. Somebody might think he is a bit slow and old-fashioned but I really like his style of writing. As a character himself he was very colourful and really lived the life that you would expect an author to live – sex, drugs and rock’n’roll, that kind of thing.

So is this a Sherlock Holmes kind of style?

Yes, possibly. It is slow-paced. He doesn’t go into extreme details about the murder or sex. It is all hinted at so it feels a bit old-fashioned, but that’s the way they wrote back then. At the time he was controversial and seen as being too explicit even if it feels to us modern readers like he was only hinting at things. When I wrote my first novel I had no idea about Norwegian crime writing; it was only after that I chose to go back and read him. I saw him as a kind of source for the early crime writers.

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