In an interview on Norwegian Crime Writing

If you didn’t really rate crime novels what made you decide to write them?

Well, I got into writing through reading the great Norwegian writers like Henrik Ibsen but also American and English writers like Ernest Hemingway and Mark Twain. Jim Thompson and Lawrence Block were the only crime writers I had read before I started writing.

But I wanted to write and I wanted the easy way out so I decided to write crime! And no, it wasn’t the easy way out but I thought that my first novel wouldn’t get published so I thought on my first attempt I will write something that isn’t that time-consuming and in order to do that I have to write something which already has a head and a tail, so I thought, OK, a crime story. I know how to construct a crime story so I can send it into a publishing house and then it will be rejected with a polite letter of rejection asking me to send them something else. And then that is my chance to write the big European novel.

But it didn’t turn out that way.

No, I got caught up in crime!

And you started reading crime novels. Your next book is White as Snow by Jon Michelet.

I remember reading this in the 80s. It was one of the few Scandinavian crime novels that I had read. At this time the whole crime scene was very political and Michelet was one of the left-wing writers. And I was surprised that it was not only left-wing but well-written as well.

Why?

Because, I think that when you mix agendas it very seldom becomes good literature. There are many examples from the 70s and 80s of books that were political and not very good but this one was an exception. You see, what was going on in the 70s and 80s was there was an extreme left-wing movement in Norway, a big communist party which was popular with people in their early 20s and 30s. Many of the people who are in powerful positions in cultural life in Norway now were left-wing radicals during the 70s.