Jo Nesbø: The Master of Nordic Noir

Harry Hole, Oslo’s greatest detective, is back. The fictional anti-hero created by Norwegian author Jo Nesbø appears once again in Killing Moon, the 13th instalment of the best-selling series of crime novels. The first Harry Hole book was published in 1997 and, since then, over fifty-five million copies have been sold worldwide, translated into fifty languages. Harry Hole is a complex character: a rule breaker with a strong sense of justice, who exasperates his superiors and inspires loyalty from his team. Throughout the series, he struggles with alcoholism, authority and his complicated relationship with single mother Rakel.

killing moon

Killing Moon picks up Harry’s story in Los Angeles. He is not in a good place. Everyone he has ever loved has left him and he has been sacked from the police force. Murder is never far away, however, and Hole is soon involved in tracking down a serial killer. At a recent press conference, Nesbø explained the character’s arc over the series.

Jo Nesbø (Norwegian accent): We meet Harry, who is on a suicide mission. He has gone to Los Angeles to drink himself to death. That is his plan. But gradually, Harry realises that there are things in life to live for and he does have a purpose. So, to create that journey, you have to do it step by step and you have to make it believable. So that is always the challenge for a writer: writing a novel, where you have the main character being changed in a way during the story. And I think that goes for most stories. They are about changing perspective on life. There’s an outer conflict — in the traditional crime novel that’s a murder that needs to be solved, in order to steer society from chaos back into order — but there are [is] also the same struggle inside the character.

smarter readerS

With a long-standing series about a beloved character, Nesbø has a loyal following of fans. Crime fiction in general is more popular than ever and that makes it difficult to keep the audience engaged. A big part of a crime writer’s challenge is related to the increasing sophistication of the reading public. 

Jo Nesbø: It’s interesting that our generation of readers have probably consumed ten times more stories than our parents and especially than our grandparents. I mean, my grandparents, they had books, but they would probably read three books a year and [had] no movies and they would listen to their friends telling the same old stories while, nowadays during the week, we have probably maybe read a book, seen at least two movies, three episodes of a TV series and so on. And that makes it difficult to to find a way to surprise our readers, because they know the story so well, and they know the three-act structure. They know every trick in the book. It’s like making dinner for chefs. So I think that, yeah, you have to raise the bar. People are getting not smarter in general, but smarter as readers, I think.

PARASITE AND HOST

Killing Moon certainly raises that bar, with the relationship between a parasite and its host as a running theme. Featuring a number of aggressive creatures — including a sea louse that eats a fish’s tongue to replace it with itself — the novel explores this symbiotic relationship in a typically violent setting, though Nesbø says that this novel is less violent than usual. 

Jo Nesbø: I’ve been criticised for being violent in my novels and that criticism is certainly fair in many ways. The reason why there’s less violence doesn’t have to be because of the criticism, that I’m afraid of criticism, because I think that is an interesting discussion: to what extent should violence be part of the crime novel? But I think as long as violence drives the story forward, as long as it has a purpose, it’s needed in the story.

undressing

The parasite theme applies to himself and his character, too. Inevitably, he explains, writers put a lot of themselves into their novels, and Killing Moon is no exception.

Jo Nesbø: Well I do think that literature and writing in general is the writer writing about himself or herself, even when the writer is not aware of that. When you tell a story, even at the dinner table, there is an element of introspective storytelling, that you are using your own sense of drama, own sense of morality, in that story. You do show yourself both to your readers, listeners and yourself. Even though I don’t set out to write about myself, I don’t write for the purpose of therapy, but there is that element of undressing for an audience, in a way, undressing your thinking and your morality, but even your sense of humour and your taste in popular culture. All those things are in there. I think it would be fair to say that, whether I’m the parasite or Harry’s the parasite, we’re linked together in a way, yes.

scandinavian export

Finally, Speak Up asked him if he could explain the enduring popularity of Scandinavian crime fiction.

Jo Nesbø: I do get that question a lot and I try to come across as an intelligent person and give you an intelligent answer to that, but the truth is, I have no idea. It could be of course that during the 70s, there were a couple of Swedish writers that would take the crime novel from the kiosks and into the serious bookstores. It wasn’t considered second-rate literature, it was something that you would have a go at. Even the serious writers would have a go at the crime novel. And so there was a certain quality to what was produced in the crime literature genre, but there were also just as many bad crime novels in Scandinavia as anywhere else. But there are just so many of them. Hopefully, it’s because they have this certain quality. Could be. But, who knows? This will probably change. I don’t know when. I’m even surprised that it has lasted this long.