I’d like you to meet Pat. That isn’t Pat’s real name, which is a closely guarded secret. She might be real, or she could be just in my head. I’m not letting on. Pat is my personal reader. Pat’s in late middle age, not far off retirement. She’s a bookkeeper at a modest-sized company, and…
Going back a few years… When I went to Iceland back in the last century, before mobile phones, email and social media, even before faxes, reading wasn’t always easy. English books were fairly few and far between. It didn’t take long to get through pretty much the whole of the local library’s English-language shelves, and…
It’s not every day that a novel by the mysterious O. Huldumann shows up. There have for years been tantalising rumours of the great man’s lost work. Now it turns out the rumours are true. There really was more Huldumann out there in the wild. The dog-eared typescript of The Island of Lies is thought…
It’s the anniversary of the death of Hector Hugh Munro, better known as Saki, who was killed by a sniper on the 13th of November 1916 near Beaumont Hamel. As well as being the incomparable master of the short story, the man is something of a conundrum. There’s a great deal about him that isn’t…
The birthday of the poet Jónas Hallgrímsson, the 16th of November, marks the Day of the Icelandic Language. There are supposedly more people speakers of Klingon than Icelandic, but somehow I doubt that there are a great many native Klingon speakers around, while around a third of a million Icelanders speak their strange throwback to…
I don’t know who Stella Blómkvist is. That’s not quite true, as I know who the razor-tongued, morally wayward lawyer Stella Blómkvist is. What I don’t know is who actually writes these stories that have been appearing at intervals for the last twenty-five years. I had read a few of them, years ago, before crime…
He sat back, folded his arms and frowned. ‘It should be banned. Simple as that,’ he said, mind firmly made up on the issue. My friend, an alcoholic who followed ten mad, self-destructive years with twenty (and counting) dry ones, has strong views. We were talking about booze. This is something the Nordic countries do…
They’re everywhere, sneaking into corners and taking up residence, lying quietly and unnoticed behind doors and under beds, making shelves creak during the night. It’s an affliction, but not necessarily a bad one. There are others that are so much worse. It’s the books. There are people who don’t have books. It’s true, I’ve been…
To celebrate the continued rise of Nordic crime fiction, here’s a sneak preview of the latest Scandinavian sensation you haven’t heard about yet, the first chapter of the trilogy in four (or maybe five) parts of reclusive author Jan-Holger Sildquist’s Surströmming series. Until recently a little-known writer, Sildquist spent his early years in north Bråland…