Stella and me

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 fiction had really begun to take off in Iceland in a big way. Let’s remember that not all that many years ago, there were just a handful of Icelandic crime writers. Stella was one of those, and it’s also worth bearing in mind that the first book under the Stella Blómkvist name appeared in the same year that the first novel by then-film critic Arnaldur Indriðason appeared.

There were half a dozen of Stella’s adventures, no-nonsense tales with action, cliffhangers, a scattering of sex, and a satisfying conclusion. Then Stella went quiet after 2006’s Murder at Rockville. Why? We don’t know, and it’s not as if we can ask the strictly anonymous author.

After a six-year break Stella was back in 2012, with Murder at the Residence. The formula was largely unchanged. But this is a more mature Stella (the character, that is. We don’t know about the author), an angrier and marginally less bullshit-tolerant Stella, with more nuance and more artfully drawn, a character more rounded and with a few of the rough edges sandpapered smooth.

Now there are, at the time of writing, seven more Stella novels that take us well into the twenty-first century.

Despite having graced the bookshop shelves and the bestseller lists in Iceland for a quarter of a century, attitudes to the Stella stories are subtly different. These stories with their staccato, hard-boiled style are often dismissed in Iceland as pulp fiction. But look again…

To start with, these stories rattle along at a cracking pace. There’s no wasted space. This is someone who knows how to put together a twisty, multi-stranded plot, someone who’s absolutely no slouch behind the keyboard. There are no self-indulgent literary tricks or affectations, no pages (and pages) of deep introspection, and there are no deep, meaningful sighs.

There’s just Stella getting down to business – in a variety of ways.

So this takes us to the shadowy figure behind the Stella Blómkvist stories. They say that nobody knows an author as intimately as their translator, although this translator’s gut feeling is that these are written by a guy, or a possibly a joint effort by more than one person. Considering the books have been appearing for twenty-five years, we can assume it’s someone into or beyond their fifties – roughly the same vintage as this translator.

We know this is someone who can string a sentence or two together, but hidden between the lines it shows that this writer is certainly very well read, both poetry and classics, as well as knowing their Icelandic history. My guess is this is someone who also knows their crime fiction, both the Nordic stuff from Sjöwall & Wahlöö onwards, and who owes a debt of gratitude to the Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Patricia Highsmith generations.

This is someone certainly knows their crime fiction onions.

I can’t deny that I’ve wondered who Stella is. There has been endless conjecture about the author’s identity, some wild, some credible. A former Prime Minister’s name was bandied about a few years ago. No, it’s not him. Practically every working author, journalist or media figure has at one time or another been linked to Stella’s name. Every time a new book appears, there’s a flurry of speculation, which then goes quiet.

It’s actually a colossal achievement to have remained anonymous for so many years in a place like Iceland, where the rumour mill is merciless, gossip travels like wildfire and secrets generally last until about lunchtime.

The rights manager at Stella’s publisher knows – as someone has to – but she’s letting no cats out of bags. Stella’s editor doesn’t know who he’s dealing with. A lot of people claim to know Stella’s real identity, have whispered or hinted to me that they know who’s behind these books. Whether they think they know, or really do know is another matter completely. 

I can narrow the field to (probably) a man, around sixty, connected to the media or literary scene in some way, but not at the centre of it, who has a lifetime of reading behind him (or her) and – like Stella – has a fondness for Jack Daniels.

Thinking this over while working on the translations and edits of Murder at the Residence (published 28th August) and Murder under the Midnight Sun (coming next year), I’ve come to the conclusion that I really would prefer not to know. I appreciate the mystery. The author might be someone I know. It could be someone I like – worse, it could be someone I don’t like…

So I’d prefer Stella Blómkvist to remain a shadowy figure. Long may the mystery – and Stella’s anonymity – last.

Murder at the Residence is published by Corylus Books on 28th August 2023

Here’s the UK Amazon link, and the US Amazon link, and the Kobo link – and if you’d like to grab a paperback from a real bookshop, the ISBN is 978-1-7392989-2-0