Episode 3: Norway - beyond the picture postcard

SPS.com.au Welcome to the Noir here, this podcast with me, Johan Gobelsson. This programme we showcase some of the best writers and meet the people behind the popular TV shows that have spread Nordic Noir around the world. Each episode is devoted to one of the Scandinavian countries and today it's Norway's town. This all-rich nation with its fjords and snow-covered mountain peaks has something lurking behind the picture postcard setting. Shortly we meet writer Gunnar Stolarsson, screenwriter German E. Eksen and the man behind the sitenim Sam El Björk. All three have dived deep into the Norwegian dark side and produce some of the finest examples of Nordic Noir. Gunnar Stolarsson published his first book in 1969. He's been described as the grandfather of Norwegian crime fiction, having written 16 books featuring the detective Varvio. 12 films have been produced that follows Detective Vium through the streets of Norway's second largest city, Bergen. Here is an excerpt from Gunnar Stolarsson's book where roses never die, where Detective Vium is nurturing the memory of his dead wife, Karin. For long periods I was feverish and uneasy and when I finally got home and hit the hay it was impossible to sleep. After an eye-wondered restlessly through the town at night, blessed by the darkness but pursued by demons. They were all around my head, whispering her name mockingly in my ears. Karin, Karin, Karin. I went to the tip of Nordnese peninsula, clambered down to what we, in our childhood years, called Bellingen. The remains of the old ballast key stood on the slippery rocks, listened to the waves, splashing around my feet and thought how wonderful it would be just to let go, dive in, start swimming. Into the darkness, across the border, to see if we would meet there after all on the other side. But I didn't, it was still something holding me back. Then Norwegian writer Jules Spirkoffs Gunnar Stolissen always answered to Raymond Chandler. The Scottish superstar crime novelist Ian Rankin calls Gunnar Stolissen his favourite Scandinavian writer, describing Detective Vium as a man with very sharp teeth. So who is this Vium? Well, he turns out he's just a few years older than his maker. Because I wanted to make a distance between him and myself at that age. And I was 29, so I made him five years older than me. Later I thought that I should have made him five years younger, because then I could have him with me even longer, because he is the sort of chronological detective that gets older from time to time and for book to book. Now as you survive, Vium, he's ages with each book, but how does he age mentally? He was 34 then, he is 61 in the last book I wrote here, because to keep him a bit younger still, the action in the books takes place some years ago. So the last one I published here in Norway to place in 2003. Of course the difference between a man who is 34 and one is 61 is that he is more mature. He is perhaps not so strong physically as he was when he was 34. So when he confronts the bad guys, he have never been a very violent man, but he would have more trouble, I think, with defend himself at 61. So he takes his mobile phone and call the police instead of confronting him. But as an older man, what life lessons do you think he has learned and how is that portrayed in the books? He has had some experiences himself, you know how it is to lose people that are close to him, he had not got a lot of tragic persons and tragic situations during all this years. So that gave him some experience in handling people in that situation. What inspired you to create him in the first place? There was a double inspiration, almost all that started the right crime fiction in Scandinavia in the 70s. We were inspired by the Swedish couple, Shuravall and Valor, which created a character marked in back, who really changed crime fiction in many ways, because they made it possible to write political fiction or even fiction that is critic to the society we live in, the time we live in. So that was one inspiration, but my literary preference when I read crime fiction, that was the classical American private eye novels of the special hammer, Raymond Chanro, and when it came to plot Ross McDonald. So what I tried to do when I wrote the first book about Valorium was to make an Norwegian version of Philip Marlow and Lou Archer. And of course there's a big difference between United States and Norway in the 70s. So he never runs around with a gun. He is not drinking so much whiskey as the American and depicted does, but he drink and aquavit, which is an Norwegian liquor. And he has the same sort of whiskey remarks as Philip Marlow and Lou Archer. And I try to write more or less in the same style. Can you explain what is that style that fascinated you? To me, Raymond Chanro was the Shakespeare or crime fiction. He has a marvelous language. Before I started to write crime fiction, I published two mainstream novels. I used very poetic language in those novels. And I always want to have some poetry in my prose. And that is what I've found in Raymond Chanro. There was a beautiful poetry in some of his descriptions. There are also a lot of wheat and also the dialogue, which is typical American one-liners. It's not so easy to do in a region, but when it comes to what the book is about, it's perhaps more the inspiration from the social realism in Srivala Waller. And later on, as you can find it, those Hanne Mankal and others, we should know each and write those. But I must say that I was before that. But I also curious about then, how was the literary Norwegian landscape when it came to crime writing when you started gunner? Yeah, that was quite different from today, because in the years after the Second World War and up till the 1960s, crime had no high. It wasn't looked upon as an interesting literary genre. It was entertainment and there were really not many witches that wrote crime fiction. They published two or three or four crime novels each year. And then I belong, of course, to the baby boom generation. So in the 60s, suddenly there were a lot of younger writers starting writing old narrowfiction and writing poetry and writing crime fiction. And also in the wake of Srivala Waller and the new interest for crime fiction that developed around 68, 69 early 70s, there was a change in the climate because then at the university it was possibly to study crime fiction, to write the thesis about crime fiction. There were literary magazines who published a special number about crime fiction and the big newspapers started to write criticism about crime fiction which they never did before because it wasn't taken seriously. How do you kill off a character like Varviyum or are you ever tempted to give him eternal life gunner? Well, I have never been tempted to kill him. There was in the end one book that readers could believe that perhaps this is the end of Varviyum but in the beginning, on the next book you will see that he has survived. At the moment I had plans for at least three or four new logarithm novels and it takes me a couple of years between each of them. So then I really being close to 80 when those subwritings but there are no plans at the moment to kill a logarithm. The TV show Manon caused heated discussion when it first appeared on Norway's public television NRK. It portrayed widespread financial corruption. In the closed world, some of Norway's biggest corporations, but also criticized how Norway's media covered these stories. I asked the creator of Manon in Germany, Erickson, if Manon is a good example of Nordic Noir. Yes, I think so, but I think the genre is pretty wide. I think we're as long as it's a spends driven and it has societal complications and has to have a certain darkness to it. And I think Manon has that. We're not a regular cop show that most Nordic Noir is, but I don't see that as a weakness or make it less noir or Nordic. Did you set out when you begin this journey of writing Manon? Did you think this is the genre that we are going to work in? The Nordic Noir genre, but they're detective and the darkness and the complicated characters so forth? No, we were, we actually started this back in 2007. Then the killing had just aired for a season and me and my brother were trying to make a documentary about things we thought were failure in modern day journalism, that were scant driven and where they don't follow the truth or the facts they want to sell stories. But then we said, why don't we make a TV show instead and do like them? And I don't think, I don't know when the Nordic Noir expression came along as a genre, but obviously we were inspired by the brilliant storylines in the killing season one. The way they managed to make this crime story with a political infighting in Copenhagen, we, yes, we watched that, but it took us, took us seven years to get it aired in Norway. So by then the bridge came along a year before us, I reckoned season one, that was a massive competitor, but we never knew about it. And we're all, we're also really reading into Norwegian crime fiction, which is amazing. Our biggest inspiration is obviously since we're born in the 70s, all the presidents men and Chinatown, other than the wires, the truly great ones. Those are the stories that really we see as ultimate thriller stories that should stand it for the rest of us. Were you inspired by real events taking place in Norway when you wrote this? Yeah, I worked in communications, so I worked with a lot of banks and newspapers. In the early 2000s we have the scandal that a newspaper drove our health minister into committing suicide. For crimes that were not proven and they were not real crimes even, but the pressure he was under, we released, well, that was the inspiration for our documentary that we never made. Then we said, we have to make a story that we really have to flame alive within ourselves. We wanted to make a story about brothers, since we're brothers, about two brothers that choose different paths in life and that involved the massive failure within journalism. I think we now are getting a bit away from. And the financial crime that in Norway was quite present, we had the most corrupt stockings change in Europe, since we're a very little country. Nepotism and insider trading was a huge problem before it was digitalized. So those are the events that we're inspired by. And a newspaper that we really, really, really think went over the top. That's season one. Season two has another inspiration and that's the conflict within the Norwegian Labour Party between the leader and the second and command. That is quite similar to the Gordon Brown-Ternic Blair conflict that we really wanted to dive into and make a more political drama. And season one is more of an additional crime's drama at Banties 2. We wanted to dive into politics. Maman cost a lot of debate in Norway when it came out. Can you tell me a little about that? Yeah, we've read about journalism and journalists are interested in that, but it creates a lot of debates. There are good ones and there are not so good ones. And then not so good ones got up in a lot of details that I say. That's not how we work. It's not like that at all. Although we had editors from the biggest newspapers and editors in N.R.K. that read the script. Well, all the details fact check. So we got into a media frenzy, which is people say so good thing for a show, but it's a lot of noise when it happened. And as a writer and producer, we're not used to being debated intensely for six weeks. I'm very impressed with Maman also when it comes to the characters. How did you find these amazing characters? My brother worked very much like the Danish producers and that is based on the American model where it's the writer and producer that really creates the character, briefs them and says how we're going to introduce them. We base the characters on true people that we know and we know that the actor. And we also tell them which pop cultural characters that we think they can get some feelings or well, a deeper feelings of what kind of characters we're trying to create. Then we are really involved in casting as well. We got all the actors we wanted. What pop I'd say to the main journalist that he encapsulated? I've always liked Juhl Neghan as a actor because he has played a lot of things in our way and you never know if it ends good or bad when you cast him. You can't go dark and can't go towards lights and that reminds me a lot of Jack Nicholson in Chinatown, another rose. She has that balance within itself. Always you never know where he will go. And I know you always get stressed when I say I always think of Jack Nicholson when I think of you. It's quite, it's a very big shoes to feel. German Iriexen He's a singer, songwriter and novelist, a playwright. He has translated Shakespeare into Norwegian. For many years no one knew who the writer's song El Björk was. Where did he come from? He seemed to have popped up from nowhere. His re-name is Froude Sanderhøien and here is an excerpt from his latest book The Owl Always Hunt at Night. "Rest in Shakespeare, Roger. Monk allowed himself a minute to process it all. He found in front of the team, never professional, measured, calm, resourceful. It was why he was the boss. He never let the others see what the cases did to him. But he could feel it creeping up on him now. The memory of what he had seen in Horm disturbed him greatly. They had had many cases and Monk always felt compassion for the victim, the family. He felt the extreme charity that he'd people who lost a lot of them. But most of them had a rational explanation. Random arguments with unhappy outcomes. Scores being settled among the city's criminal gangs. Jealousy. Sometimes the cases he worked on had an element of humanity. Saying that a killing could be human did not make it acceptable. But in his profession, and he never said it out loud, but he often thought it. He was always relieved when there was, ultimately, an explanation he could understand. Not this time. This was not human. I asked through this under the air, how come no way produces such great crime stories? People seem to be bewildered because we have this perfect society and this perfect country and we have all these terrible stories coming from up here. I'm not sure. I think it has something to do with our climate. It's dark. It's cold. And also with our literary tradition, we have a lot of alteration for extensualism writing. And I think we kind of go into the crime genre a little bit different than maybe the English and English. Americans do. Very curious about your latest book. The owl always hunt at night. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Well, the owl is the second book in my series and it's a story about my main characters, Hulgham, Hulgham and Mia Krieger. They find a girl in the forest with a flower in her mouth and it seems sort of kind of a satanistic ritual but then they start to discover that there's more to this story than just what it seems in the beginning. Because I'm curious to know for the where do you get your inspiration? Would you get inspiration to write that book and your previous book? Ah, I'm not really sure. I think I have a twisted mind. It's very hard to say where my inspiration comes from. Mostly I get inspired by my characters. I like to sort of give them something to do. Images to just keep popping into my head. I just, in my first book, I saw this terrible image of a child hanging from a three and I was like, oh no, what happened here? And in my second book, I saw this again, terrible image of a girl laying in the forest and I was like, I have to figure out what happened here. So this is what I do. I sort of give myself up a mathematical question and I try to solve it myself. Is it true when you wrote your first book? I read somewhere that you actually got frightened when you were asked who the murder was? Yes, yes, no, I got frightened. Not when I realized who the murder was but what happened, you know? Well, actually, yeah, that's when I won the murder. Yeah, yeah. But I was laying in my soul for it was my time and I was thinking about writing a cryo novel and suddenly this story came to me and I had to get up and turn on the light and I walked around and I said, no, no, no, I can't do this. I can't do this. You're writing name and I'm sure you get this question a lot but your writing name is some. Well, Björk, why do you have a special name when you write your books? I wanted to create like a Elena Farante character like where you didn't know there was a mystery who wrote the book and so I just made up a name that I felt sounded nice and in Norway the first year nobody knew who it was and it was a big commotion here. The papers and everybody tried to figure out who this song Björk was. And no one during that time figured it out. I think after a few months I was one of the suspects. I think I spilled my guts when I had a bear with a friend who was a friend with a journalist but they they never figured it really out. So why did you come out? Why didn't you think, oh, this is fantastic. See, I can use you wherever I want. Yeah, that's what I wanted to do but you know, it's in the book fair in Frankfurt that year my book suddenly sold to 22 countries like in a week. Yeah. And suddenly there was big companies involved and they really wanted a face. They wanted someone to interview. They wanted someone to represent. So I had to make it choice. Do I keep it a secret still or do I kind of take this money they offer and tell them who I am? So when you came out, was it a lot of disappointed like, oh, it's him or were people surprised? No, I'm glad there was no disappointment. There was really a surprise. I mean, my mother's from a small town and she couldn't walk on the streets. They would just stop her and they would just call her like, what happened? What happened? There was a lot of fun actually. Do you think there is a relationship between writing and music? A good writer has a lot of musicality. I feel that my musicality is very, very helpful. I sometimes feel it's like writing a symphony, you know, the emotions and what do you call it? The drama, turgical, the structure. Yeah, the structure. It's very similar. It's very similar. I feel it's very, very helpful, you know, but that I have this music in me. Are the other writers who write in this genre, Nordic Noir? That inspires you. To be honest, not really. I used to read a lot of crime novels when I was younger, but then you sort of crack their code in a way, you know, when you start writing yourself. I'm very inspired by other writers who have sort of a crime tension around their novels, but they're actually not considered crime novelist like Dometarch or Bret Easton L.A.'s or William Gibson. They write exciting books, but it's not a crime book if you get my meaning. Is it important for you to reflect Norwegian society in your books? I feel it's very important to reflect the society. Maybe not the society, like you see it from a broad, like this perfect country, but maybe I want to tell the stories for maybe the people who are not doing that well, you know, I've chosen their side. But Norway, as you said, we look at Norway and we think it's like an earthly paradise. You are so rich. You don't seem to have any trouble. It's an extremely nice country, the Scandinavian countries. I mean Norway, Sweden, Denmark. We are extremely lucky. We have, I mean, health care, good schools are good. I mean, equality between men women, very good. But then it's for some people, if you fall out of this, I mean we're so perfect and we train to be so perfect that if you fall out, you're suddenly very alone. So these are the stories I kind of tend to want to tell. We heard through the Sunday ayin. Thanks for listening to our Nordic Noir podcast. The readers in this episode were Achilles Youngoli and Frank Martisen. Production is by me, Johan Gård Brelson, and Technical Production by Vlad Lardma. I hope you can join us for our next episode of Noir here this, in which we travel to Iceland and Finland. Did you know that Iceland has one of the lowest crime rates in the world, but more crime writers per capita. Conversely, Finland is considered the most violent country in Northern Europe. To help explore these issues, we meet the Finnish crime reporter, turn crime writer, Yarkosipila. Icelandic Agapacrista expert and bestselling author Rangajona Son and Gunthor in Goodman's doctor, professor in comparative literature at the University of Iceland. If you like what you heard, tell your friends, subscribe via your favorite podcast app and post a review on iTunes. Goodbye. Thanks for watching.