I find myself in the strange position of being the only British author writing Scandinavian fiction. Indeed I seem to be on the brink of devoting the next ten years of my life to a chunk of rock in the North Atlantic with the worst climate in Europe. Where The Shadows Lie, published this month, is the first in a series about an Icelandic detective named Magnus.
This may seem like a misguided attempt to jump on a bandwagon. Or a cynical ploy to take advantage of the various attention-seeking the devices Iceland has employed over the last couple of years to get noticed: volcanoes, ash clouds, economic collapse and a "pots-and-pans" revolution. Neither of these are quite true.
I have written eight financial thrillers. Four years ago, I decided I wanted to change genres, to write a series featuring a distinctive detective. I like writing about foreign places, so I needed a distinctive country. I had been on a surreal book tour to Iceland in 1995 and for some reason that nation popped into my mind and once there wouldn't budge.
I'm glad it didn't, for Iceland is an extraordinary place. The people are a manic lot, a nation of multi-taskers with a highly developed sense of irony. They have just voted a comedian to be mayor of Reykjavík whose platform is to get a new polar bear for the city zoo. He demanded a car and a chauffeur to talk to when he is driving it. He got 51% of the vote.
Iceland's landscape is astounding, a fiery, turbulent, beautiful work in progress. Its history and literature, the wonderful sagas, enthral me. Trolls and the ghosts of murdered berserkers stalk the lava fields. The very modern and the ancient coexist in the most extraordinary ways. Iceland was the poorest country per head in the 1940s, but the richest in 2007 (I know, I know, it probably isn't any more). Every Icelander has a Facebook page, every Icelander's grandmother talked to elves. I could fill a book on how extraordinary Iceland is, several books. In fact, I will.
This makes my Scandinavian novels very different from those written by the indigenous Scandinavians. Although Magnus was born in Iceland he was brought up in America and was a homicide detective in Boston. He sees Iceland and its extraordinary features through the eyes of an outsider. Arnaldur Indridason, for example, an excellent Icelandic crime writer, doesn't. His books examine the subtle clash between the old and the new Iceland. His hero, Erlendur, doesn't understand the new and is happier with the old ways. But his Iceland is different from the one I see, with its erupting volcanoes, its polar bears arriving from Greenland on ice floes, its lesbian Prime Minister, and its population who may or may not believe that hidden people live in the rocks at the bottom of their gardens.
Some people say that Scandinavian novels are dark and gloomy. And indeed Iceland and Icelanders can be dark and gloomy. In December, daytime lasts only a few hours and is really just a lighter shade of black. The wind blows cold off the Atlantic, Reykjavík streets can be almost East German in their greyness and the average Icelander is pretty reserved when you first meet him. But this is also the land of the midnight sun, the all-night party, the national practical joke, the obsession with the Eurovision Song Contest. Icelanders consistently top the charts in international surveys of happiness. The bizarre and the absurd are celebrated. It is, in my eyes and in my detective Magnus's, a colourful backdrop, not a gloomy one.
So, although I admit to writing novels about crimes that take place in a Scandinavian country, I am not sure that they are Scandinavian crime novels. Which is fine with me.
Michael Ridpath
Where The Shadows Lie is published by Corvus
