From one of the most celebrated crime writers in Europe comes another epic thriller featuring
the maverick methods of Police Detective Harry Hole ...
Nemesis by Jo Nesbø, translated by Don Bartlett (Harper)(Paperback) Gripping and surprising, Nemesis is a nail-biting thriller from one of the biggest stars in crime fiction.

Grainy closed-circuit television footage shows a man walking into an Oslo bank and putting a gun to a cashier's head. He tells the young woman to count to twenty-five. When the robber doesn't get his money in time, the cashier is executed, and two million Norwegian kroner disappear without a trace. Police Detective Harry Hole is assigned to the case.

While Hole's girlfriend is away in Russia, an old flame decides to get in touch. Former girlfriend and struggling artist Anna Bethsen invites Hole to dinner, and he can't resist a visit. But the evening ends in an all too familiar way as Hole awakens with a thundering headache, a missing cell phone, and no memory of the past twelve hours. That same morning, Anna is found shot dead in her bed. Hole begins to receive threatening e-mails. Is someone trying to frame him for this unexplained death? Meanwhile, the bank robberies continue with unparalleled savagery.

As the death toll continues to mount, Hole becomes a prime suspect in a criminal investigation led by his longtime adversary Tom Waaler and Waaler's vigilante police force. Racing from the cool, autumnal streets of Oslo to the steaming villages of Brazil, Hole is determined to absolve himself of suspicion by uncovering all the information needed to crack both cases. But the ever-threatening Waaler is not finished with his old archenemy quite yet.

The Redbreast by Jo Nesbø and Don Bartlett (Harper) Police Detective Harry Hole has made a terrible mistake. An embarrassment in the line of duty has pulled him off his usual beat. Reassigned to mundane surveillance tasks, he reluctantly agrees to monitor neo-Nazi activities in Oslo. But as Hole is drawn into an underground world of illegal gun trafficking, brutal beatings, and sexual extortions, he soon learns that he must act fast to prevent an international conspiracy from unfolding.

Trapped in the crosshairs of the man with all the answers, Harry Hole plunges headlong into a mystery with roots deep in the past. His investigation takes him back to Norway's darkest hour—when members of the young nation's government collaborated with leaders of Nazi Germany. Dredging up a painful history of denial, Hole turns his attention to the Norwegian troops who fought for Adolf Hitler on the Eastern front. Branded by their countrymen as traitors, the soldiers who survived the brutal Russian winter—the hunger, fear, cold, grenades, and snipers—returned home as scapegoats of a nation's atonement. Sixty years later, old grudges and betrayals appear to have been laid to rest, until Hole realizes that someone has begun to pick off the surviving soldiers one by one.

With only his troubled, guilt-ridden conscience as a guide, Hole must move quickly through the traps and mirrors of a twisted criminal mind. But as his sanity slips in a slow burn of anger and alcohol, his mistakes continue to pile up. And if he fails to quicken the pace, Norway's darkest hour since World War II just might lie in the future.

In a tightly woven plot that takes readers from the icy steppes of the Russian front to a seemingly peaceful springtime in modern-day Oslo, Norwegian crime writer Jo Nesbø delves into a sinister national history with uncommon bravery. Transforming shades of moral gray into an explosive palette of characters, Nesbø holds readers in suspense until the final pages. His deft orchestration of parallel narratives knows no match in the genre, and his thematic reach exceeds even the most ambitious thrillers on the market. With the U.S. publication of The Redbreast, American readers will learn what European readers have known for a decade—that Nesbø's writing is "quite simply brilliant" (Weekend-Avisen, Denmark).

 

The Devil's Star by Jo Nesbø and Don Bartlett (Vintage Books) A young woman is murdered in her Oslo flat. One finger has been severed from her left hand, and behind her eyelid is secreted a tiny red diamond in the shape of a five-pointed star — a pentagram, the devil’s star.

Detective Harry Hole is assigned to the case with his long-time adversary Tom Waaler and initially wants no part in it. But Harry is already on notice to quit the force and is left with little alternative but to drag himself out of his alcoholic stupor and get to work.

A wave of similar murders is on the horizon. An emerging pattern suggests that Oslo has a serial killer on its hands, and the five-pointed devil’s star is key to solving the riddle.

NEMESIS by Jo Nesbø:

An economist by education, Norwegian Renaissance man Jo Nesbø co-founded the successful band Di Derre in 1992. Working as a stockbroker by day and musician by night, he published his award-winning debut novel, The Bat Man, in 1997. Since then he has received overwhelming recognition for his talent. He is the winner of the Glass Key Award for Best

Nordic Crime Novel—the most prestigious crime-writing award in Northern Europe, and a two‑time recipient of The Booksellers' Prize—the most important literary award in Norway—for The Redbreast and The Snowman.

The Redbreast, Nesbø's first book to be published in the U.S., was a December 2007 Book Sense pick, was selected as a Barnes & Noble Discover Pick, became the Barnes & Noble Mystery of the Year, and received stunning reviews in major American media outlets (see attached sheet). In April 2008, Nesbø attended the prestigious PEN World Voices Festival where he participated on three literary panels, and led bookselling events in NYC and DC. Fans are eager to read the next Harry Hole book and NEMESIS (Harper/HarperCollins), is sure to deliver.

Grainy CCTV footage shows a man walking into a bank and putting a gun to a cashier's head. He tells her to count to twenty-five. When he doesn't get his money in time, she is executed. Detective Harry Hole is assigned to the case.

While Harry's girlfriend is away in Russia, an old flame gets in touch. He goes to dinner at her house and wakes up at home with no memory of the past twelve hours. The same morning the girl is found shot dead in her bed. Harry begins to receive threatening e-mails. Is someone trying to frame him for this unexplained death? Meanwhile the bank robberies continue with unparalleled savagery.

NEMESIS, the seventh thriller featuring Harry Hole, is one of Jo Nesbø's biggest commercial successes to date, and has helped catapult the Harry Hole series onto the international mystery scene. The book spent 49 weeks on the Norwegian bestseller list—climbing all the way to #1—and has sold more than 100,000 copies in Norway alone. Rights to NEMESIS have already been sold in 23 countries, and his books have been translated into 30 languages. Gripping and surprising, NEMESIS is by one of the biggest stars of Scandinavian crime fiction.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Jo Nesbø is a musician, songwriter, economist, and one of Europe's most critically acclaimed and successful crime writers today. His first crime novel featuring Harry Hole was published in Norway in 1997 and was an instant hit, winning the Glass Key Award for best Nordic crime novel (an accolade shared with Peter Hoeg, Henning Mankell and Karin Fossum). In 2004 THE REDBREAST was voted the best Norwegian crime novel ever written, by members of Norwegian book clubs. Nesbø lives in Oslo. For more on Jo Nesbø, visit his website at www.jonesbo.com

Norwegian Evil
An interview with bestselling crime novelist Jo Nesbø By Jesper Stein Larsen, translated by Don Bartlett

The main protagonist in Jo Nesbø 's crime novels is fascinated by evil. So is the writer — by death and horror.

[Sitting at Schrøder's and waiting for Jo Nesbø.]

The nicotine-stained pictures on the wall stare down at the waitress as she arrives with a helping of biffsnadder and chips [trucker food], and two beers. Red gingham table cloths, fans in the ceiling and lino on the floor. At the table next to mine an elderly man has poured coffee into his saucer. Now he is rolling three sugar cubes through it. It is a March afternoon and the melting snow is splashing into the street. Everything is just as in the books about Harry Hole who debases his life with generous measures of whisky and beer at this table when his hunt for evil has brought him too many trials and tribulations.

It is not hard to imagine Harry walking in through the door with his Doc Martens, a big jacket and a concerned expression on the lined face beneath the short, blond hair. Or sitting down with a Jim Beam and a beer to brood over under the yellowish glare from the table lamps. And thinking: to hell with everything.

Harry Hole has rattled around in seven novels penned by Jo Nesbø — not blindly, although sometimes it can seem like that, but with the magnetism of a loner, a hard-boiled sensitivity and an intuition that borders on the super-natural. He is the hero of some modern Scandinavian crime writing that draws heavily on the American noir tradition with black humour, quick-fire dialogues and terse prose. But he is also his own man.

Jo Nesbø props his bike against the window and slips off a multi-coloured woollen hat as the door closes behind him. The hat apart, he looks like his hero, though perhaps he is a little more cautious and serious. He orders coffee and Farris mineral water, while starting to explain why Harry drinks.

"From the outset I knew that the main character had to have an Achilles heel, an inner demon, to ensure that he not only experiences tension outside, but on the inside too. And that was to be alcoholism. But I didn't want the standard, cliché, American, hard-boiled detective clinking ice cubes round a whisky glass and suffering from hangovers the next day. With a cool thirst. This had to be uncool thirst with alcoholism as his kryptonite. He is derailed by it."

Unlike many of his fictional colleagues, Harry Hole rarely goes on the booze, because his thirst is so uncool, as Jo Nesbø puts it, that there is no room for anything else while it lasts. Not in seven novels, each of several hundred pages. Harry lapses from time to time and Schrøder's is a fixed venue in most of the books, but he is more often sober than not.

"He's thirsty, but there's no reason for him to drink beyond his needs."

Why he ended up in the police is a bit of a mystery. He comes from a family of academics based in Oppsal, to the east of Oslo, a comfortable, secure middle class home. His sister has Down's syndrome. There are alcoholism genes on his father's side and in Harry's past lurks a disastrously unhappy love affair with a woman who took her own life.

"He graduates in law and then goes to Police School, and in some strange way this is his adolescent rebellion, because he comes from an academic background. He joins the police by chance and so that's that, he continues his career and becomes very interested in the nature of evil. His ambition is to understand evil. That's what the brunt of his intellectual energy is focussed on: what is evil? What makes someone kill? And he goes on a specialist course with the FBI and takes part in an investigation in Chicago to catch a serial killer. That is perhaps the closest he himself comes to evil. He feels something akin to what the serial killer feels, the same tension and excitement, when he approaches a victim and the same anti-climax after the killer is caught."

Jo Nesbø does not have any great crime-writing idols, but he was inspired by the universe created in Frank Miller's graphic novel Sin City.

"It has this American hardcore hero and the very character-driven style of narration, an all-out stylised fight between a protagonist and an identified antagonist. The mystery is secondary; the struggle between Good and Evil is what counts. That fascinated me and was what made me write about the struggle between Good and Evil in Harry, and that's perhaps what makes him seem more and more like the criminals he's chasing. His colleague, the rogue Tom Waaler, who plays an important role in several books, is a very clear antagonist, but in many ways he is very like Harry Hole."

Even though Jo Nesbø is famous for his sophisticated, startling plots, it is clear he is most concerned with the development of the main character. To increase the tension, Nesbø makes the crimes impinge more and more on Harry's private life. His colleagues die, and his great love Rakel and her son Oleg also become drawn into violent dramas.

"Character-led stories are the most interesting to write. The more the action revolves around Harry's personality, the better. It makes his decisions more existentialist. And that's the only thing which I think is interesting in novels: what does the protagonist do? That's what all good stories are about. If you watch a disaster movie, it's not about burning buildings and explosions, but about what the protagonist does, the decisions he takes. Will he go back up the skyscraper or will he try to save himself? Often they are about people who have to overcome their greatest fear. Like Harry, who suffers from vertigo and has to go up the tower in Holmenkollen. You give your characters moral dilemmas, and the whole thing is about the way in which they tackle them."

Do you work consciously on creating moral choices or dilemmas when you start a book?

"No, I tend to start books with something more concrete. Stanley Kubrick worked with visual scenes, building blocks that he knew he would use to build up the story. That's the way I am tending more and more to work. There are some scenes I know I want in the book. They could be quite spectacular, but also quite simple things. And I might be absorbed by a moral question. In The Redeemer revenge was the basic motive, the refined idea of revenge, because there is an invisible line between the revenge we condemn and the revenge the legal system takes care of"

What do you mean?

"When we remove criminals from the streets and lock them up, this is the modern legal system attending to our need for revenge. It would be extremely naïve to believe that anything else was going on. Imprisoning people or sentencing them to death is society exacting its revenge, and that of course is uncivilised. The line between revenge becoming a crime and revenge being acceptable is very fine, and that is what many modern films and thrillers are about. Batman is a vengeful psychopath, but we approve of that on a moral level, and that is interesting. That is what I wanted to write about. And in The Redeemer Harry takes his revenge, the uncivilised, immoral, unethical version, but I don't romanticise it. I don't give readers the arguments to excuse it."

But you think it is uncivilised?

"Yes, of course it is. Revenge always is."

Like many other crime heroes, Harry does not have a functional love life. Why not?

"Aksel Sandemose wrote that love was the only thing worth writing about. And it is Harry's ambition to understand both love and evil. He is a passionate guy in all ways. And he is the type of man who has no control over his impulses. The fact that he cannot set limits permeates his drinking habits and his attitude to his job. He takes on cases and is swallowed up by them. It is the same with his relationships with women. I could have chosen to make them live happily ever after and have children, but then we have a completely different person, one I find boring. I like the fact that he is in transit in his own life, as far as his emotions and his job are concerned. Rakel and he are examples of two people who cannot live with or without each other."

What made you choose this scenario?

Jo Nesbø squirms on the chair, rubs his large forehead and sighs.

"If you ask a writer why he has done something enough times, he will end up answering it is about his life. In the final analysis it is about what I want. It's down to something I have thought and felt."

Is he becoming more and more like you?

"When you make a person a hero you are bound to have some things in common with him —at least a basic set of values if you're going to understand him. And when Harry says that the film Braveheart, with Mel Gibson, is one of the worst films he has seen, then I agree. He loves the Stones and the Beatles, as I do, but he leans more to the Stones while I lean to the Beatles."

But are there any tangents between your life and his? Having a child, for example, did that have any effect on Harry?

"Sure. Now I have a daughter, and I had her… well, that's crazy…in 1999 and The Redbreast came out in Norway in 2000."

He laughs out loud. And looks surprised.

"That's the way it is of course."

What do you set out to do with your crime fiction?

"I look for order in emotional chaos, try to create emotional harmony. It doesn't matter that some corruption remains, but there has to be an emotional pay-off at the end of the book."

Your protagonist has had a terrible price to pay to get that far. People he is fond of die and, psychologically, he becomes more and more damaged. Physically, too, in the latest book

"I think it's important to show that heroes can disintegrate."

Do they disintegrate for our benefit?

"I don't know if there's anything to be learnt from it. But it is a fact. And it is sad that they do so in such an irreversible way. I'm carrying an injury, tennis elbow, and now I'm over forty and I'll never get rid of it completely. I can train it up, have a massage and all that, but it will always be there. In a way it is a foretaste of death, and it is interesting to put in the book, the beginning of the end."

How do you think the series has developed in terms of the plot, language, structure and style?

"This is a question of practice. As far as the plot goes, writing the type of book I do now is a bit like steering a super tanker. You can't just chug full steam ahead and sail away. You must have a course laid down and the whole thing planned. And it's difficult. To compose a crime novel you need to use a bit of engineering skill. If you've completed a couple of projects you learn a lot. And if you got through the first two intact, as I did, that's good. With the third comes the grand plot."

The first ones seem like the work of a beginner because there's just one string. They're not on the same level linguistically, either.

"I wouldn't disagree. The third book is more like a symphony orchestra. I'm glad I didn't try to write The Redbreast straight off. There was only one narrator's point of view in the two first ones, but in the third there are several timescales and different angles. It was an enormous difference and shows my progress."

His new novel The Snowman is about a number of women who have been unfaithful. There are several sections where, in the last minutes of their lives, the victims tell the story from their angle, and there are chilling and sickening scenes — some of the worst this reviewer has read. A confession which makes Jo Nesbø smile with pleasure and declare his huge satisfaction.

"Of course, it's not about what you write, but frequently about what you don't write. When the woman is trapped in the forest and knows she is going to die there's not very much about what the murderer does to her, but the chapter closes with his words to her: 'Shall we start?' The next thing you hear is that Harry has found a snowman with her head on. And that's enough for you to fill in the rest with your own fears." Fears Jo Nesbø knows from his own experience.

"I believe that those of us who were afraid of the dark when we were young have an advantage. If you pretended you were too big to be afraid of the dark, you closed off part of your brain, but if you let your imagination run, it went wild. When I went down to the cellar to get potatoes as a boy, I came back up again with a horror story of novel proportions in my head. And when I'm writing the passage about the woman being chased through the forest, or when Harry gets lost, I draw from the fear and horror I experienced myself I've been lost in a forest myself and felt I wasn't far away, but suddenly it became darker and darker, and even though I thought the house was close by, it wasn't. And then you're convinced you're lost. Your terror is the fuel for your writing. I was a lot more afraid of the dark and frightened than my brothers, and I'm sure it has given me an extra edge and sense of horror. I was always the one who had to tell ghost stories when we were small because they could hear the terror in my voice. And I was petrified by my own stories."

In the opening chapter of The Snowman we meet a woman with her husband and child — later she is the first to go missing. The scene was Jo Nesbø's first idea for the book.

"I knew I would put it in. The wife comes home to a nice family atmosphere. They get the meal ready and then the man remarks on the nice snowman in the garden. They look at him and say they didn't make it, and then they go over to the window. And there it is in the garden, but no-one can understand how it got there. There's something odd about it that they can't quite put a finger on, but the boy sees what it is: instinctively you would make a snowman face away from you, but this one faces into the house. I knew this scene would be the start of the novel."

How did the themes for the novels emerge?

"The first book was just chance. I decided I wanted to write a detective novel and I was visiting a friend in Australia. In the Australian Museum I saw a lot about aborigines and started getting interested in that. The second one came from huge coverage on paedophilia and incest cases in Norway and I was going to Bangkok to write a book about a sprawling, alien town. So I contacted a sexologist in Norway before leaving and got all the literature on the various forms of paedophilia. But The Redbreast, which is about World War II and the Eastern Front, is mostly personal material, because in my close family there were Resistance men and soldiers on the Front. I grew up with the war as seen from both sides. And when my mother and father married, a family of Resistance fighters met a family that had been on the Germans' side. The great thing was that there were no problems because both families had made their own sacrifices in the war."

How did that manifest itself?

"They shared contempt for those who had sat with their hands in their laps and done nothing. So the story about the Eastern Front is to a large extent my father's story. His comrade was shot on New Year's Eve, his head exploded and it was my father's job to clean the brain tissue and blood off the machine gun. My father ended up in Vienna as a result of an injury from a hand grenade and fell in love with a nurse. He was only 18 years old. I was an adult when I found out, but it was such a dramatic story that I knew I would have to tell it one day."

But the book also touches on wartime secrets. What's your stance with regard to that period?

"The main impression Norwegians would like to give is that we won the war along with England and USA. We just did it in a slightly different way, with an extensive Resistance movement and by blowing up loads of German trains. But that is miles away from reality. Most people did nothing, and the claims that there were 20,000-30,000 fighters in the Resistance movement are completely wrong. That was in 1945 when everyone knew that the Germans would lose, but how many members were there in 1942? No-one would say out loud, but there were perhaps fewer than 2,000 in practice while at the same time, in 1942, there were 5,000 volunteers for the Front. Even when things were going badly at the Front, there was no halt to the flow of volunteers."

He doesn't make a big thing about it, but his novels do contain blood and guts — heads go flying or are shattered by bullets — and on occasion the description is fairly direct and explicit. And he doesn't mind admitting that.

"Yes, well, I am attracted and fascinated by that. I write about it because I'm curious. For example, there was a friend of mine who worked as a porter at the morgue. He told me about the body of an old man they had to collect. It had been lying on the floor for a couple of months. On its side. And when they turned it over, part of the flesh stuck to the floor and where he had been lying was all black. I would like to have seen that. And what is it actually I wanted to see? It's the fascination with death and the grisly. Living in a safe world we are incredibly drawn by pitiless, grisly deeds. It makes us appreciate security more. The hearth becomes a little warmer when you read Jack London. Personally, I'm curious about everything that is human. I'm not fascinated by suffering for its own sake - torture scenes don't interest me — but I am fascinated by what human beings look like when they're dead, what a corpse looks like."

His first two novels take place in Australia and Bangkok, but since then Oslo has been the centre for Harry's hunt for evil. And Oslo has long lost its innocence — in reality and in Nesbø's novels. The picture postcard idyll of the nice cobbled streets, the City Hall, Holmenkollen and the Kontiki museum are still there, but now they have company. Foreign beggars sitting in the slush on street corners and Baltic prostitutes shivering in the cold in Skippergata. The world has come to Oslo.

"Yes, Oslo is a cosy little capital town, but it is also what you have seen. It has the highest number of fatalities from drug overdoses in Europe. Last year the number of rapes reported per inhabitant was three times what it is in New York. There is organised crime, hardcore prostitution, trafficking, drugs from the Balkans and the Russian Mafia. It's a town that has gone through immense changes over the last twenty years. It's still a very beautiful town in one of the richest countries of the world, a safe town, but there is all the rest, so it's easier to write about the shady side of Oslo now than it was twenty years ago. I want to describe the contrasts, and Oslo today is a perfect setting for a riveting thriller."

He shares one point with his protagonist. They are both preoccupied with evil.

Where does it come from? What is at the heart of evil?

"That question elicits a lot of elusive answers. They disappear as you get closer, run through your fingers. The Norwegian criminologist, Christie, says that there are no evil people, only evil actions, but then you can go on to say that your actions define who you are, so if you have committed evil, you are an evil person, but that's not a constant. You aren't always an evil person, only for a moment or a second. I'm not interested in the sociological side but in what it is that makes us commit evil deeds. But here, of course, there are lots of difficult questions regarding terminology. What is evil? Today we would see the great warrior hero of Viking times as a sociopath. Criminal actions in one time and culture can be socially acceptable in another. And you can't be sure you'll find evil by examining the criminal's mind. It's very complicated."

In The Snowman Harry, lost in the forest, makes an attempt to put words to evil:

"Evil is not a thing; it doesn't reside anywhere. On the contrary, evil is the absence of things, the absence of goodness."

"That's perhaps the closest I have come to describing it. Evil is a passive thing; it is the absence of goodness, empathy, caring."

How do you work?

"I'm working on novel number eight right now. I've written a synopsis of about 100 pages, which took me about six months, and then I start writing from the beginning. I stay close to my synopsis and exploit it to the maximum. When you've got a few books under your belt you know what works and what doesn't. And you notice when something isn't working because it is illogical, doesn't fit or because the characters don't slot into the action. They don't do what you want them to do. And so you have to throw it away, but afterwards you can see more clearly, and in my experience this comes out when you write the synopsis. So I stick to it very closely when I write. Usually it starts off with a motive. You have to have a murderer who commits a crime he wants to hide. You have a murder, you have a physical scene, you know how it is done and how it can be covered over, but then you realize that all this is academic because you don't have a credible motive. If you write about a bank robbery it has to be one executed in a sophisticated way because no-one is under any illusions about the motive, but when you write about a murder, you can easily paint yourself into a corner because of the problem of the motive. What caused this murder? You have to have a hidden motive. And it has to be strong enough to kill for. That's where I begin. What can drive a person to commit such a deed? On the whole no-one in Scandinavia has any need to kill for gain, the most obvious motive. We can get by. You don't need to kill anyone to earn a million kroner. And almost no-one does. Then you have personal motives, like jealousy, which are often obvious to everyone around and result in unpremeditated killings. So you have to use your imagination and work on the motive."

Is it difficult to stage scenes in Norway without them becoming far-fetched?

"No, that doesn't bother me. There should be a splash of adventure. It's not a question of things not being credible. You have to inspire confidence in the reader and establish a contract in which you say this could have happened, however fantastic it might seem. But just look at what happens in reality, what you read in the newspapers, that is fantastic and yet it is fact. There was the Nokas robbery in Stavanger where more than ten heavily armed men stole over 50 million and shot a policeman. That's reality's version of the film Heat. And there are many real cases which outdo even the wildest crime story."

How does a writer trick his readers?

"Like a magician flourishing the right hand so the audience cannot see what's in the left. It's sleight of hand. If you had seen the left hand you would have seen everything. If I feel that the magician before me can trick me with his dexterity, and it's not an optical illusion, that's fine by me. It gives me a thrill. And that's how I try to do it, so that you are left with the same feeling when the denouement comes: Right, it was there for all to see. I was given a chance. Have you seen the film The Usual Suspects? That's the kind of crime film where you feel you have been duped. The solution was there all the time, but you didn't see it. That's the feeling I try to create. In reality, if a woman has been killed, it is almost always the husband or the lover. And I play on that. Sometimes I use it; at other times I think of different motives, and in crime novels that's often the most fantastic, unlikely things. If you choose to write about someone killing because of sibling rivalry, you have to be incredibly convincing because it really is an unusual story."

What do you do when you have structured your novel? Do you go back and slip in tiny clues?

"Yes, I might slip in something to give the impression you had the chance to guess the outcome earlier. There is, of course, the technique of focusing the camera on a vase for no reason, making you feel that it is connected in some way with what happens, but if you have someone cut flowers, then go over to the vase and put them in, then the vase is incorporated into the action and it's a better way of sowing clues — no exclamation marks."

You often refer to films. Are your books going to be filmed?

"I have received a few offers, but I've said no. I love films and would like to see Harry Hole filmed, but not yet. Because I'm in the middle of the writing process and film is such a strong medium that I feel it would intrude and take him away from me."

How many Harry Hole books are there in you?

"I'm not absolutely sure, but he's a hero with the seeds of destruction in him. He won't live forever. He is going to escape from Oslo in the next book. To Hongkong."

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