Phantom (Harry Hole Series #9)

Phantom (Harry Hole Series #9)

Phantom (Harry Hole Series #9)

Phantom (Harry Hole Series #9)

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Overview

INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • An “addictive page-turner” (Los Angeles Times)—Inspector Harry Hole attempts to exonerate his would-be son Oleg in this installment of the New York Times bestselling series.

When Harry Hole moved to Hong Kong, he thought he was escaping the traumas of his life in Oslo and his career as a detective for good. But now, the unthinkable has happened—Oleg, the boy he helped raise, has been arrested for killing a man. Harry can't believe that Oleg is a murderer, so he returns to hunt down the real killer.

Although he's off the police force, he still has a case to solve that will send him into the depths of the city’s drug culture, where a shockingly deadly new street drug is gaining popularity. This most personal of investigations will force Harry to confront his past and the wrenching truth about Oleg and himself.

Don't miss Jo Nesbo's latest Harry Hole thriller, Killing Moon!

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780307951151
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date: 04/23/2013
Series: Harry Hole Series , #9
Pages: 480
Sales rank: 101,322
Product dimensions: 5.34(w) x 7.80(h) x 1.06(d)

About the Author

About The Author
JO NESBØ is a musician, songwriter, economist, and #1 New York Times best-selling author. He has won the Raymond Chandler Award for Lifetime Achievement as well as many other awards. His books have sold 55 million copies worldwide and have been translated into 50 languages. His Harry Hole novels include The Redeemer, The Snowman, The Leopard, Phantom, The Thirst, and most recently Knife, and he is also the author of The Son, Headhunters, Macbeth, The Kingdom and several children's books. He lives in Oslo.

Read an Excerpt

I

Amid the noises of the night in downtown Oslo—the regular drone of cars outside the window, the distant siren that rose and fell and the church bells that had begun to chime nearby—a rat went on the hunt for food. She ran her nose over the filthy linoleum on the kitchen floor. The pungent smell of gray cigarette ash. The sugary-sweet aroma of blood on a piece of cotton gauze. The bitter odor of beer on the inside of a bottle cap, Ringnes lager. Molecules of sulfur, saltpeter and carbon dioxide filtered up from an empty metal cartridge case designed for a nine-by-eighteen- millimeter lead bullet, also called a Makarov, after the gun to which the caliber was originally adapted. Smoke from a still-smoldering cigarette with a yellow filter and blackpaper, bearing the Russian imperial eagle. The tobacco was edible. And there: a stench of alcohol, leather, grease and asphalt. A shoe. She sniffed it. The obstacle lay on its side with its back to the wall blocking the entrance to the nest, and her eight newly born, blind, hairless babies were screaming ever louder for her milk. The mountain of flesh smelled of salt, sweat and blood. It was a human body. A living human being; her sensitive ears could detect the faint heartbeats between her babies’ hungry squeals.

   The church bells were ringing in time with the human heart now. One beat, two. Three, four . . .

   The rat bared her teeth.

July. Shit. It sucks to die in July. Is that really church bells I hear, or were there hallucinogens in the damn bullets? OK, so it stops here. And what difference does it make? Here or there. Now or later. But do I really deserve to die in July? With the birds singing, bottles clinking, laughter from down by the Akerselva and fricking summer merriment right outside the window? Do I deserve to be lying on the floor of an infected junkie pit with an extra hole in my body, as life rushes out of it along with flashbacks of everything that’s led me here? Is that me, is that everything, is that my life? I had plans, didn’t I? And now it’s no more than a bag of dust, a joke without a punchline, so short I could have told it before that insane bell stopped ringing. Shit! No one told me it would hurt so much to die. Are you there, Dad? Don’t go, not now. The joke goes like this: My name’s Gusto. I lived to the age of nineteen. You were a bad guy who screwed a bad woman and nine months later I popped out and got shipped to a foster family before I could say “Da-da.” I caused as much trouble as I could. They just wrapped the suffocating care blanket even tighter and asked me what I wanted. A fricking ice cream? They had no goddamn idea that people like you and me would end up shot, exterminated, that we spread contagion and decay and would multiply like rats if we got the chance. They have only themselves to blame. But they also want things. Everyone wants something. I was thirteen the first time I saw in my foster mother’s eyes what she wanted. 

   “You’re so handsome, Gusto,” she said. She had come into the bathroom—I had left the door open, and hadn’t turned on the shower so that the sound wouldn’t warn her. She stood there for exactly a second too long before going out. And I laughed, because now I knew. That’s my talent, Dad: I can see what people want. Do I take after you? After she left I looked at myself in the full-length mirror. She wasn’t the first to call me handsome. I had developed earlier than the other boys. Tall, tight, already broad-shouldered. Hair so black it gleamed. High cheekbones. Square chin. A big, greedy mouth, but with lips as full as a girl’s. Smooth, tanned skin. Brown, almost black eyes. “The brown rat,” one of the boys in the class called me. Didrik, think that was his name. He was going to be a concert pianist. I’d just turned fifteen, and he said it out loud in class. “That brown rat can’t even read right.”
 
   I just laughed and, of course, I knew why he’d said it. Knew what he wanted. Kamilla. He was secretly in love with her; she was not so secretly in love with me. At a school dance I copped a feel to see what she had under her sweater. Which wasn’t much. I’d mentioned it to a couple of the boys and Didrik must have picked up on it, and decided to shut me out. Not that I gave a shit about being “in,” but bullying is bullying. So I went to Tutu in the motorcycle club, the bikers. I’d dealt some hash for them at school, and said that I needed some respect. Tutu said he’d take care of Didrik. Later Didrik wouldn’t explain to anyone how he got two fingers caught under the top hinge of the boys’ bathroom door, but he never called me a brown rat again. And—right—he never became a concert pianist, either. Shit, this hurts so much! No, I don’t need any consoling, Dad—I need a fix. One last shot and then I’ll leave this world without a peep, I swear. There goes the church bell again. Dad?


2

It was almost midnight at Gardermoen, Oslo’s principal airport, as Flight SK-459 from Bangkok taxied into its allocated spot by Gate 46. Captain Tord Schultz braked and brought the Airbus 340 to a complete halt; then he quickly switched off the fuel supply. The metallic whine from the jet engines sank through the frequencies to a good-natured growl before dying. Tord Schultz automatically noted the time, three minutes and forty seconds since touchdown, twelve minutes before the scheduled arrival. He and the first officer started the checklist for shutdown and parking, since the plane was to remain there overnight. With the goods. He flicked through the briefcase containing the log. September 2011. In Bangkok it was still the rainy season and had been steaming hot as usual, and he had longed for home and the first cool autumn evenings. Oslo in September. There was no better place on earth. He filled in the form for the remaining fuel. The fuel bill: He had had to find a way of accounting for it. After flights from Amsterdam or Madrid he had flown faster than was economically reasonable, burning off thousands of kroners’ worth of fuel to make it. In the end, his boss had called him on the carpet.

   “To make what?” he had yelled. “You didn’t have any passengers with connecting flights!”

   “The world’s most punctual airline,” Tord Schultz had mumbled, quoting the advertising slogan.

   “The world’s most economically fucked-up airline! Is that the best explanation you can come up with?”

   Tord Schultz had shrugged. After all, he couldn’t say the reason—that he had opened the fuel nozzles because there was something he himself had to make. The flight he had been put on, the one to Bergen, Trondheim or Stavanger. It was extremely important that he did the trip and not one of the other pilots.

   He was too old for them to do anything else to him but rant and rave. He had avoided making serious errors, the organization took care of him, and there were only a few years left before he reached the two fives, fifty-five, and would be retired, whatever happened. Tord Schultz sighed. A few years to fix things, to avert ending up as the world’s most economically fucked-up pilot.

   He signed the log, got up and left the cockpit to flash his row of pearly-white pilot teeth at the passengers. The smile that would tell them that he was Mr. Confidence in person. Pilot: the professional title that had once made him something in other people’s eyes. He had seen it, how people, men and women, young and old, once the magic word pilot had been enunciated, had looked at him and discovered not only the charisma, the nonchalance, the boyish charm, but also the captain’s dynamism and cold precision, the superior intellect and the courage of a man who defied physical laws and the innate fears of mere mortals. But that was a long time ago. Now they regarded him as the bus driver he was and asked him what the cheapest tickets to Las Palmas were, and why there was more leg room on Lufthansa.

   To hell with them. To hell with them all.

   Tord Schultz stood at the exit next to the flight attendants, straightened up and smiled, said, “Welcome back, miss,” in broad Texan, the way they had learned in flying school at Sheppard. Received a smile of acknowledgment. There had been a time when he could have arranged a meeting in the arrivals hall with such a smile. And indeed had. From Cape Town to Alta. Women. Many women. That had been the problem. And the solution. Women. Many women. New women. And now? His hairline was receding beneath the pilot’s cap, but the tailor-made uniform emphasized his tall, broad-shouldered physique. That was what he had blamed for not getting into fighter jets at flying school, and ending up as a cargo pilot on the Hercules, the workhorse of the sky. He had told them at home he had been a couple of inches too long in the spine, that the cockpits of F-5’s and F-16’s disqualified all but dwarfs. The truth was he hadn’t measured up to the competition. His body was all he had managed to maintain from those times, the only thing that hadn’t fallen apart, that hadn’t crumbled. Like his marriages. His family. Friends. How had it happened? Where had he been when it happened? Presumably in a hotel room in Cape Town or Alta, with cocaine up his nose to compensate for the potency-killing drinks at the bar, and his dick in not such a Welcome-Back-Miss to compensate for everything he was not and never would be.

   Tord Schultz’s gaze fell on a man coming toward him down the aisle. He walked with his head bent, yet still he towered over the other passengers. He was slim and broad-shouldered like himself. Younger, though. Cropped blond hair stood up like a brush. Looked Norwegian, but was hardly a tourist on his way home, more likely to be an expat with the subdued, almost gray tan typical of whites who had spent a long time in Southeast Asia. The indisputably tailor-made brown linen suit gave an impression of quality, seriousness. Maybe a businessman. Thanks to a not- altogether-thriving concern, he traveled economy class. But it was neither the suit nor his height that had caused Tord Schultz’s gaze to fix on this person. It was the scar. It started at the left corner of his mouth and almost reached his ear, like a smile-shaped sickle. Grotesque and wonderfully dramatic.

   “See you.”

   Tord Schultz was startled, but did not manage to respond before the man had passed and was out of the plane. The voice had been rough and hoarse, which together with the bloodshot eyes, suggested he had just woken up.

   The plane was empty. The minibus with the cleaning staff stood parked on the runway as the crew left in a herd. Tord Schultz noticed that the small, thickset Russian was the first off the bus, watched him dash up the steps in his yellow high-visibility vest with the company logo, Solox.

   See you.

   Tord Schultz’s brain repeated the words as he strode down the corridor to the flight crew center.

   “Didn’t you have a little carry-on up top?” asked one of the flight attendants, pointing to Tord’s rolling Samsonite suitcase. He couldn’t remember what her name was. Mia? Maja? At any rate he had fucked her during a stopover once last century. Or had he?

   “No,” Tord Schultz said.

   See you. As in “See you again”? Or as in “I can see you’re looking at me”?

   They walked past the partition by the entrance to the flight crew center, where in theory there was room for a jack- in-the-box customs officer. Ninety-nine percent of the time the seat behind the partition was empty, and he had never—not once in the thirty years he had worked for the airline—been stopped and searched.

   See you.

   As in “I can see you, all right.” And “I can see who you are.”

   Tord Schultz hurried through the door to the center.


As usual, Sergey Ivanov ensured that he was the first off the minibus when it stopped on the tarmac beside the Airbus, and sprinted up the steps to the empty plane. He took the vacuum cleaner into the cockpit and locked the door behind him. He slipped on latex gloves and pulled them up to where the tattoos started, flipped the front lid off the vacuum and opened the captain’s locker. Lifted out the small Samsonite carry-on, unzipped it, removed the metal plate at the bottom and checked the four bricklike one-kilo packages. Then he put them into the vacuum cleaner, pressing them into position between the tube and the large cleaner bag he had made sure to empty beforehand. Clicked the front lid back, unlocked the cockpit door and activated the vacuum cleaner. It was all done in seconds.

   After tidying and cleaning the cabin they ambled off the plane, stowed the light-blue garbage bags in the back of the Daihatsu and went back to the lounge. There were only a handful of planes landing and taking off before the airport closed for the night. Ivanov glanced over his shoulder at Jenny, the shift manager. He gazed at the computer screen that showed arrival and departure times. No delays.

   “I’ll take Bergen,” Sergey said in his harsh accent. At least he spoke the language; he knew Russians who had lived in Norway for ten years and were still forced to resort to English. But when Sergey had been brought in almost two years ago, his uncle had made it clear he was to learn Norwegian, and had consoled him by saying that he might have some of his own talent for picking up languages.

   “I’ve got Bergen covered,” Jenny said. “You can wait for Trondheim.”

   “I’ll do Bergen,” Sergey said. “Nick can do Trondheim.”

   Jenny looked at him. “As you like. Don’t work yourself to death, Sergey.”

   Sergey went to a chair by the wall and sat down. Leaned back carefully. The skin around his shoulders was still sore from where the Norwegian tattooist had been plying his trade. He was working from drawings Sergey had been sent by Imre, the tattooist in the Nizhny Tagil prison, and there was still quite a bit left to do. Sergey thought of the tattoos his uncle’s lieutenants, Andrey and Peter, had. The pale-blue strokes on the skin of the two Cossacks from Altai told of their dramatic lives and great deeds. But Sergey had a feat to his name as well. A murder. It was a little murder, but it had already been tattooed in the form of an angel. And perhaps there would be another murder. A big one. If the necessary became necessary, his uncle had said, and warned him to be ready, mentally prepared, and to keep up his knife practice. A man was coming, he had said. It wasn’t absolutely certain, but it was probable.

   Probable.

   Sergey Ivanov regarded his hands. He had kept the latex gloves on. Of course it was a coincidence that their standard work gear also ensured that he would not leave any fingerprints on the packages if things should go wrong one day. There wasn’t a hint of a tremble. His hands had been doing this for so long that he had to remind himself of the risk now and then to stay alert. He hoped they would be as calm when the necessary—chto nuzhno—had to be performed. When he had to earn the tattoo for which he had already ordered the design. He conjured up the image again: him unbuttoning his shirt in the sitting room at home in Tagil, with all his urka brothers present, and showing them his new tattoos. Which would need no comment, no words. So he wouldn’t say anything. Just see it in their eyes: He was no longer Little Sergey. For weeks he had been praying at night that the man would come. And that the necessary would become necessary.

   The message to clean the Bergen plane crackled over the walkietalkie.

   Sergey got up. Yawned.

   The procedure in the second cockpit was even simpler.

   Open the vacuum cleaner, put the contents in the carry-on in the first officer’s locker.

   On their way out they met the crew on their way in. Sergey Ivanov avoided the first officer’s eyes, looked down and noted that he had the same kind of wheeling suitcase as Schultz did. Samsonite Aspire GRT. Same red. Without the little red carry-on that could be fastened to it on top. They knew nothing of each other, nothing of motivations, nothing of the background or the family. All that linked Sergey, Schultz and the young first officer were the numbers of their unregistered cell phones, purchased in Thailand, so they could send a text in case there were changes to the schedule. Andrey limited all information to a strictly need-to-know basis. For that reason, Sergey didn’t have a clue what happened to the packages. He could guess, though. For when the first officer, on an internal flight between Oslo and Bergen, passed from air to land, there was no customs check, no security check. The officer took the carry-on to the hotel in Bergen where he and the crew were staying. A discreet knock on the hotel door in the middle of the night and four kilos of heroin exchanged hands. Even though the new drug, violin, had pushed down heroin prices, the going rate on the street for a quarter was still at least 250 kroner. A thousand a gram. Given that the drug—which had already been diluted—was diluted once more, that would amount to eight million kroner in total. He could do the math. Enough to know he was underpaid. But he also knew he would have done enough to merit a bigger slice when he had done the necessary. And after a couple of years on that salary he could buy a house in Tagil, find himself a good-looking Siberian girl and perhaps let his mother and father move in when they got old.

   Sergey Ivanov felt the tattoo itch between his shoulder blades.

   It was as though the skin were looking forward to the next installment.

What People are Saying About This

“Intricate, breakneck plotting makes for an addictive page-turner in Phantom . . . Brings to mind Michael Connelly’s tortured LAPD detective Harry Bosch.”Los Angeles Times
 
“The Oslo depiction adds a contemporary heft to Phantom that expands Nesbø’s reach . . . Suggests more than a few parallels to the great television series ‘The Wire’; perhaps it is one master’s nod to another.”Boston Globe
  
Phantom will maintain Jo Nesbø’s unstoppable momentum.” The Independent (UK)

“Easily the most troubling and heartfelt of this excellent series, Phantom is one of the finest suspense novels to come out of Scandinavia to date.” BookPage
 
“Nesbø’s true subject is the deterioration of the social fabric that has made Oslo such a civilized place.”New York Times Book Review
 
“A compulsive page-turner . . . [Phantom] is expertly plotted and structured, with all the requisite twists and turns to keep the reader guessing. The latter half of the book is also relentlessly paced, reading at times like a Scandinavian police version of the Jason Bourne series.” The Independent on Sunday (UK)

“Far more than a procedural . . . Personal and topical and hip, as usual.” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
 
“Nesbø has written a cunningly constructed thriller . . . running at Hollywood summer blockbuster speed.”Richmond Times-Dispatch
 
“Superb on every level . . . Nesbø begins with an emotionally gripping family drama but surrounds it with an elaborate, beautifully constructed plot involving [a] new drug and the ruthless man who rules its distribution. The subplots, plot twists (especially the last one), and the fully fleshed supporting characters—many of whom could drive their own novels—are all testament to Nesbø’s remarkable talent, but finally, it all comes back to Harry and the pain he endures in trying to carve out a separate peace from a world and a past that won’t let him go.”Booklist (starred)
 

“A first-class thriller . . . Contains several twists, some of which will make you gasp and at least one of which will make you cry . . . Phantom is Nesbø’s finest novel, a novel for grown-ups, which triumphantly proves, as Harry says, that ‘humans are a perverted and damaged species and there is no cure, only relief.’” Evening Standard (UK)

“Deeply moving . . . This is Harry’s most personal case.” Publishers Weekly (starred)
 
“Norwegian crime fiction writer Nesbø is one of the best . . . Oslo’s gritty and violent drug world is brought to life through the characters. The fast-paced plots are twisted and riveting, and the two stories collide to reveal a shocking climax. Nesbø is on par with the original Scandinavian duo Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, authors of the Martin Beck series.”Library Journal

“The internationally popular detective series by the Norwegian author builds to a blockbuster climax [in Phantom] . . . Those hooked by [The Snowman] or earlier ones should make their way here as quickly as they can . . . Devastating for protagonist and reader alike.” Kirkus Reviews (starred)
 
Phantom is an astoundingly good novel. Nesbø has done it again.”Trouw (Netherlands)

“Another excellent example of why Nesbø has such a firm grasp on the Nordic crime crown . . . Nesbø’s portrait of venality and corruption is bleakly angry, his peek beneath Oslo’s gleaming façade disturbing; a fascination with addiction adds to his writing’s unsettling intensity. But he doesn’t let this overwhelm a tightly coiled plot.” Metro (UK)

“Once again Nesbø demonstrates that he is a crime writer of absolute world class . . . You will understand what I mean when you read Phantom. And please do, this is a masterpiece of the genre. Jo Nesbø just gets better and better.” Västerbottens Folkblad (Sweden)

“Perhaps it was unrealistic to expect Nesbø to reach the dizzying heights of his two previous books, The Snowman and The Leopard. How wrong I was. Phantom is arguably a much better book than any previous instalments. Nesbø wrings out the tension, by turns painful and delicious, with consummate skill. The surprises come like an avalanche as the end nears, engulfing everything in its path.” Daily Express (UK)
 
“Nesbø is one of the best suspense writers in the world and this novel fully confirms that claim . . . Suspenseful, moving, well written and impossible to put down . . . I just can’t recommend this enough.”Litteratursiden.dk (Denmark)
  
“A brilliant thriller rife with exciting twists by one of the best Scandinavian crime authors.”Bücher (Germany)
 
“Extremely thrilling!” Die Zeit (Germany)
 
“Harry’s most lethally gripping and personal journey to date.”The Mirror (UK)

Phantom must be the crime novel of the year. There is no one better or even equal to Jo Nesbø in Scandinavian crime fiction.” Weekendavisen (Denmark)
  
“Jo Nesbø is a master of his craft. His latest novel, Phantom, is world-class crime writing.” Dagbladet (Norway)
 

Interviews

Chain Reactions: Barnes & Noble Review Interview with Jo Nesbø

Over the course of the last few years, Scandinavian novelists have begun dominating the crime-writing scene. Some of it has to do with the enormous popularity of Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy. But even the number of Larsson fans who picked up another Scandinavian writer to prolong the excitement they'd experienced with Lisbeth Salander cannot, by itself, account for the proliferation and growing popularity of writers who range from Sweden's Henning Mankell to Denmark's Lene Kaaberbøl and Agnete Friis. By far the most successful (and praised) among them in the U.S. is Jo Nesbø, creator of the Oslo police detective Harry Hole. Harry is, like all good detective heroes, forever butting heads with his superiors. He's also a drunk who, unlike other alcoholic series detectives (Lawrence Block's Matthew Scudder and James Lee Burke's Dave Robicheaux come to mind), never goes decisively on the wagon.

The Oslo that Harry traverses has never been as dark as in the latest Nesbø novel to hit these shores, Phantom. Harry, no longer a cop and now working in Hong Kong, returns to the city because Oleg, the son of the woman he loves and who has always regarded Harry as his father, is jailed, accused of a drug murder. As Nesbø explains in this interview, Harry's mission is not so much to find the truth as to get his boy out of jail.

Nesbø's visit to the East Coast of the United States was interrupted by Hurricane Sandy. A week after we were supposed to sit down to talk in New York City, we caught up via phone.—Charles Taylor

The Barnes & Noble Review: It seems every few years some country becomes the focus of crime writing. A few years ago it was Scotland with tartan noir. And really in America in the last few years, it's Scandinavian crime writers. Do you have any idea why that is? Jo Nesbø: I can only hope that it has something to do with the quality of the writing. But that's been going on for a long time, that you have this tradition of many storytellers in Scandinavia that use the crime novel as a vehicle. Ever since the '70s, Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö were the godfathers of Scandinavian crime. They broke the crime novel in Scandinavia from the kiosks and into the serious bookstores. So, hopefully it might have to do with that, just that there are so many crime writers and some of them, not all of them, but some of them are good.

BNR: Do you think that you and your colleagues offer a darker strain of crime fiction? Because I believe you do.

JN: I can't speak for the other writers, you know, where they have their inspiration. But myself, I'm probably influenced by being a musician and Henrik Ibsen. With the geography, with the long winters. But also, you know, growing up in the '60s and the '70s in Norway, I've been exposed to American culture. And my father and my grandparents came from the United States, so I'm thinking maybe a little bit more than other Scandinavian writers, I'm probably influenced by American culture. Although I mean, Norway, being a nation that had so much emigration to the United States and also people coming back, it sometimes feels like another American state. Also Norway, where it's coastal, where I grew up, it's close to England.

BNR: When you say American culture, I'd assume we're talking about music as well as literature?

JN: Yes.

BNR: And you're a musician. You have a band, is that right?

JN: Yeah.

BNR: What's the band's name?

JN: The band's name is Eieerre, and it means something like "Those Guys."

BNR: [laughs] Okay. And how would you describe the sound of the band?

JN: I'm not sure if I could do that in a way that would make sense to an American audience. It's a Norwegian folk music meets zydeco meets rock 'n' roll meets pop.

BNR: [laughs] Okay, all right. Well, that sounds like a description we can work with. I don't know how you got involved in writing. You started off in a field quite different, isn't that correct? JN: Well, the short version. At nineteen I was pretty sure I was going to be a professional soccer player. At that time I played for one of the Norwegian premier leagues. But I tore ligaments in both knees, so I started studying business administration and economics and became a financial analyst, and I worked at a brokerage firm as a stockbroker. And at the same time, I had formed my own band. And when I got to Oslo, I formed another band, and we recorded first one album and then we had a big breakthrough with our second album.

So you know the rest of the band, they were full-time musicians, and I was, you know, the one who had a day job. But for some reason I insisted on keeping on as a stockbroker. I needed that sort of normalcy of going back to a job on Monday morning. It was a crazy combination. At the end of that year, we had done 180 gigs with the band while I was still working as a stockbroker. I was the singer and the songwriter in the band, so you would think that at least I would do it full time, but at the end of that year I was just so tired of playing and working that I had to take six months off. And I told my band and the boss at the brokerage firm that I'm going to Australia to do something completely different. So I brought a laptop to Australia, and that was where I wrote my first novel.

BNR: You wanted the normalcy of the stockbroker's job—is your writing routine very disciplined?

JN: It is. When I got back from Australia, I knew that I had to write. I would quit the job at the brokerage when I got back. And I also told my band that I didn't want to go touring for a long, long time. So for the next couple of years I was mainly a writer. But I was a bit worried. I didn't want my music to be the thing that paid the rent because I didn't see myself as a musician. And I was afraid that I would have to sort of compromise in order to make a living as a musician. And I didn't want that.

So I'd rather have a job that paid the rent and then play, just play the music that I wanted to play. But as a writer at that time, I figured I made enough money as a musician and as a stockbroker so I didn't have any financial worries for the next ten years. So, I figured, okay, I'll just write anything I want to write. I'll be this struggling writer for the next ten years. That was my plan. And I was a bit worried that I wouldn't get up in the morning, that I would start drinking too much and living an unhealthy life. But what happened was that the privilege of spending so much time writing, I knew every morning I would just get up and I would work far more as a writer than I had as a stockbroker.

BNR: You're speaking about discipline and how it felt good to you. I'm also interested in your mentioning Ibsen, which would suggest to me that you're fastidious about what you introduce into the novels, that you're making sure what you're giving us is something that's going to be used. Is that fair?

JN: Yes. I think so. Actually, I think that Ibsen is great for crime writers to read because he was in many ways one of the first crime writers. What he would do in his plays is of course having something happen and then that will lead to a chain reaction where the truth is bit by bit being revealed. And those are often dark family secrets. The nature of Scandinavians is that they don't talk so much, there will be these dark secrets, and most things are under-communicated. So in that way, I think Henrik Ibsen was a crime writer.

BNR: It's certainly true in Phantom, where we keep returning to the flashbacks, and what we're learning in the flashbacks is ahead of what Harry is learning. And finally the flashbacks complete the story. So there's an example of what you're talking about. JN: Phantom was for me an interesting technique of telling the story. You have one voice that it is in the present telling what is happening, and then there's one voice from the past that's also driving the story forward. And you know that the two story lines will meet eventually. If you only have that voice in the present, you're not sure that you get to know the whole truth. But since you have that voice from the past, you know that you will find out what happened. But you also know that it doesn't necessarily mean that Harry is going to find out what happened.

BNR: How would you describe your relationship to Harry? Do you feel he's your surrogate, or do you feel a little more removed from him than that? In crime fiction we always seem to wonder how close the author is to his or her detective.

JN: And I think that sometimes the writer is wondering about the same thing. Because when I started writing about Harry, I certainly didn't plan for him to have anything to do with me and my life. But looking back, it's sometimes strange because you can see how you're using more and more of yourself in the main character. They say that every writer is writing about himself or herself, and I think that is probably true, whether they want it or not. And at least for me, I can see, not at the time of writing but later in hindsight. The things that are going on in Harry's life mirror what's been going on in my life. I probably do use more of myself in my main character than I've planned. It just happens in the process because he is your eyes and ears into the story.

BNR: Harry's relationship with alcohol is, as far as I can tell, unique. We've had series detectives with drinking problems before, but at some point they seem to lick it. There are the Scudder books by Lawrence Block, and the James Lee Burke Dave Robicheaux novels. What I find interesting about Harry's on-and- off drinking is that you are not judgmental at all.

JN: Yes, well to me it's as simple as needing to make a more interesting story. Storytelling is all about conflict. Like in an Ibsen play again. In every scene there must be a conflict. And I think that Harry...his struggles will of course be with the world, will be with the killer trying to flee or not wanting to be found. That is the obvious conflict in any crime novel. But you also have to have a conflict on the inner level. And to me Harry's fight with alcoholism is sort of a symbol of Harry's fight with the world and with himself, with his other self. Because you know, the story, the way I see it, is always about the main character's internal self, whether it's going to heaven or hell. Harry's fight with alcohol has to do also with a moral choice. Alcohol is just a symbol. To me, alcohol is Harry's Kryptonite.

BNR: Harry goes through some profound changes in Phantom. How did you make those decisions about what happens to Harry in the book?

JN: In the previous book, The Leopard, Harry is going home because his father is dying. So it's a book about, among other things, the father-son relationship, and in that book Harry is the son. But in this book we meet Harry as father and Oleg is the son. He has made a choice coming back to Oslo to investigate this case where Oleg is in jail as if he doesn't have a choice. You have a feeling that he wished that he didn't have to come back home. But his job in this book is not as a police officer, it's as a father. His only mission is to get Oleg out of jail, whether he did commit the murder or not. That is for me the biggest. He's not out for justice. He's just out to save his boy.

BNR: You're talking about things like redemption and the soul of the character and in some ways—and I mean this as a compliment—in some ways that might strike some as old- fashioned preoccupations to have in contemporary fiction.

JN: Yeah.

BNR: Earlier you talked about your coming from a culture where crime fiction has been used to address other things while still working as crime fiction. I'm going to let you answer this any way you can, but I'll break it into two parts: Is crime fiction the way that literature now deals with social and moral questions? And is it necessary for literature to have a moral component or, frankly, to characterize the language you're using, a spiritual component?

JN: Well, I think it's interesting that a couple of years ago, there was a literature festival in Norway where crime fiction was being criticized because it wasn't dealing with social issues the way it used to do. It had become less political, and it didn't address problems in society. And for me it was interesting that that was sort of a mandate that crime fiction had. I realized that as crime writers we had this mandate to address society, which was our responsibility and not the responsibility of the rest of the literature field. And it's sort of a normal request to have that mandate and in another way it's strange that just thirty, forty years ago what was considered pulp fiction has now taken up the role that the big important writers earlier in the century had.

And I do think that it is interesting that the crime novel also has taken over the role that religious writing used to have, that used to deal with moral questions about wrong and right. Of course that sort of literature doesn't exist any longer. But this literature that used to be purely entertainment, and still is mainly entertainment, is the literature interested in moral questions, what is wrong and right, while the rest of literature is sort of describing society but doesn't necessarily have a strong viewpoint, or doesn't have—what's the word in English—it's descriptive but not normative. While crime writers are more normative in their way of writing and storytelling.

BNR: So when a detective, or anyone else in the novel, when their flesh is in peril, it's their soul that's in peril.

JN: Hmm, yeah.

BNR: If someone who reads your novels has never been to Oslo, how close to the real thing is the vision they are going to get of Oslo? Some of the stuff, especially in Phantom, especially about the drug hangouts, I could think of parallels for in '70s New York.

JN: Yeah, I just spoke to Paul Auster about New York in the '70s. That really interests me. I wish I was there in the '70s and he told me, no, you probably don't.

BNR: I think he's probably right.

JN: You know, the New York of the '70s, of the movies during the '70s and in novels like The Basketball Diaries. I'm just curious about that, because it's such a bleak, dark city at that time. I guess I do draw ideas, talking about inspiration for the Oslo that I describe in the Harry Hole series, because ever since the '70s Oslo has been one of the biggest drug cities in Europe where you had the highest number of deaths from overdoses. But then again, it's probably not the Oslo that you will see as a tourist in Oslo, mostly seeing the city at the daytime and hopefully avoiding neighborhoods where you have the prostitution and drug scene. Although if you were to go looking for it, it's not hard to find. It's in the midst of Oslo. The Oslo after dark that I've described is there. But I do add fiction, so it's a bit twisted, it's a bit darker. Just like Gotham City is a version of New York City.

November 29, 2012

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