Iceland Noir
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The nature in Iceland is very dangerous. Wherever you are, whatever time of year, if you go up into the highlands, which most of Iceland is just the highlands and we just live on the coastline. But if you go up to the highlands by yourself, whatever time of year, even in the height of summer, nature can be very cruel.

Lawyer and writer Ragnar Jónasson. It's a dangerous place to be if you don't know what you're doing. And that's, I think, a common theme in a lot of the crime fiction in Iceland. Iceland is a dangerous place, but crime is incredibly rare. There were only four homicides in the entire country last year, up from just two in 2021. What do you think makes Iceland such a good place to set crime fiction?

People in Iceland love reading crime fiction, and they love writing it too.

Even the prime minister of Iceland recently wrote a crime novel. So we got on a plane to talk with her about it and to figure out why in a country where the biggest threats are things like strong winds and getting lost, everyone is so interested in crime. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. Are you sure this is the right way? I think that's it right there. Where? Right there. You're kidding. No.

On a rainy day this past spring, criminal co-creator Lauren Spohr and I were in Reykjavik, trying to get to our meeting with the prime minister. Next to the punk museum? Yeah, absolutely. The prime minister's office is in a plain white building downtown. You'd never guess it was the office of one of the most important people in the country. There's no fence around it, or guards outside. Right across from the Hard Rock Cafe. Oh, it is across from the Hard Rock Cafe.

We can get out of America. Prime Minister Katrin Jakobsdottir has been in office since 2017. Before that, she was the country's Minister of Education, Science and Culture. She's also the chairperson of the country's Left Green Movement. But she's always been interested in crime. When she was elected, the New York Times wrote...

A pacifist environmentalist, an expert on Icelandic crime thrillers, emerged on Thursday as Iceland's new prime minister. Before I became a politician, I studied Icelandic crime fiction. And what I think is interesting is that we have relatively many people writing crime fiction and they are very different people.

We talked with the prime minister in a sitting room in her office. It was incredibly casual and relaxed. Iceland is one of the safest countries in the world. It's number one on the global peace index. Most police are unarmed. And in the entire country, there are only five prisons, which can hold 150 people total.

I think the interest in crime in Iceland is maybe because we have been so privileged that crime isn't really very common here in Iceland. So we like to read about it. And I think sometimes it's an interesting opposition, really. The prime minister's book is called Reykjavik. It's about a young girl who goes missing in the 1950s from a remote island called Videi off the coast of Reykjavik.

The prime minister co-wrote it with Ragnar Jónasson, who was there with us at the prime minister's office. He's a best-selling crime writer, and he started a crime writing festival called Iceland Noir. He met the prime minister a few years ago when they were both on a committee judging the best translated crime novels in Iceland. I mean, I'd known for a long time that she wanted to write a book. And then I just had this idea, you know, why not do this together?

And so I just asked her, you know, should we do a crime novel together? And I wasn't sure she would say yes, but she did. And then I wasn't sure she would actually go through with it, but she did. Ragnar had an idea how it would all begin, you know, what would really be the start of the book. This young lady disappearing from this island very close to Reykjavik.

And I think that's something that Icelanders relate very strongly to because even though we don't have a lot of crime, we often have people disappearing simply because of the very tough natural circumstances. We have the ocean around us where people disappear. We have...

people simply getting lost in the wilderness, etc. So we also have kind of a dark thread there, which is something that we used. Icelandic crime fiction is part of a whole genre of crime novels called Nordic Noir, set in the countries in and around Scandinavia. The genre is often described as bleak and gritty,

It includes books like Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, which became the first ever book to sell more than a million e-book copies. In 2010, The Economist wrote about the phenomenon of crime novels coming out of Nordic countries, writing, quote, "...the protection offered by a cradle-to-grave welfare system hides a dark underside."

I think the societal structure is also interesting because, and I think that's of course the reason that Nordic noir is popular because it is set in a Nordic welfare society which is

interesting for an author to probe under the surface and find really what's happening beneath the surface in a Nordic welfare society. And we have many stories that revolve really around that, that things aren't as good as they look. You know, and even the way it's interesting to have the crime fiction come out of this country. I mean, the prison system here is so different. The gun violence is so different. I mean, it's so interesting that you have such a

a wealth of crime fiction coming from a country which handles crime pretty well, I would say, compared to the US. And there's major differences here between the two countries. Yeah, well, we really think of crime as a societal issue and not the issue of each individual. And I think the reason that's

where societies don't have a lot of crime, is that they are relatively equal and inclusive. That's my political vision. But I also think that the changes that happened in Icelandic society after World War II, because before that you could say that Iceland was mainly a rural society, and then we have...

the making of a city here in Reykjavik and a new kind of societal structures appear which make Iceland really a perfect setting for crime fiction even though it's a small country you can't really know everybody in this new society of a modern city. Many Icelandic crime novels are set in Reykjavik including those by one of the most famous Icelandic crime writers, Arnoldur Indridisson.

He started writing crime fiction in the late 90s after working as a journalist. Before his books, people thought that crime stories set in Iceland didn't really work because it's so safe there. He once said in an interview, "This is the challenge you're faced with, to be realistic and believable. You can never use easy solutions, solve the matter with a gunfight."

You need to burrow into the characters, look for a psychological, intrinsic solution, rather than an external, explosive solution. The Prime Minister wrote about his work for her master's degree dissertation, and about how early crime fiction from outside of Iceland helped influence modern-day Icelandic noir.

It's interesting that when we see the crime fiction really being born as a sharn with Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle, etc. Those stories and books are translated into Icelandic very quickly, just a few years after they are published in the native language. So obviously there was a very strong interest in this new trend here in Iceland from the very beginning. And we saw...

Icelandic novels being published that were kind of, well, imitating this new genre. We have actually a story called An Icelandic Sherlock Holmes, which tells a story about an amateur private investigator, etc. So I think we were pretty quick to really discover this trend and making our own version of it. But still, I would say that the crime...

fiction genre didn't become acceptable in Iceland until maybe around the year 2000, when it became really acceptable and part of a very strong literary genre in Iceland before it was considered to be more, well... Lowbrow. Lowbrow, exactly. But I think we can actually, we can even go back further. I mean, to the Icelandic sagas, I mean, from the Middle Ages,

Some of those stories really are crime thrillers, even like legal thrillers. So we have this very strong heritage dating back centuries of writing crime fiction in a way. The Icelandic sagas were written about 800 years ago. They tell the story of the people who settled Iceland, often following them for generations, and are written almost like modern novels in a simple, straightforward style.

They're about families, conflict, and everyday life. And I think that's also a part of why we write and read so much, because, you know, our heritage is these sagas much more than, like, anything else. I mean, we don't have this, you know, that other, you know, nations have heritage of, you know, architecture or art in a way from that period. I mean, we have the books, we have the stories. We'll be right back.

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Start Ritual or add Essential for Women 18 Plus to your subscription today. That's ritual.com slash criminal for 25% off. The Prime Minister of Iceland has said her background in crime fiction helped prepare her for her role in government, saying that it, quote, is about not really trusting anyone, and that's generally how politics works. She's also said every politician needs to have something to take his or her mind off the daily business of politics.

She's described crime fiction as, quote, very therapeutic. One of her favorite authors is Agatha Christie. She has been very influential. But then I read everything, you know, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Dorothy L. Sayers, etc. I read all of those. So I kind of, I really, you know, it's so, and when you have read so many crime novels...

It's so enjoyable when you kind of find one that you don't see through and you're actually surprised when the ending comes. People in Iceland read a lot, an average of 2.3 books every month. On Christmas Eve, there's a tradition called the Christmas book flood. And there's an Icelandic saying that everyone gives birth to a book.

The phrase literally translates to, "Everyone has a book in their stomach." It's reported that one in ten Icelanders will publish one in their lifetime. People tend to think that it's kind of normal to write books. How did you find time? You know, both of you do other things, obviously. How did you find time to write? Did you write at night? Did you send chapters back and forth at night after the work of the day was over?

Well, it took a long time. You know, we were writing this book for two years. Yeah, more than two years.

So that created some time, at least for me, who normally is out on meetings every night and meeting people, which you didn't do during the pandemic. So all of a sudden, instead of just watching Netflix or something to relax, we were creating our own story. But it was obviously a little bit, you know, a strange experience to do this with a prime minister.

When I called her to ask how this chapter was progressing and that chapter, she was having meetings with the Prime Minister of Britain or the heads of states all over the world. It's a strange conversation to have. I jumped out of this meeting with the Prime Minister of the UK

to speak to you. I mean, how do you respond to that? That's just like a bizarre scenario. It requires a lot of patience, obviously, for the co-author. But the good thing was I would never probably have written it alone because he kept pushing it really until we had a finished manuscript. And even then I said, okay, here we have a manuscript. It's probably not good enough.

So the biggest surprise for me was when actually we were in the process of saying, okay, it's going to be published. Then it became very real. And then I got a little nervous. Yeah, that was probably the only point, you know, only time she got really mad at me during this process was during the editing because I hate editing books.

So I was sort of stalling on that, you know, writing something else. And then I got this call from the prime minister one day last summer and she was, you know, she was angry at me. She was like, you need to finish this editing so we can move on. And again, that's a new experience to get like a call from the prime minister of your country, you know, telling you off a little bit. But I would be the same, you know, it doesn't matter if...

My job doesn't matter because this is just who I am. Keep calling people and telling them what to do. Are you ready to write another one?

No, not ready. Of course we are, yeah. I'm not saying it won't happen at some point, but somehow time has been filled with a lot of stuff. So no, we haven't started that. No, we haven't started, but it's an ongoing conversation. Basically, you know, me saying that we should start and she's saying no, but I think we'll figure it out. There was one other person I wanted to talk with about crime and crime fiction in Iceland.

His name is Peter Gwomansson, and he deals with both. How many people do what you do in Iceland? I'm pretty much the only one. Most of the time, it's just me. Peter Gwomansson is a forensic pathologist who works in Reykjavik. Before he took the job a few years ago, there were no forensic pathologists based in Iceland at all. He and a colleague who flies in once a month handle all of the autopsies done in the entire country —

which has a population of about 380,000 people. Do you know any other countries where there's only one forensic pathologist? No. No westernized countries, at least, I think. He and his colleague work with the police to investigate sudden and unexplained deaths in Iceland. Although murders are rare in Iceland, he says suspicious deaths are more common, at least double the homicide rate.

So our role in the investigation is, of course, also like ruling out homicide when something appears to be a homicide. What is your day? What is your typical day like? I mean, I assume you're not working on any homicides today. No, not physically, but we have had some homicides. In June, we had three homicides. So...

So there's a lot of work involved in these cases, even if you're not standing and autopsying them. But the normal day is I come in and there is... I mean, people have died. They're brought here. And the majority of the day is, of course, standing with the bodies and autopsying. And at the end of the autopsy, you can say...

It's this, uh, it was that kind of force. It hit him in that place. Then it went through the, this artery, uh, released this amount of blood. And that's the way the person died. You have the, like you have built up the whole chain before your eyes. Um,

the chain of causation. That's the job and it's really interesting sometimes coming in and seeing what's happened. And of course usually if there is something interesting you see it on the news before you come in that something has happened, some big accident or something.

And because you're the only guy there, you know you're probably going to get to see that individual at some point. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So if you're having a nice weekend at home or something and you're hoping for an easy following week at work and then there is on the news car accidents and whatever, then you know beforehand that your week won't be as easy as you hoped for.

Because it's also such a small country that everything makes headlines, even small happenings. Peter Gwomansson became Iceland's only forensic pathologist in 2018. And then he started getting questions from Icelandic crime writers. What types of questions do they ask? You couldn't really, like, generalize.

because the nature of the questions is most often that they are really, really specific. It's like, how long does it take to die if half of your body is immersed in seven degree cold water? And so on. And how does a body smell that has been...

He told me he's even gotten questions like, can a dead body make a sound or change position? Eventually, he got so many questions from so many writers that he decided to just teach a class on it.

In the last three years, I think I'm right. I have had every fall and every spring at least one course, and it has been close to full or full. So, I mean, criminal writers, they have a serious interest, a professional interest in forensic medicine and pathology for their profession. So I offer them a chance for...

Starting with the basics to gain insight into what we are dealing with, how we think, what are the problems, what is difficult, what is easy, what can we say, what wouldn't we be able to say and so on.

Do you get the sense that these authors are really trying to get the details right? You know, that the people who come to your workshops, your lectures, are there because they want to make what they're writing as realistic as possible, that that really matters to them. Yeah, I've had conversation with authors that are really ambitious to...

having it right, like it is in reality. And I'm sitting there and talking to them, and they have this divine power of fiction in their hand. They can take and they can say whatever they want. And I tell them,

You don't have to keep it like it is in reality because you can write whatever you want. And it surprises me. That's the thing. It surprises me that authors, when they get stuck in this fixating on the problem of writing like reality, because it's a kind of a...

a backwards thing, if you just think about it, because they are writing fiction. Why do you think, I mean, there's so few violent deaths, murders in Iceland. Why do you think that crime fiction is so popular there? Yeah. It is a very, very popular genre here in Iceland, as well as in probably other Nordic countries also. I think people are somehow...

drawn towards the subject and they find it interesting. Why do people die and put on it and so forth? I mean, maybe people are even more interested in it there because they see it so rarely. Yeah, I know what you mean. Like if you have a homicide here, despite how unusual or interesting it really is,

then it will make headlines in every media, of course, and everyone will know about it within like 45 minutes or something. It's a small community. It's true. And people are interested in if there is like evil or something bad happens. So it's close to them.

He told me he personally doesn't read much crime fiction. I don't. I've read a few of the Icelandic authors, and I think I get plenty of death and all these things during the workday. You've seen enough. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think so. We recently...

spoke with the Prime Minister of Iceland about her new crime novel. Did she ask you any questions? No. No, she didn't. Well, I think she's maybe going to write another one, so she might call. Oh, nice. I look forward to it. Reykjavik, a crime story, written by Prime Minister Katrin Jakobsdóttir and Ragnar Jónasson, will be out in the U.S. this September. Criminal is created by Lauren Spohr and me,

Nadia Wilson is our senior producer. Katie Bishop is our supervising producer. Our producers are Susanna Roberson, Jackie Sajico, Lily Clark, Lena Sillison, Sam Kim, and Megan Kinane. Our technical director is Rob Byers, engineering by Russ Henry. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com. And if you're a fan of crime fiction, you might enjoy Phoebe Reads a Mystery...

A show where I read classic crime novels. Our latest book is The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I've also read books like Arthur Conan Doyle's The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and The Mysterious Affair at Stiles by Agatha Christie. You can listen back through our entire catalog, 25 books total, and look out for new books coming soon.

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Discover more great shows at podcast.voxmedia.com. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.