The Origins of The Dancer, by Óskar Guðmundsson

The idea for The Dancer more or less pushed its way into my head. We had spend a weekend in the countryside and I was driving home in the evening, my whole family asleep in the car. I switched on the radio and a Rolling Stones song came on, and a vision suddenly came to me of a young man dancing ballet steps to this song. Forty-five kilometres later, by the time I parked the car outside our home, I had almost the whole story – and the first thing I did was to write down the outline of it. For me it was unheard of that the whole way through I knew what I was going to be writing next, virtually to its end. I’ve often thought that it must be wonderful if every story came unforced and fully packaged like that.

When I had the idea, I saw immediately that it would not take place in the present day. This was a great feeling, as I had been wondering for a while about how interesting it would be to write a tale that takes place before the era of computers and mobile phones. It was demanding but also a pleasure to get to grips with a book that features none of these gadgets. The other aspect I relished was setting the story at just that time, in 1983, when I was in my teens and knew the centre of Reykjavík intimately. So it was a joy to be able to take my thoughts back to those years and remember the locations and all the shops that no longer exist.

Ylfa, my detective, is taking her first steps as a police officer. At that time, this was an overwhelmingly male workplace and one that could be challenging for female officers. While Ylfa may come across as being fragile, she also has an inner resilience and can become a formidable adversary. She’s determined and refuses to allow herself to be pushed around – although this isn’t the case in her turbulent home life. She and her fiancé have a year-old daughter. He’s tired of Ylfa devoting so much time to her job so moves out, taking the child with him, and it’s difficult for Ylfa to get to see her.

Ylfa’s superior officer is Valdimar who is not far off retirement age and has a wealth of experience behind him. He’s a respected figure within the police force. As Valdimar took shape along with the story, I immediately felt fond of him. He’s all heart and has a deep-seated sense of justice, but nobody wants to be anywhere nearby when he’s roused to anger. Valdimar is old-school, and has quirks such as a loathing of food that has been heated up in a microwave – a technology that was just starting to appear at that time. The relationship between Ylfa and Valdimar is one of respect and fondness, and he fights her corner when the going is tough at the station and also at home. He becomes something of a father figure for Ylfa.

It was highly challenging and frequently emotionally demanding to write the story of Tony, who is The Dancer of the title. We get to know him when he’s around twenty years old, although we also see glimpses of his sick mother starting to teach him to dance from the age of three. His whole life is infused with insane child-rearing strategies, violence and abuse. My hope while writing The Dancer was that readers would form a close enough connection with his horrific circumstances to realise what happens as he begins to lead a life of his own, with what can only be described as no hope whatever of finding a place of his own in society.

To begin with, the novel had a conventional format, mainly taking place from the points of view of Valdimar and Ylfa. When I came to write the Tony the Dancer’s own scenes, it quickly became clear that to do his tragedy justice, I’d have to spend more of the narrative inside his head. That served also to make the story more graphically brutal as the reader is presented directly with what Tony sees.

The Dancer is the book that caused me the most gut-wrenching anxiety, and I had practically convinced myself that I was putting an end to my writing career. I was certain that the responses would be dreadful, and there would be no way back from this. I was completely aware that readers would find the story disturbing but I was mainly concerned that they would see it as unbelievable. It came as a huge relief when the story was a bestseller and was selected as the best crime story of the year by audiobook producer Storytel, which today is Iceland’s largest publisher. Now The Dancer is published in the UK and the reviews have been overwhelmingly positive. I’m delighted with the reception it has received, and this is what provides the tailwind you need to keep writing – and I’m grateful to Corylus Books and my translator Quentin Bates for their faith in me.

The next story in the trilogy The Puppetmaster has already appeared in Iceland. In The Dancer we got to see Ylfa coping with her family problems, and this continues in The Puppetmaster as we get to see more unfold. She and Valdimar are presented with a new case, which centres around a boys’ home in rural Hvalfjörður where people are disappearing one by one. Their investigation uncovers a murder case dating back a decade, something that was never solved when siblings were found tied beneath a buoy in Reykjavík harbour. The story addresses how children who failed to fit into the system were treated, sent to these correctional homes, often with horrific consequences. It also takes on the longstanding Icelandic problems of nepotism and favouritism that have resulted in a great deal of corruption in the country’s public life.

The Dancer by Óskar Guðmundsson, translated from Icelandic by Quentin Bates (Corylus Books) Out Now

Life was never going to be a bed of roses… Tony is a young man who has always been on the losing side in life. He was brought up by his troubled, alcoholic mother who had a past of her own as a talented ballerina, until a life-changing accident brought her dreams to a sudden end. As her own ambitions for fame and success were crushed, she used cruel and brutal methods to project them onto her young son – with devastating consequences. There’s no doubt that a body found on Reykjavík’s Öskjuhlíð hillside has been there for a long time. The case is handed to veteran detective Valdimar, supported by Ylfa, who is taking her tentative first steps as a police officer with the city’s CID while coping with her own family difficulties. It’s not long before it’s clear a vicious killer is on the loose - and very little about the case is what it appears to be at first glance.

The Dancer was originally published in 2023 as a Storytel Original Series 

ISBN: 978-1-7392989-5-1

Price £9.99

eBook pub date: 5th January 2024

Paperback pub date: 1st February 2024

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Quentin Bates has personal and professional roots in Iceland that go very deep. He is an author of series of nine crime novels and novellas featuring the Reykjavik detective Gunnhildur (Gunna) Gísladóttir. In addition to his own fiction, he has translated many works of Iceland’s coolest writers into English, including books by Lilja Sigurðardóttir, Guðlaugur Arason, Einar Kárason, Óskar Guðmundsson, Sólveig Pálsdóttir, Jónína Leosdottir and Ragnar Jónasson. Quentin was instrumental in launching Iceland Noir in 2013, the crime fiction festival in Reykjavik.