Outstanding Crime Fiction from Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden Long-listed for the 2025 Petrona Award.
Twelve crime novels from Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden have made the longlist for the 2025 Petrona Award for the Best Scandinavian Crime Novel of the Year.
They are:
Dead Island by Samuel Bjørk tr. Charlotte Barslund (Norway, Bantam)
Murder Under the Midnight Sun by Stella Blómkvist tr. Quentin Bates (Iceland, Corylus Books)
The Widows by Pascal Engman tr. Neil Smith (Sweden, Legend Press)
Deliver Me by Malin Persson Giolito tr. Rachel Willson-Broyles (Sweden, Simon & Schuster)
The Dancer by Óskar Guðmundsson tr. Quentin Bates (Iceland, Corylus Books)
Victim by Jørn Lier Horst and Thomas Enger tr. Megan E Turney (Norway, Orenda Books)
Blood Ties by Jo Nesbo tr. Robert Ferguson (Norway, Harvill Secker)
The Sea Cemetery by Aslak Nore tr. Deborah Dawkin (Norway, MacLehose Press)
Shrouded by Sólveig Pálsdóttir tr. Quentin Bates (Iceland, Corylus Books)
The Clues in the Fjord by Satu Rämö tr. Kristian London (Finland, Zaffre)
Ghost Island by Max Seeck tr. Kristian London (Finland, Mountain Leopard Press)
Pursued by Death by Gunnar Staalesen tr. Don Bartlett (Norway, Orenda Books)
The longlist contains a mix of newer and more established authors including previous Petrona Award winners Pascal Engman, Malin Persson Giolito, Jørn Lier Horst, and Gunnar Staalesen.
Both large and small publishers are represented on the longlist, with Corylus Books having an impressive three entries. The breakdown by country is Norway (5), Iceland (3), Finland (2) and Sweden (2).
The shortlist will be announced on18 September 2025.
The Petrona Award 2025 judging panel comprises Jackie Farrant, the creator of RAVEN CRIME READS and a bookseller for a major book chain in the UK, Ewa Sherman, translator and writer, and blogger at NORDIC LIGHTHOUSE, and Sonja van der Westhuizen, a book critic for print and online publications in the UK and South Africa, as well as a blogger at WEST WORDS REVIEWS.
The Award administrator is Karen Meek, owner of the EURO CRIME blog and website.
The Petrona team would like to thank their sponsor, David Hicks, for his continuing support of the Petrona Award.
It’s been a signal year
for Stephen King followers as we had the release of his Crime Thriller NEVER
FLINCH featuring Holly Gibney….
…..though the undisputed master of the horror genre,
after this latest release perhaps Stephen King will be anointed the king of
crime fiction. Never Flinch features the return of Private Investigator Holly
Gibney, tasked to bodyguard the controversial feminist speaker Kate McKay. It
seems McKay is being stalked by a deranged brother [and sister] duo from a
radical religious sect intent on disrupting her promotional book tour….
And earlier this year
we were treated to Osgood R. Perkin’s re-working of King’s creepy story THE
MONKEY which has its roots in W.W. Jacob’s 1902 classic The Monkey’s Paw – and last
fall’s remake of the Tobe Hooper’s Salem’s Lot miniseries [which hit British
Cinemas].
But next week sees the
release of The End of the World As We
Know It an original short story anthology based on master storyteller
Stephen King's #1 international bestselling classic The Stand.
Stephen King has fully
authorised a return to the harrowing world of The Stand through this original short story anthology as presented
by award-winning authors and editors Christopher Golden and Brian Keene.
Contributors Tim Lebbon
and V Castro are delighted to be sharing their stories at the official UK
launch, in conversation with Sarah Maria Griffin on Tuesday 19 August at
Forbidden Planet London Megastore, 179 Shaftesbury Avenue London WC2H 8JR – the
signing starts at 1730 hours – for more details and tickets – Click HERE
More information about
the UK Launch next week Click HERE
and more about Stephen King’s work Click HERE
Shots Magazine would
like to thank Kallie Townsend or Hodder & Stoughton UK for information
about the UK launch.
....And from Horror Author and Co-Editor of The End of the World As We Know It - here's Brian Keene.....
“I get the willies when I see closed doors,” says Bob Slocum, narrator of Joseph Heller’s 1974 novel Something Happened. Of course it’s not really the doors that frighten Bob; it’s what they represent. It’s the idea of something secret going on in another room. The closed door symbolises Bob’s paranoia; his pathological fear of secrets and betrayal that will set him off on a path toward madness. The closed door—that single, seemingly innocuous image—takes us to the heart of the character’s psyche, and the root of his fear.
Now, Joseph Heller is perhaps an unlikely reference point for a piece about a vintage-style whodunit, but I mention him here for a reason. You see, I’ve written a series of Golden Age-inspired mysteries which are built around my great fascination with the recurring motif of the locked-room mystery. For the uninitiated, the locked-room mystery is a subgenre of crime fiction dealing with so-called impossible crimes; typically murders with an air of something supernatural about them, as though the criminal possessed otherworldly powers. Inevitably, though, the solution to the mystery is rational, earthly, and eventually deduced by an ingenious sleuth via the process of ratiocination.
The locked-room mystery is the most ornate, labyrinthine construction in the crime fiction world; it’s a self-consciously surreal exercise in puzzle-making where logic and lateral thinking are paramount. But it’s also a surprisingly blank canvas for creative expression—at least, I’ve always found it that way. Once you’ve established the parameters of your puzzle, you can go pretty much anywhere. I tend to think this is the reason locked-room mysteries—more than any other crime subgenre—crop up in so many other fields of literature, including science fiction (such as Isaac Asimov’s Caves of Steel, or Adam Roberts’s The Real Town Murders) and fantasy (Randall Garrett’s Too Many Magicians). There is so much scope for imagination and flights of fancy that it is a positively irresistible challenge for writers of all genres.
For me, the puzzle is important for several reasons. When done right, the locked-room mystery is a work of art akin to a perfectly constructed Swiss watch. Its moving parts all converge and coalesce to produce a single, immensely satisfying effect for the reader. But that’s not all; the solving of a mystery, or the restoring of earthly logic to a seemingly illogical world, is deeply cathartic.
There is often talk of classic mysteries scratching our collective itch to see justice done, and to see the good guys foiling the bad guys. Maybe this is true in some instances, but to me it’s an oversimplification. I think the real thrill of a locked room comes from its exploration of a deeper psychological mystery. The seemingly impossible puzzle upends our understanding of the world; it makes us question our senses, our logic, our very selves. And by the time the solution to the mystery is presented, and we see how we have been tricked, we’ve gained a deeper philosophical understanding of ourselves. We see that our perceptions are shaped by our interactions with the world around us. The locked-room mystery places this strange dialogue between our inner and outer worlds at the heart of the narrative.
The same is true of classic ghost stories, which dredge up images from the depths of our collective unconscious and present them as physical manifestations. In a way, ghosts are memories; projections of our own fear and trauma. Which brings me to the unpleasant business at Devil’s Neck.
The House at Devil’s Neck is the fourth in my series of spooky, Golden Age-inspired puzzle mysteries featuring magician-turned-sleuth Joseph Spector. Like the other titles in the series, it’s intended primarily as an entertainment; a piece of escapism. But it’s also an excuse to explore deeper and darker territory—in an oblique way, of course.
This time around, it is August 1939 and Spector travels out to a derelict mansion to participate in a séance. The date is highly significant, since the ghost who walks the halls of the house at Devil’s Neck is a soldier of the First World War. After the séance, circumstances begin to get out of control: one of the party is found dead; murdered in a locked room. Then another. And as the bodies pile up, the clock continues ticking, inching our characters closer and closer to the precipice of a fresh horror: the dawn of a Second World War.
So you see, The House at Devil’s Neck is a mystery in more than one sense. It’s about solving impossible murders and catching a Machiavellian criminal. But more broadly speaking it’s also about the bleak inevitability of approaching conflict, while the shadows of a previous conflict still loom large: ghosts, memories, or whatever you want to call them.
By the end of the book, the primary puzzles are solved. The “who” and the “how” have been deciphered, and the supernatural impossibilities unravelled. But the solution to the other, deeper mystery—an endless cycle of conflict, returning again and again like a vengeful spirit—remains elusive. It would take a greater detective than Joseph Spector to explain that.
The House at Devil’s Neck by Tom Mead is published by Head of Zeus on 14th August at £20.
This gripping locked-room mystery sees Joseph Spector investigate his most sinister case yet: murderous machinations at a haunted manor house. A former First World War field hospital, the spooky old mansion at Devil's Neck attracts spirit-seekers from far and wide. Illusionist-turned-sleuth Joseph Spector knows the house of old. With stories spreading of a phantom soldier making mischief, he joins a party of visitors in search of the truth. But the house, located on a lonely causeway, is quickly cut off by floods. The stranded visitors are soon being killed off one by one. With old ally Inspector Flint working on a complex case that has links to Spector's investigation, the two men must connect the dots before Devil's Neck claims Spector himself as its next victim.
More information about Tom Mead can be found on his website. You can also find him on X @TomMeadAuthor and on Instagram @tommeadauthor. You can also find him on Facebook.
Tom will be speaking at Manor Farm Library, Ruislip HA4 7SU with Barbara Nadel on 15th August at 3pm. Tickets £2. For tickets see: https://tinyurl.com/fjf7esed.
He will also be speaking at Death in the Dales Festival with Martin Edwards & Dolores Gordon Smith on Saturday 18th October at 3.15pm. For tickets for the day see: https://www.sedbergh.org.uk/view-event/death-in-the-dales-festival-of-crime-2/
The Australian Crime Writers Association announced its shortlist for the 2025 Ned Kelly Award for Best Debut Crime Fiction:
Down the Rabbit Hole, by Shaeden Berry (Bonnier Echo) A Town Called Treachery, by Mitch Jennings (HarperCollins) The Chilling, by Riley James (Allen & Unwin) All You Took From Me, by Lisa Kenway (Transit Lounge) Everywhere We Look, by Martine Kropkowski (Ultimo Press) Those Opulent Days, by Jacquie Pham (Atlantic Monthly Press)
My first job in television was
making up stories for a soap. I couldn’t believe such a role existed - I had
loved telling stories all my life, and I was going to be paid for something I
had been doing since I was a child. I joined a team of story liners and, over
the course of a year, I wrote numerous stories about characters of all ages and
backgrounds - some of whom had appeared on screen for decades; others whom I
helped create. It was the best training I’ve ever had and, when I sat down to
write my debut crime thriller novel, INNOCENT GUILT, those lessons I had
learned at the start of my TV career proved invaluable.
INNOCENT GUILT began with an image: a woman
covered in blood, carrying a baseball bat walks into a police station. She
doesn’t say a word; she’s not injured, and the blood isn’t hers. Is she the
victim or the perpetrator? Who is she? What has she done? I wasn’t sure at
first, but I wanted to find out.
My lead character, Detective Leah
Hutch, is outside the police station when the mute woman appears, and we mainly
follow the investigation through her eyes. After several years of working in
series television, I have first-hand experience of how attached audiences can
become to characters, developing allegiances that bring them back to a TV show,
season after season. I wanted to create a central character with whom readers
would want to go on a journey across multiple books. I spent a while
pondering who Leah is and how she sees the world, but it wasn’t until I
started to think of the chapters as scenes that she really came to life. As I
wrote, I imagined her in each scene - how would she react to each conflict -
big and small? How did that drive the story forwards? The chapters became
shorter and sharper, and the words started to flow. Sometimes Leah surprised
me, and I had to change course from what I had originally planned. With each
draft, I got to know her better and discovered layers I hadn’t envisaged.
We mainly follow the story
through Leah’s eyes, but hers isn’t the only point of view in the novel: A
journalist called Odie Reid receives a mysterious tip-off about a dead body in
a park. She has history with Leah and tries to link the dead body to the mute
woman, determined to solve the case before Leah does. Thus begins a cat and
mouse game between two women who don’t like each other, as they investigate the
case in parallel.
When it came to structuring the
novel from two different perspectives, I turned to the world of television once
more. Since my days working on a soap, I have primarily worked on returning
drama series. I have spent hours helping screenwriters plot multiple story
strands across several episodes, building to the season climax, and I
approached INNOCENT GUILT in much the same way. The main difference was
that now, as opposed to working in a team, I was on my own. I have a fantastic
agent and editor, but in those early stages, it was just me and the blank page.
I am often asked how working on a
book differs from producing television drama and which I prefer: Writing books
is in many ways solitary, whilst TV is more collaborative, particularly when it
comes to the practicalities of TV production. Having said that, I’ve been
pleasantly surprised by how useful my TV experience has been, and I’m thankful
for those early days spent sitting in a room with my fellow story liners,
creating imaginary characters and talking about their lives as if they were
real.
Innocent Guilt by Remi Kone (Quercus
Publishing) Out Now
Victim or murderer . . . Can she
discover the truth? On a misty autumn afternoon, a woman covered in blood
clutching a baseball bat walks silently into a London police station. The two
officers assigned to her case are DI Leah Hutch and DS Benjamin Randle. But the
woman refuses to speak. She is not injured and the blood on the bat is not
hers. What has she done? Is she the victim or the perpetrator? As Leah and
Randle start their inquiry, a man is found battered to death in a nearby park.
Journalist Odie Reid receives a tip off and is determined to solve the case
first, trying to link this death to the woman held in custody. Leah and Odie
have history and very quickly their cat and mouse game becomes personal,
leading them both to the very darkest corners of their pasts.
A review
of Innocent Guilt can be found here
on the Shots Mag website.
-------------
British
Nigerian Emmy-nominated producer, Remi Kone has worked on a number of
well-known television dramas, such as KILLING EVE, SPOOKS and LEWIS. She lives
in London, and INNOCENT GUILT is her first novel.
One
irretrievably damaged and the other an outcast.
Dóra
struggles to cope with life after taking a bullet to the head. Rado is the
child of refugees, his career shunted off the tracks due to his family
connections to an organised crime gang. But they’re the only ones available
when a troubled teenager vanishes from a school trip, and the trail gets darker
the further they pursue it.
Broken
takes place in a side of Reykjavík no visitor would ever want to see, as the
mismatched pair tread on all the wrong toes in the search for the missing
youngster. This takes place against the backdrop of a vicious vendetta and
price on Dóra’s head. A brutal turf war embroils Rado’s family as he and Dóra
follow the threads of corruption higher and higher, to the top of the exclusive
apartment block on the outskirts of the city.
The
first novel by award-winning screenwriter Jón Atli Jónasson to appear in
English, Broken is the first of a razor-edged crime trilogy shot through with
black humour and characters who leap off the page.
We reviewed Broken on its Hardcover release earlier this
month, writing at the time -
This
extraordinary crime novel debuted 2022 in the authors’ native Iceland, but is
now finally available in an English Language translation.Broken is a deeply thought-provoking
narrative, written in an urgent present-tense style making the reader pause to
collate and evaluate the proceedings as well as to take a breath. Written from
multiple viewpoints, terse dialogue with deftly placed social commentary - its
narrative pace is measured, but zings along with the velocity of the bullet
that impacts Dora’s head in Broken’s opening chapter.
Dora
works for the police in Reykjavík, shielded from ‘real’ police work by her boss
Ellioi, instead she’s left to manage administration / office work, though she
longs to return to working on the street. Ellioi hides his guilt [from the
assignment they shared and which left fragments of a bullet lodged in Dora’s
skull], by keeping her in the office, deskbound on minor cases - and away from
further danger. The cranial injury still causes Dora physical pain, constant
operations, and strict regime of medication - affecting her cognition and
distorting her personality.
So on the eve of Broken’s Paperback release in August, we
decided to have a chat with Quentin for our readers.
A
Karim: Could
you tell us a little about yourself and where the fascination for Iceland and
Icelandic culture / literature stemmed [and stems] from?
Q
Bates: It’s a long story… I had the opportunity for a gap year,
and a friend of my Dad’s said I could come and work in his net loft in Iceland
for a few months. The 17-year-old me couldn’t shake off English suburbia fast
enough. It didn’t quite work out as planned, as my A level results were pretty
poor. So I just stayed in Iceland and the gap year became a gap decade. During
that time I did several different jobs, went to college and started a family,
so some very deep roots were put down there. We relocated to England after a
while, for a variety of reasons. These days my wife and I try to split our time
between the south of England and the north of Iceland, as we have children and
grandchildren on each side of the ocean.
It was while I was at college that I started reading
Icelandic properly, and the book scene was very different back then. There was
practically no crime fiction other than translated mostly from English, and
Icelandic literature was mostly very literary, plus there were loads of worthy
biographies of captains of industry, political figures and whatnot, as well as
nautical stuff – I’ll come back to that further on.
AK: And reading, did you come from a bookish
family or was it your schooling?
QB: There
were always books at home and my parents didn’t push us in particular
directions, at least, we were never discouraged from reading anything. We were
just encouraged to read whatever we wanted. Dad gave me two Asterix books for
my (I think) eighth birthday, and that was probably a pivotal moment. I just
fell in love with the village of Indomitable Gauls. One of those two books was
Asterix in Britain, and I still think it’s the best one, gently and
affectionately skewering the foibles of the Rosbifs across the Channel with
their warm beer and terrible weather. It was much, much later that I figured
out that the translator was the brilliant Anthea Bell.
Of course I pillaged the parental book shelves. Dad liked
weighty 19th century literature (heavy going!) but that left me with an
appreciation of Hardy and others. He also loved Norse mythology, the ancient
sagas and Tolkien, and I inherited that. Although I read the Lord of the Rings
pretty much every year for a long time, it must be 20 years since I last read
it and I’m not sure I dare pick it up now. No, I haven’t seen the movies and
don’t want to… Mum’s tastes were broader, and ranged from Ruth Rendell and Ed
McBain at one end to Trollope and Maugham at the other. My first brush with
Nordic crime fiction was picking Sjöwall & Wahlöö from Mum’s
shelf, intrigued by the weird name, and I must have been 13 or 14 then. But
there was no more! There was no other Nordic crime fiction in English for
another couple of decades! By late teens I was reading George Orwell, Jack
Kerouac, Douglas Adams (loved HHGTTG!), Solzhenitsyn, Anthony Burgess, Evelyn
Waugh, Robert Graves. After S&W came Maigret, and fortunately there was no
shortage of Simenon in English.
I’ve always been the oddball who scours the shelves of a
library or bookshop for odd foreign names. So as a teen I was reading writers
such as Jerome Weidman and Hans Helmut Kirst, who seem to be pretty much
forgotten today. I still have this habit, and given the choice of a safe pair
of familiar hands, or the first in a series featuring a crime-busting retired
Olympic lady hammer-thrower by an unknown Bulgarian author, I know which way
I’ll jump.
AK: And pivotal books that influenced your
desire to write your own work?
QB:
Maybe it’s more about the breadth than any particular author…? But, while I was
living in Iceland, English books weren’t always easy to get hold of. I think I
was at sea one time and had a few books with me, including a major bestseller
by an author whose name I’ll keep to myself. It was terrible, a truly dreadful
book. That brought home to me then than if that’s the kind of stuff that could
get published, then I might be in with a chance after all.
Much later on… it was the books of the brilliant French
author Dominique Manotti that showed me just how sharp, incisive, smart and
politically aware crime fiction can be at its best. I don’t think she’s writing
now, as she must be quite elderly. I got to meet her and shared a panel with
her at a festival, and I was like a star-struck schoolboy.
AK: I read your first published book was a
nonfiction work about fishing in the North Sea?
QB: That
was fun! I was working as a journalist, writing about maritime stuff, and
mainly to do with fishing – as that’s my professional background. I did trips
on five different boats and that book contains those accounts. One was supposed
to be four days on a Scottish mackerel boat that turned into twelve, another
was a four-day trip from Newlyn and the others were easier, just one-day trips
to sea. It was great fun, but the small publisher went out of business about
half an hour after the book appeared. So it was never going to be a bestseller!
I also wrote a book with the skipper of the Gaul – a trawler that disappeared
off the Norwegian coast in 1974. He had been on a trip off when the ship sank –
and I got to know him well. There had been all kinds of rumours of the Gaul
having been a spy ship, none of which held water. That was a labour of love…
The book took ten years, during which the wreck of the Gaul was located,
surveyed and an inquiry was held, so all that had to be built into the
narrative. That was quite an adventure. That book is now virtually impossible
to find and second-hand copies go for 100+ quid!
AK: And what made you write fiction? And why
Crime thrillers?
QB: It had always been at the back of my mind, along with
the thought that fiction was a mug’s game, the chances of being published so
slim that it was hardly worth trying. So I had to give it a go. That first book
came out of a creative writing course I took as a way of getting a weekly
afternoon off work… I later on found out that the deputy editor and the
advertising manager were also working on novels of their own, but that’s
another story. I expected to come out of the course working on non-fiction. But
one of the tutors was a serious Noir aficionado, and so Sam North was very
encouraging, and bears much responsibility for the decision to give crime
fiction a try – and it was obvious that it would be nuts to not make use of all
that knowledge of Iceland. Gunnhildur grew out of that – seven novels and two
novellas.
AK: And how did you start working in
translating Icelandic work into English?
QB: I
had translated a book while I was at college in Iceland – one of the set texts.
That was a seafaring tale, and the author (Guðlaugur Arason) became a very dear
friend. Working on a nautical trade magazine, I worked a lot with material from
other languages in one way or another, so I found myself translating a lot of
technical and news material. It was at one of the first Iceland Noir festivals
that Karen Sullivan of the then-brand-new Orenda Books was considering the
unknown Ragnar Jónasson and asked if I
could translate Snowblind. So I did… And then others came along looking for
translation, so I’ve been pretty busy with that over the last few years.
AK: Please tell us about how you discovered
Jon Atli Jonasson and deciding to not only translate his debut novel BROKEN,
but also to venture into publishing?
QB:
Corylus is me, translator Marina Sofia and Romanian publisher and author Bogdan
Hrib. We wanted to publish some new voices, authors we could see who weren’t
getting translation and publishing deals. It has been quite a learning curve!
Some of our authors – Sólveig Pálsdóttir, Óskar Guðmundsson and Stella
Blómkvist – have done well, while others have unfortunately done less well. We
have published a couple of absolute crackers, fantastic books that have sold
just a few dozen copies… All the same, I’m intensely proud of publishing Jérôme
Leroy and Elsa Drucaroff in English. Their books are amazing, even if we may
have caught a bit of a financial cold there!
I knew about Jón Atli’s book, and had translated an excerpt
for the Icelandic publisher, and I think that was even before it had appeared
in Icelandic. It was a real surprise when Jón Atli’s agent David Headley
offered us the book – as Corylus is a publishing midget. So I got to work. I
have to say, David is very shrewd and his faith in Corylus to do well for his author
feels like a seal of approval that we’re doing the right things.
AK: Did Jon Atli Jonasson’s screenplay for THE
DEEP and
your own background in North Sea fishing resonate?
QB: I haven’t seen The Deep. I was working as a fisherman
in 1984 in Iceland when Hellisey was lost and Guðlaugur Friðthórsson performed
that astonishing feat of endurance to swim to land. When a boat is lost,
especially when there’s a loss of life, the whole fleet (and the whole country)
feels it, takes it personally, as it could have been any one of us in the
water. I think every fisherman has a brown-trouser moment or two – I know I
do…At that time we all hung on the
radio. It was the first question when you came on watch – ‘any news?’ So I’ve
never been able to bring myself to watch it.
I’ll tell you something that does resonate – Among the
books I picked up when I was starting to read Icelandic were seafaring tales by
Ásgeir Jakobsson and by Jónas Guðmundsson. Today Ásgeir Jak’s son Jakob
publishes my books in Icelandic – and Jónas Guðmundsson’s son is Jón Atli. So I
had read practically everything by Jón Atli’s Dad, and didn’t realise the
connection until we first met, by which time I had finished the first draft of
the Broken translation. His father’s books were so pivotal for me 40 or so
years ago that it genuinely made me shiver when I realised who he was.
AK: And what’s next for [a] Quentin Bates and
[b] Jon Atli Jonasson [c] Corylus Books
QB: Well
to answer sequentially -
[a]
Translation has tailed off a bit. There are a few more translators at work now,
and it seems that larger publishers are becoming more reluctant to commission
translations, especially for new authors. Then there’s the whole AI thing, but
let’s not go into that here… The upshot is that I’ve had some much-needed elbow
room to get back to my own stuff, and I have a new lead character and a cast of
supporting characters in something new that’s now coming to completion, plus
draft outlines for what could become a series. I don’t want to jinx it by
saying too much, except that the setting is Nordic and the lead character was
once a cop...
[b]
There’s a sequel to Broken, Venom, which I’m reading at the moment, and it’s
every bit as meaty as Broken. From what Jón Atli has told me, this is a trilogy
and he’s at work on the third novel now – although I’ve a feeling this could
turn into a trilogy in four, five or more parts. This is powerful stuff with
such strong characters, so I hope it does. We have UK & Commonwealth
(excluding Canada) rights to Broken, so it’s sadly not available to readers in
North America. We’ve tried to find a partner publisher on the other side of the
Atlantic, but none of the ones we’ve approached has bitten. So if there’s an
interested publisher in the US or Canada, please step this way…!
[c] We
have a third novel (Murder Tide) by the mysterious Stella Blómkvist coming out
this summer, and the translation of the fourth (title not yet finalised) is
complete, so that’ll be out next year. And we need to have a chat with David
Headley about Venom for next year! Sólveig Pálsdóttir is hard at work, so her
next one could be for next year. We also have a second novel by Catalan author Teresa Solana for next year.
We’re weighing up options for authors from other countries… We see so many
proposals for what look to be fabulous books from around the world and it
genuinely hurts to have to turn them away. But Corylus is a tiny, tiny
publisher and there’s only so much we can do.
BTW, Corylus believes very firmly in artisanal translation
by human translators with passion for language, nuance and idiom. We’ll shut
the shop before we resort to AI translation.
AK Good for you - let’s keep literature
human not AI Technology - and thank you for your time.
More information about Quentin’s publishing venture – Click
HERE and
about his writing Click HERE
Recently we’ve been genuinely disturbed by a remarkable
publication, ostensibly a true crime work, but it’s far more than that. It’s a
literary examination of the environmental impact of industrial pollution (of
the diffusion of toxins) and their possible linkage to the darkest horrors of
human behaviour. It’s also part ‘coming-of-age’
narrative painted against the backdrop of a changing America – during a
time of serial killers.
Written by award-winning
writer Caroline Fraser, ‘Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time
of Serial Killers’ published by FLEET
[an imprint of Little Brown UK / Hachette] is a powerful book, one that disturbs
as it provokes deep, deep thought and reflection.
We wrote at the time of its recent publication -
This
book is most unusual. Ostensibly a true-crime narrative that investigates the
serial killer Ted Bundy and others such as the Green River Killer, the Night
Stalker, the Hillside Strangler, Zodiac, Charles Manson [et. al.] - linked in
terms of their murderous activity to –
[a]
The geography of the Pacific North West of America., both natural as in the
Olympic-Wallowa Lineament [OWL] fault line, as well as man-madestructures like the regional “floating
bridges” with their problematic ‘reversible car lanes’.
[b]
The events and socio-political turmoil of America in the 1970s to the 1980s.
[c]
Heavy industry and the chemical poisoning that resulted from the smelters
[metal extraction and purification from molten ores] before environmental
safeguards came into being with the E.P.A.
And
[d] the authors’ own ‘coming of age’ in that region and age.
The
title has inserted “Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers “as a
suffix of sorts which acts as a warning - because this is a disturbing [and at
times distressing] work, but one that provokes deep-thought amidst the
revelations and the revulsion that the author knits from.
We had a few questions for the author and were delighted
when Caroline Fraser agreed to discuss her book.
Ali: Welcome to Great Britain’s Shots
Magazine.
Caroline:
Thanks so much--I'm glad to join
you.
AK: We’re excited to introduce you and this
extraordinary narrative “Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial
Killers” to our readers, but first the most obvious question, what attracted
you to write Murderland?
CF:I'd been thinking on and off for years about
the question of why there were so many serial killers in the Pacific Northwest
in the 1970s and 1980s.I was thirteen
in 1974, living in a suburb of Seattle, when Ted Bundy began abducting and
killing women there (although his crimes may have begun earlier).So I remember the strange sense that there was
a predator out there, combing the streets and beaches for victims, entering
women's rooms in the middle of the night and taking them.Nobody knew where they were for months.
And
I'd always wondered why there was so many incidents of bizarre and violent
crime during the '70s in particular, even on Mercer Island, the fairly sedate
and wealthy suburb where I lived:arson,
bombings, the guy who lived down the street who blew up his house and killed
himself (nearly taking his family with him).A serial killer who grew up down the street from me.During Covid, all this finally came together
when I had some time to do more research on that era and what might have caused
such mayhem.
AK: “….a
light dusting from the periodic table on top of all that trauma….” Was an interesting line that made me sit up
to attention realising that there could be a credible link between the cruel
violence [particularly of serial killers] and Lead, S02, heavy metals and other
industrial pollutants poisoning the environment, and affecting behaviour – what
led you to see this link?
CF:Oddly, what led me to this link was a real
estate advertisement. About ten years ago, I was looking at ads for undeveloped
property on Vashon Island in Puget Sound.One ad that said something about "Arsenic remediation needed,"
and I had no idea what that could mean.Vashon Island is directly across from the city of Tacoma, and I quickly
discovered that the southern end of the island was heavily polluted with both Lead
and Arsenic by a smelter, the ASARCO Copper smelter that had been operating in
Commencement Bay in Tacoma for about a century, from the 1890s to the
1980s.
The
more I read about Lead exposure and its association with violent crime, the
more intrigued I was. And when I saw on
a map the proximity between Charles Manson, incarcerated on McNeil Island a few
miles off of Tacoma; Ted Bundy, growing up in Tacoma in the worst part of the
smelter plume; and Gary Ridgway, growing up north of Tacoma, with multiple exposures
from the plume, SeaTac airport, and his job painting trucks, I felt there was a
story to tell about these connections and the history of violent crime in
Tacoma. Eventually, I began looking at
other places in the American West that were beset by smelter pollution.
AK:You grew up in the Pacific Northwest, what
made you incorporate your own early life [including some very personal details]
into the narrative?
CF:In terms of pacing and structure, I felt that
the narrative needed some lighter moments to relieve the truly grim recitations
of murder.I came to feel that the
memoir sections served different purposes, including offering examples of the naiveté
of young girls and women at that time, a naiveté that did not serve them
well.Which is not to say that any of
the girls and women involved were responsible for their attacks, not at
all.Instead, I was trying to show how
the culture set up an environment that enabled these assaults.
The
memoir passages also introduced another kind of crime that was far more common
than serial murder (and not unrelated):domestic violence.
AK: Of the many serial killers you detail, why
did you focus on Ted Bundy
the most?
CF:Bundy is in a class by himself in some ways,
both in terms of our extensive knowledge about his movements and activities,
and in terms of what he revealed about himself.Some serial killers have little or nothing to say for themselves (Robert
Lee Yates, Jr. is an example), whereas with others, we have audio and/or video
recordings, such as Ed Kemper, Denis Rader (BTK), and Israel Keyes.Bundy spoke extensively, if hypothetically,
to several interviewers, from both law enforcement and media.And while most serial killers lack insight
and are deceitful in what they say, Bundy did occasionally touch on issues of
motivation and behaviour that I consider extremely revealing.
Also,
since Bundy has been so glamorized in film and TV, I felt it could be corrective
to take a stark, unvarnished look at the grotesque nature of what he did.
Most
importantly, and more than anybody else in Murderland, Bundy provides a
startling example of somebody who was exposed to a significant amount of lead
growing up, first in Philadelphia, then in Tacoma.Thanks to the GIS maps of the Tacoma smelter
plume, we can see exactly how much lead and arsenic were in in his front yard
and his back yard.What you make of that
is up to you, but these are undeniable facts.
AK: I found the linkages to the literary world
fascinating with mentions of Dashiell Hammett, Frank Herbert and even Stephen
King, would you care to comment?
CF: I loved delving into those connections.Hammett's noir depiction of Tacoma and Herbert's
ecological take on the overwhelming despoliation of his hometown provide
real depth to the historical portrait of a place that had been suffering
intensive ruination for decades.
As for
Stephen King, the fact that he began his career by publishing Carrie, a
classic masterpiece of horror based on a young woman's systematic degradation,
in 1974, the year of the rise of serial killers, was too good to pass up.
AK:The book has a vast appendix which
illustrates the incredible research behind “Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust
in the Time of Serial Killers” so can you
let us know a little about the process in writing this book.
CF: I knew that the research would be intensive, so
I began keeping detailed timelines of the narrative of the book.The timelines were tied to notes confirming
where I'd found certain details.Ancestry.com and newspapers.com were resources that I used heavily, and
I archived many of these sources to keep track of them.
AK: The book is a very dark and terrifying
narrative so what were you [as a person] like during the writing?
CF:Everybody asks me some version of this
question.I wonder if it has something
to do with the fact that Michelle
McNamara, the author of I'll Be Gone in the Dark, her book about the
search for the Golden State Killer, died,
sadly, of a drug overdose, while she was reporting it.
I
don't think working on this made me any more gloomy or pessimistic than I
already am!To be sure, parts of this
book were difficult to write, but not more difficult, probably, than any of the
books that Ann Rule wrote over her long career as a crime writer.Because so much of the material was
historical, it was removed in time, and I think that may make a difference as
well.Not that it wasn't
horrifying.It was.
AK: So what’s next up for Caroline Fraser,
more journalism or more non-fiction or even fiction [as Murderland: Crime and
Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers reads almost like a SF-thriller novel
in places…]?
CF:Ha!That's lovely to hear, but I'm not really contemplating fiction.There are a couple of biographies I'm
thinking about, but I haven't made my mind up yet.I think I'll be taking a little time off and
trying to decide.
AK: And finally, are you a true-crime reader –
and what books have you read both fiction and non-fiction?
CF:I re-read some classics while working on this
book, including Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, Robert Graysmith's Zodiac,
and Curt
Gentry & Vincent Bugliosi's Helter Skelter. I re-read a lot of gothic horror, including
Bram Stoker's Dracula (which I love) and Robert Louis Stevenson's The
Strange Tale of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which turns up in my book.
Over
the years, I've read a lot of true-crime, beginning with Ann Rule's famous The
Stranger Beside Me and many of her others.While writing Murderland, I acquired a stack of old True
Detective magazines that she'd written for in the 1970s under a pseudonym. I'll Be Gone in
the Dark, mentioned above, was inspirational,and Maureen
Callahan's American Predator offered valuable reporting on Israel Keyes.
AK: Thank you for your time and insight, very
much appreciated.
CF: Thank
you!
About Caroline
Fraser
Caroline Fraser was born in Seattle and holds a Ph.D. from
Harvard University in English and American literature. Formerly on the editorial
staff of The New Yorker, she is the author of three nonfiction books, the
Pulitzer Prize-winning Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls
Wilder, God's Perfect Child: Living and Dying in the Christian Science Church,
and Rewilding the World: Dispatches from the Conservation Revolution, all
published by Metropolitan Books. She served as editor of the Library of America
edition of Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books and has written for The
New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic Monthly, Outside
Magazine, and The London Review of Books, among other publications.
She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with her husband, Hal
Espen.
Shots
Magazine would like to thank Caroline Fraser for her time and to Zoe Hood of Fleet
/ Little Brown UK / Hachette publishing for helping to organise this
interview.
