It was only meant to be a small, private joke – a bit of fun – because there's precious little of that in most crime fiction pages.
I'd just spent four years on the Faroes trilogy, writing a story which didn't shy away from the bleaker side of multiple murders. So, having brought The Fire Pit to a rather graphic and dark conclusion, I was ready for a change of mood.
The trouble is, I've always been rather pedantic about accuracy in police procedure. My personal (and slightly neurotic) worry is that someone will read one of my books and then point out that I've made a basic technical mistake. As a result, I tend to be rather obsessive about research and getting things right. If a plot calls for someone to discover a corpse, then – for reality's sake – I usually feel obliged not to shy away from the unavoidable consequences of that situation, whether I like it or not.
But after the Faroes books I was disinclined to leap straight back into writing more grim reality, so I started to wonder whether I could dispense with that for a while. In fact, what if there was a way to write a crime novel where I didn't feel constrained by accurate procedure and realism? What if, instead, I made the rules and perhaps set the story in a fictional time and location, so no one could tell me I'd got it wrong?
I may have had a touch of cabin-fever at the time, I suppose, but it seemed like the perfect solution to lighten the mood.
I'd like to say "and so, before long, Citizen Detective was born", but that wouldn't be true.
I could have guessed that creating an entire society from scratch – as well as the plot of a decent murder mystery – can't be done quickly. However, I also discovered that it's really quite liberating to dispense with gritty realism and simply let your imagination off the lead for a run.
So, the world I eventually came up with was that of Citizen Detective (Grade III) Arne Blöm. He is a very small cog in the machinery which regulates an oppressive authoritarian society, perhaps not dissimilar to East Germany in the fifties or Sweden under the Communists.
Most of Blöm's working day consists of filling out forms (some realism there), padding his timesheet, and trying to avoid saying anything contentious or unpatriotic which might be overheard by the State bugs in the light fitting. But then, of course, there are deaths, which seem unrelated until Blöm is summoned to the sinister Ministry of Governance and Homeland and discovers that things are not as they seem with the State apparatus.
Generally speaking, I was quietly pleased with the book and the small alternative world I'd created. It had been fun to write, which was all I intended, but when I showed it to "a friend in the industry" they were a little sceptical.
Yes, they agreed, it was a sort of crime novel, but was it hard-boiled or comfy crime; a mystery, a police procedural and/or Scandi-noir? How would I categorise it?
Well, I supposed it was a bit of all those, I said, but that didn't help. It turns out publishers don't have a category for something which is a "bit of all of those" (with a little sardonic humour thrown in), and if it can't be categorised it's a no-go. Apparently the marketing algorithms would have a melt-down.
So.
If you're a professional writer you have to accept that the requirements of publishers and TV companies are usually pretty inflexible. If they expected you to produce a gritty noir thriller and you give them something set in a country which doesn't exist and featuring a middle-aged detective who spends much of his time worrying about the repair of his brogues, well, they're not going to be terribly enthusiastic.
All of which I knew, so I wasn't particularly surprised or disappointed. Citizen Detective was never supposed to be more than a break from realism for my own entertainment and it had served that purpose.
Of course, being a writer it's always nice to be read, so I told my "friend in the industry" that I'd simply set the book free on Kindle. In these wonderful egalitarian times of independent publishing that's not hard to do, so why not?
"Bad idea," says my friend. "People will think it's one of your proper crime novels and then find out it isn't. They won't be happy."
Because my friend is a wise and serious person I thought about this. But I liked Blöm; I liked the story, even if it wasn't a "proper crime novel", and it seemed a shame just to put it away in a drawer. But then it occurred to me that this might actually be an opportunity to add another layer of intrigue and misdirection to the whole world of Blöm.
What if I never claimed to have actually written the book? Then no one would expect my usual, realistic style. Instead I could say I'd simply "translated" it from a work by a dissident, underground author named O. Huldumann, writing at the time of the events he describes. I could even add a short afterword, describing how I first "discovered" a copy of the original book (a cult classic, of course) and how little is known about who Huldumann was.
And so that's what I did. I thought it was fun to pile construct on construct, and so did some other people who not only figured out what had gone on, but actively joined in with the Great Huldumann Mystery. They know who they are.
Trouble is, I might have been a little more convincing than I really intended to be, because I now discover there are some people who don't realise it was all make-believe.
So, I'm coming clean here. I'd like to apologise if anyone misunderstood, and I now wish to categorically state that Citizen Detective and The Island Of Lies are not proper crime novels (even if there's a detective and multiple deaths to be solved). And, yes, O. Huldumann is as fictional as Arne Blöm and the world he inhabits.
Sorry.
But I still had fun and I'm not sorry for that.
The Islands of Lies by O Huldumann (Translated by Chris Ould) Corylus Books
In the midst of Capital City's November crime wave Citizen Detective (Grade III) Arne Blöm finds himself appointed as a Konstable of the State Court and tasked with the arrest and detention of a man he's pretty sure is actually dead. However, being the Detective he is, Blöm quickly discovers that his assignment to the island of Huish has more sinister undertones. Faced with a series of strange and similar deaths, Blöm dispenses with traditional methods for solving the crimes and begins to suspect that certain sections of the island's population are not what they seem, nor as harmless as they might appear…
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