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

https://corylusbooks.com/

Twitter: @CorylusB @oskargudmunds @graskeggur

https://www.facebook.com/CorylusBooks

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.

Petrona Award Longlist announced

 

OUTSTANDING CRIME FICTION FROM DENMARK, FINLAND, ICELAND, NORWAY AND SWEDEN LONGLISTED FOR THE 2022 PETRONA AWARD

Twelve outstanding crime novels from Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden have made the longlist for the 2022 Petrona Award for the Best Scandinavian Crime Novel of the Year.

They are:

Fatal Isles by Maria Adolfsson tr. Agnes Broomé (Sweden, Zaffre)

The Assistant by Kjell Ola Dahl tr. Don Bartlett (Norway, Orenda Books)

The Butterfly House by Katrine Engberg tr. Tara Chace (Denmark, Hodder & Stoughton)

The Therapist by Helene Flood tr. Alison McCullough (Norway, MacLehose Press)

The Commandments by Óskar Guðmundsson tr. Quentin Bates (Iceland, Corylus Books Ltd)

Smoke Screen by Jørn Lier Horst & Thomas Enger tr. Megan Turney (Norway, Orenda Books)

Everything Is Mine by Ruth Lillegraven tr. Diane Oatley (Norway, AmazonCrossing)

Silenced by Sólveig Pálsdóttir tr. Quentin Bates (Iceland, Corylus Books Ltd)

Knock Knock by Anders Roslund tr. Elizabeth Clark Wessel (Sweden, Harvill Secker)

Cold as Hell by Lilja Sigurðardóttir tr. Quentin Bates (Iceland, Orenda Books)

Geiger by Gustaf Skördeman tr. Ian Giles (Sweden, Zaffre)

The Rabbit Factor by Antti Tuomainen tr. David Hackston (Finland, Orenda Books)

The quality of the entries for the Petrona Award, now in its tenth year, remains consistently high, so much so that for the first time, the judges have decided to release a longlist. These twelve titles will be whittled down to a shortlist, to be announced on 16 November 2022.

The longlist contains a number of new faces as well as Petrona Award-winning authors, Jørn Lier Horst and Antti Tuomanen and the previously shortlisted Kjell Ola Dahl and Thomas Enger. 

Both large and small publishers are represented on the longlist, with Orenda Books leading with four entries, and the breakdown by country is Norway (4), Iceland (3), Sweden (3), Denmark (1) and Finland (1) with translator Quentin Bates being longlisted for all three Icelandic titles.

The Petrona Award 2022 judging panel comprises Jackie Farrant, the creator of RAVEN CRIME READS and a bookseller/Area Commercial Support for a major book chain in the UK; Miriam Owen, founder of the NORDIC NOIR blog and creator of content for communities, and Ewa Sherman, translator and writer, and blogger at NORDIC LIGHTHOUSE. The Award administrator is Karen Meek, owner of the EURO CRIME blog and website.

Óskar Guðmundsson on A Story That Needed to Be Told

 

An encounter with a childhood friend after a gap of many years was the spark that behind Óskar Guðmundsson’s The Commandments, his first novel to appear in English, published by niche translated fiction outfit Corylus Books.

Powerful themes run through the book, which addresses the highly sensitive issue of the abuse of boys by a number of clergymen over many years.

“In Iceland this debate about abuse within the Church has always been a painful one, and it has been carefully largely kept out of sight,” Óskar said.

“This is the most challenging subject I have taken on so far and it didn’t take me long to realise how tough this was going to be.”

Meeting up with someone who had been part of the same youth group in their early teens was a shock, as this man had led a deeply troubled life, due in large part to having been abused by a priest who arranged and accompanied groups of young people on trips out of Reykjavík.

“I was fortunate to escape one of the bad apples of the Church. I must have sensed that something wasn’t right, and the priest’s approaches rang alarm bells in my head. I stopped taking part, but in spite of my warnings, my friend stayed. We lost touch and it was many years later that I met him again. By then he was a terribly damaged individual, and told me the whole story.”

That story formed the basis of The Commandments, and although the characters and events are from my imagination and the setting has been moved to the north of Iceland, his account of what happened to him is at the centre of the story.

“I’ve asked myself again and again if I could have done more back then to protest him from all this. I felt this was a story that needed to be told, with its themes of broken trust, forgiveness and hatred, and to describe how this abuse starts from small beginnings and grows to wreck lives.”

Early in the writing of the book, Óskar took the decision to locate the events in and around the town of Akureyri in northern Iceland, a place for which he has a great fondness. It’s not a big place by European or US standards, a community of just under 20,000 people, but it forms the largest settlement in the country outside the capital region of Reykjavík. Akureyri is also surrounded by smaller communities, such as the coastal village of Grenivík where the first brutal murder in the story comes to light.

When The Commandments was published in Iceland, it didn’t escape notice, not least because the Glerá Church at the centre of Akureyri is one of the key locations in the story.

“This is very sensitive subject matter in Iceland, and I had a request from the priest at the Glerá Church to pay him a visit, and it was very obvious that he and his colleague were extremely disturbed by the book and its themes. In particular they were concerned in case I had some particular person in mind connected to the church. We had a very long conversation and I was able to assure them that while the underlying themes are very real, the events and the persons portrayed in the book are drawn purely from my imagination,” he said.

“It has been a challenge to write this story, but this is a story I felt needed to be told.”

The Commandments by Óskar Guðmundsson Published by Corylus Books

On a Sunday morning in 1995, Anton, a nineteen year old boy, meets a priest in front of a church. The young man was never seen again. Twenty years later, under the midnight sun, a pastor is found brutally murdered in his church in a small fishing village north of the city of Akureyri, close to the Arctic Circle. When detective inspector Salka starts working on the case a deacon is found crucified in his home in Akureyri. The murderer leaves a message on both crime scenes and Salka realises that the killer is seeking revenge but she also fears that the lives of some other people in the church society are in danger. The two cases take an unexpected turn when Salka discovers a connection between the killings and events that took place two decades earlier.  Former police officer Salka Steinsdóttir finds herself pitched into the toughest investigation of her life, just as she is back in the tranquil north of Iceland to recover from a personal trauma. The victim is someone she had pursued earlier in her career – and had never been able to pin down. Now a killer has taken the law into their own hands and meted out brutal retribution for ancient crimes. Salka is faced with tracking down the murderer of a stalwart of the church and the community, a man whose dark reputation stretches deep into the past, and even into the police team tasked with solving the case. As the killer prepares to strike again, Salka and her team search for the band of old friends who could be either killers or victims – or both.

More information about the author can be found on his website. You can also follow him on Twitter @oskargudmunds.