Kjell Ola Dahl on writing

I write across many genres: fiction, non-fiction, scripts and crime fiction. But always, when I board the Oslo Detectives Series rollercoaster, together with Gunnarstranda and my other police characters, I know I am going to have fun exploring Norway’s capital – researching its various neighbourhoods and discovering aspects of the city that have previously been more or less unknown to me.

Another thing I find interesting in these books is exploring the many sides of of my characters’ personalities. Faithless is part of this series; and while the story is still essentially a police procedural, in this particular book I wanted to put some pressure on my characters. In this novel my detective, Frank Frolich, learns how small the world is, and how this fact affects both his work and his private life. Overall, I wanted the story to demonstrate how people's actions always depend to some extent both on their personal history and on circumstances they cannot fully control.

As a police officer Frolich is a man with power and position. He meets a woman as part of a routine task, and suddenly realises that she is connected to him through other people, through his own history, and soon also his work. When she is killed, he is therefore involved, whether he wants to be or not. And he is forced to make some choices, some of which, inevitably, are wrong. Like everyone, he carries his personal history with him, but this situation makes him face it in an uncomfortable way.

I have to confess I wanted Frolich to sink. And I wanted this psychological sinking process to be reflected in the plot in a physical way: so, to solve the mystery he has to go underground. One important character in the story works as a municipal engineer, looking after Oslo’s sewage system. Researching this aspect of the book was fascinating: I spent days with engineers and workmen – walking down tunnels, wading through shit (literally) and driving through the city’s subsurface maze. I collected a huge amount of facts about what really goes on down there, under the city. But in the end, I was writing a book, so everything had to come down to the story. The usual ‘killing of darlings’ therefore meant that I used only small parts of this research in the novel.

Another thing I wanted to do in this novel was explore the personality of the female police character, Lena Stigersand. She plays only a minor role in earlier books in the series, but this time I wanted to get to know her better. I am afraid I am rather hard on her in Faithless (don’t worry – she gets her revenge on me in the next novel): she wants to be out in front, to make choices, and she has to face the consequences of this. Ultimately, she is forced to realise she is not able to fully control her own life. She learns that all it takes is to forget some small detail, or for things to change slightly, and sooner or later her plan fails.

The last one to learn new things in this novel is Gunnarstranda himself. He is in fact the most stubborn character in this universe. But, at the same time he is as solid as a rock – the centre around which all these stories circle. He has changed in some minor ways over the years, but his wit and intelligence make it very difficult for me to provoke him into any surprise moves. Neverthelss, this time I did manage to force him to reflect on the phenomenon of what you might call ‘unknown energies’. And in that, he surprised even me.

Faithless by Kjell Ola Dahl (published by Orenda Books)

Oslo detectives Gunnarstranda and Frølich are back … and this time, it’s personal… When the body of a woman turns up in a dumpster, scalded and wrapped in plastic, Inspector Frank Frølich is shocked to discover that he knows her … and their recent meetings may hold the clue to her murder. As he ponders the tragic events surrounding her death, Frølich’s colleague Gunnarstranda investigates a disturbingly similar cold case involving the murder of a young girl in northern Norway and Frølich is forced to look into his own past to find the answers – and the killer – before he strikes again.

Thomas Enger on The Henning Juul series - my inspiration

A lot of people have asked me: "How did you go about creating Henning Juul as a

character?" "And how is it even possible to know that you are going to write five novels?"

Let me tell you how it all began. In the space of almost 15 years I made four attempts at writing a novel. None of them were published. Number three and four came quite close to making it, but it wasn't to be. So when the idea for this new character (Henning Juul) came to me, I sat down and asked myself: are you good enough to pursue a career as an author? Maybe you should try something different?

So I started thinking about TV. Maybe that format would suit me better. And I wanted to do something that hadn't been done before on television. I wanted the series to say something about our society in a satirical kind of way, and at the same time be as suspenseful as it could possibly be.

So I thought of Henning Juul as the journalistic equivalent to Dexter, you know the one? The crime scene investigator who runs around killing people who he deems unworthy to live? I thought of Henning as a man running around killing people that somehow deserved it, but he needed a motivation. This is where Henning's son comes into play. What if Henning was trying to find his son's killer? What if he justified his actions that way?

I remember writing scenes like Henning walking down the streets of Oslo, and then there would be this guy in the background painting a picture with his penis and people standing by applauding while drinking huge amounts of red wine (yeah, VERY satirical). I wrote a scene where a man was talking to someone on the banks of Akerselva, the river that runs through parts of Oslo, with a lot of dead sea gulls floating by at the same time with no one seeming to care. Old people trying to sell drugs to the police in the open. Taxi drivers offloading their cars after they had only gone about 2000 miles. Things like that.

And I sat down and wrote all these different stories, what kind of people Henning should kill in each episode, and why. And of course, how that all should lead to Henning finding his son's killer. At one point I thought it was going to be 12 episodes. Then I got it down to eight. It even went as far as me meeting with the head of development at NRK - Norway's biggest producer of TV series. The guy told me he loved the idea, and he wanted me to write a pitch that - if it was good enough - could result in me getting some working money.

At that point I was unemployed, and I needed an income quite quickly. And then, all of a sudden, the man I had met in with in NRK decided to quit, and he handed me over to this other guy who was involved in a production somewhere up north in Norway. And he was just impossible to get in touch with.

So there I was, with an idea for a TV series but with no real prospects of getting anywhere with it. So I said to myself: hey, you're really on to something here. This is a good idea. Why don't you go back to your original goal when you started writing? Why don't you see if you can write this universe as a novel series instead?

But because I had made four unsuccessful attempts, I decided to try to figure out what I previously had done wrong. I quickly realised that I had written stories set in cities I had never been to. I had written about people and environments I knew nothing or very little about. And I hadn't mapped anything out before I started writing.

But I had a great plan for Henning Juul. And I had made him a journalist, like I once had been myself. He lived in Oslo, like I did. And because the novel format is largely different from a TV series, I decided to get rid of all the satire and concentrate on the main issue at hand: Henning Juul finding his son's killer. And once that was in place, it was just a matter of mapping out the stories in a slightly different manner. When I was finished with that I realised I had material for six novels (it turned out to be five, but I'll tell you more about that in a later).

I still hadn't found any work, so I decided to make contact with two publishers in Oslo, and the very next day I was invited to a meeting with Gyldendal - one of the biggest publishers in Norway. They loved the idea, and they wanted me to start writing right away.

So that's what I did.

Six weeks later I presented them with the first 120 pages of what was later to become Burned, volume one in the Henning Juul series, and based on those 120 pages Gyldendal told me they wanted to publish the whole series.

I guess you can imagine what that felt like, having tried to become an author for 15 years. I was unemployed, I had no income. Now all of a sudden I was about to get published for the first time.

What's really amazing is that seven years later the Henning Juul series is just one step away from actually becoming a TV series. Funny how life works out sometimes, right?

Cursed by Thomas Enger is published by Orenda Books

When Hedda Hellberg fails to return from a retreat in Italy, her husband discovers that his wife’s life is tangled in mystery. Hedda never left Oslo, the retreat has no record of her and, what’s more, she appears to be connected to the death of an old man, gunned down on the first day of the hunting season in the depths of the Swedish forests. Henning Juul becomes involved in the case when his ex-wife joins in the search for the missing woman, and the estranged pair find themselves enmeshed both in the murky secrets of one of Norway’s wealthiest families, and in the painful truths surrounding the death of their own son. When their lives are threatened, Juul is prepared to risk everything to uncover a sinister maze of secrets that ultimately leads to the dark heart of European history.

You can find out more information about Thomas Enger and his books on his website.  You can also follow him on Twitter @EngerThomas and find him on Facebook.

Ben McPherson on What I don’t know about criminal psychology

I was in Oslo on 22nd July 2011; the day Anders Behring Breivik committed the worst peacetime atrocity by a single gunman, ever. We heard the bomb go off. The glass in the windows shook. We thought it was thunder.

Breivik murdered seventy-seven people. His bomb destroyed a government building in the heart of Oslo, killing eight. After that he calmly drove to the Island of Utøya and murdered a further sixty-nine, mainly teenagers, at a summer youth camp. This remains the worst peacetime killing committed by a single gunman, ever.

As a fiction writer you have a responsibility not to turn the suffering of others into entertainment. Breivik ruined the lives of countless people, and the bravery of those who testified against him, while he stared at them unblinkingly across the courtroom, was unforgettable. Yet the problem of Breivik continues to gnaw at me.

My first novel is called A Line of Blood. It has nothing to do with Breivik, and yet Breivik’s influence seeped into it, almost without my knowing it. The book is about a marriage, and a family, placed under intolerable pressure by the death of the man in the house next door. It’s also about a crime committed “in good conscience”, as Breivik’s was.

I covered the trial for a small Internet newspaper. I sat for six weeks in an Oslo courtroom watching Breivik, and listening to expert testimony about him, and his crime, and his state of mind. I did not then — and do not now — understand what would push a man to plan and commit an act of such barbarity. And yet Breivik told us, repeatedly.

Breivik claimed he was firing the first shots in a great European war against Islamisation. He was, he said, a military commander and a Knight Templar. The children he killed were “enemy combatants”.

I already had a very clear rule when writing: no psychopaths. Psychopaths change the rules of the game; they act outside the rules of our day-to-day interactions with the world, from a set of rules that most of us don’t understand.

Of 34 mental health experts who examined or observed Breivik in the months between the murders and the trial, only two concluded that he was insane. Breivik, in other words, is not a psychopath. He is more complex, and more worrying, because of this.

I have never sat across a table from people who will not repent and cannot be reformed, so I have to make things up. I base what I write on my own experience, on observing other people’s behaviour, and on talking to experts who are cleverer than me. My writing brings me into contact with criminal psychologists. These people work with some very dangerous men and women; they are highly trained and ferociously intelligent. I do not have their training, nor their professional insight.

I make things up, and then ask experts to tell me where I am wrong. And I have the luxury of not having to be right about criminal behaviour. When I get things wrong, no one dies.

None of the characters in my book is evil or psychopathic, but all of them have done bad things. One has done a very bad thing indeed. It’s domestic, it’s at the other end of the scale from what Breivik did and again — and this is worth repeating — I made it up. But I learned two very important lessons from the Breivik trial and those lessons made their way into the book.

Breivik was convinced, and is to this day, that he acted in good conscience. “It was horrible,” he said, “but necessary.” That belief — that fantasy, perhaps — seems to be necessary if a murderer is to live with what he or she has done. It’s there in my novel; it was the psychological key I needed to make the act believable.

The second lesson is this: listen to what the killer is telling you. During the trial a professional witness told me that he couldn’t understand why the court was wasting time discussing Breivik’s sanity; he felt he was clearly sane. “Why can’t they see what he’s trying to tell them? That he’s a modern European fascist… that this is a political act.” Sometimes you miss the obvious truth, because it’s too hard to bear.

I plan one day to base a book on Breivik. I am not yet ready. The man who ruined so many lives did not ruin mine, but he left a tiny marker on it that I cannot be free of. I think his may be a crime that cannot be forgiven. The attack was an attack on the values of a modern and enlightened country; those values were heroically defended by Norway in the aftermath. And on a personal level, 22nd July was our wedding anniversary, and now that day forever carries Breivik’s taint, and I can’t forgive him for that.

You can follow Ben McPherson on Twitter - @TheBenMcPherson.  You can also find him on Facebook.

A Line of Blood

A chilling psychological thriller about family – the ties that bind us, and the lies that destroy us. You find your neighbour dead in his bath.  Your son is with you. He sees everything.  You discover your wife has been in the man’s house. It seems she knew him.  Now the police need to speak to you.  One night turns Alex Mercer’s life upside down. He loves his family and he wants to protect them, but there is too much he doesn’t know.  He doesn’t know how the cracks in his and Millicent’s marriage have affected their son, Max. Or how Millicent’s bracelet came to be under the neighbour’s bed. He doesn’t know how to be a father to Max when his own world is shattering into pieces.  Then the murder investigation begins.

A Line of Blood by Ben McPherson is out on 26 March £12.99 (Harper Fiction)