Quentin Bates talks to Shots Magazine

 

We were delighted to recently bump into the Renaissance Man of Mystery Quentin Bates at both Crimefest Bristol as well as Capital Crime.

Quentin is a prolific author, a Publisher, Translator, Fisherman, and generally an all-round interesting bloke, with an interesting life. He recently founded a publishing company called Corylus Books.

Their first acquisition ‘Broken’ by Jón Atli Jónasson caught our eye.

From the publisher -

Two broken cops.

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.

Read the Full Review HERE

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

Crimes of the System by Jon Atli Jonasson

 

Above: Jon Atli Jonasson at Capital Crime London, 2025

We’ve been energised by the recent debut in English of the work of Icelandic writer, screenwriter, playwright and poet Jon Atli Jonasson; reviewing BROKEN last month when it was released in Hardcover by Corylus Books and now on the eve of its debut in Paperback on August 1^st 2025 – the author agreed to give Shots Magazine’s readers a little insight -

My first foray into crime writing came in the form of a serialized radio drama centered on Iceland’s most notorious criminal case: the Guðmundur and Geirfinnur case. The case involves the disappearance of Guðmundur Einarsson and Geirfinnur Einarsson in 1974. Although they had the same last name, they were not related. Six individuals were convicted of their suspected murders, based primarily on confessions — often referred to as the Reykjavik confessions—obtained by police during prolonged and intense interrogations. Notably, the convictions were secured without the discovery of the victims’ bodies, eyewitnesses, or any forensic evidence.

In the years that followed, public opinion in Iceland shifted, with many believing the six were wrongfully convicted. On 27 September 2018, 44 years after the disappearances, the Supreme Court of Iceland acquitted five of the original six suspects. In 2013, an official police investigation report was submitted to the Office of the State Prosecutor. On 24 February 2017, the Interior Ministry's Rehearing Committee recommended that the case be reheard by the Supreme Court of Iceland. As part of its evaluation, the commission's review of the 1974 Geirfinnur case incorporated the work of Gísli Guðjónsson, a former Icelandic detective and internationally renowned expert on suggestibility and false confession, whose research introduced the concept of "Memory Distrust Syndrome.” This theory suggests that under severe psychological stress — including conditions like solitary confinement and sleep deprivation — a person may lose confidence in their own memory and instead place undue trust in external sources, such as interrogators. This can ultimately result in false confessions made in an effort to end the psychological pressure.

My serialized radio play uses the premise of the hardships the defendants were subjected to under the solitary confinement. This case didn’t just devastate the lives of the accused — it cast a long shadow over many others as well. For decades, it stood as one of the most profound and lasting scars on Icelandic society. In March 2013, following an 18-month investigation, the Icelandic government released a report exposing serious flaws in the original police inquiry. It highlighted systemic incompetence and instances of abuse, including the use of solitary confinement, improper administration of medication, inhumane treatment such as water torture and sleep deprivation, denial of legal representation, and a presumption of guilt. The report also noted the absence of key elements typically required for a credible case: forensic evidence, the victims' bodies, and any clear motive. The case contains too many complexities to be adequately addressed in a single blog post. However, it is evident that the accused were perceived not merely as criminals but as a significant challenge to the established order. They were young individuals introducing new ideas. This was fundamentally a generational conflict, in which the older generation employed the full force of the legal system and the media to suppress societal change.

The government’s report on the case reveals only a small part of the full story. My main concern with the report is that it was authored by representatives of the very system responsible for this miscarriage of justice. It managed to erase the human experience behind the text in the way bureaucracy does so efficiently. When I wrote my version of events as a serialized radio play, I went directly to the source. I spoke with the accused who were still alive, retired police officers, and others connected to the case. I had access to their secret prison diaries and personal letters. I also talked with their children — many of whom grew up largely without them—as well as other family members, retired journalists, and prison guards.

The purpose of this blog post isn’t to portray myself as a hero. I was simply searching for compelling drama. However, during the research and scriptwriting process, I began to recognize the deeper potential of the crime genre. How it can tell big stories. I’m a big fan of Richard Price and his masterpiece novel Clockers which is set in a fictional New Jersey city called Dempsy. His brilliant depiction of everyone involved in the drug trade — criminals and law enforcement alike—stands as a great example of how crime fiction can vividly explore systemic urban decay and the social forces that trap individuals within it. Richard Price continues the tradition established by Swedish authors Sjöwall and Wahlöö, who pioneered crime fiction as a sharp critique of social and political institutions. Like them, Price uses the genre not just to tell a story, but to expose deeper societal issues.

This approach strongly influenced the framing of my first crime novel, Broken, set in contemporary Iceland. I also felt it had been a while since anyone in Iceland had written a crime thriller that explores the state of the nation from both the perspectives of law enforcement and the criminal world. Crime is constantly changing and evolving. During my research I came across a new type of criminal with a mind-set that contrasts sharply with the traditional gangster. They don’t get their hands dirty in the same way; instead, they follow a morning routine, read biographies of Elon Musk and Steve Jobs, and view themselves more as entrepreneurs than drug dealers; violence is delegated to experts: The Icelandic underworld has also grown more intricate because of the arrival of foreign gangs in Iceland and the type of crimes being committed. As the divide between the wealthy and the impoverished grows wider, social tensions escalate, leading to increased desperation among those left behind. This fuels a rise in violent crime, including more frequent murders. Xenophobia also plays a significant role, further destabilizing already fragile social structures.

But at the core of my novel, I still hope you find a story of two flawed but compassionate cops determined to make a difference.

(c) 2025 Jon Atli Jonasson

Shots Magazine would like to thank Quentin Bates of Corylus Books for his help in getting this article from the author of Broken.

Read the Shots Review HERE

All photos © 2025 Quentin Bates, Marina Sofia and Michael Stotter