SARAH ARMSTRONG on The Language of Spies

 

Sarah Armstrong is the author of four novels, most recently The Wolves of Leninsky Prospekt and The Starlings of Bucharest. She is also the author of A Summer of Spying, a short non fiction work about her experience of jury service during the Covid-19 pandemic, authority, truth, and the surveillance we are all exposed to.

 

There are some jobs which just seem to suggest spying. Among the most obvious is any position in a foreign embassy, and this is the association I drew on in my first Moscow Wolves novel, The Wolves of Leninsky Prospekt. My protagonist, Martha, has entered into a marriage of convenience with a diplomat working at the British Embassy in Moscow. Martha doesn’t work both because she doesn’t need to and because wives were not encouraged to. From a writing perspective, this freed her up to explore Moscow at her leisure, and allowed me to explore it too. Martha is never quite sure whether her husband, or any of his colleagues, are more than diplomats. What Martha never doubts is that at least one of them must be a spy.

 

This is an assumption which, like most speculation about spies, has been fed by novels and films. Autobiographies published by agents who have defected confirm that it isn’t a lazy stereotype, it is indeed based on fact. And yet, when it comes to the world of spies, as Mick Herron has exploited in his Slough House series, no one can disprove the facts you make up about spies. The world of spying is a closed one, and that allows writers all kinds of latitude.

 

For the sequel to The Wolves of Leninsky Prospekt, I wanted to explore different types of work that might fit into the world of espionage. One of the first things I do when starting a new novel is to look up what happened in the year and place I’ve chosen. In 1975 Moscow was host to the Soviet International Film Festival. In The Starlings of Bucharest, I decided that my protagonist, Ted, would be an accidental film critic with aspirations to become a news reporter. A job as a reporter would be a useful cover for a spy but it felt a little too obvious, so I resisted giving Ted this job. Instead, the idea of Ted making a temporary visit to Moscow was a better solution as it provided a way to experience the city which contrasted directly with the months that Martha lived in her flat in the first novel. While researching the range of film festivals across Eastern Europe, it also struck me that being a film critic had huge potential for covert meetings and socialising with people from suspect places in a way which would often be difficult to observe. 

 

The film festivals of the 1970s were highly organised international affairs showing films from dozens of countries in dozens of languages. This meant that translators became a crucial part of the festivals too, and I found some fascinating pieces written by Elena Razlogova which discuss the simultaneous translations which enabled the Moscow International Film Festival, and other international festivals and film tours, to take place. Four of the translators that Razlogova discusses are her relatives, and this gives her discussion of live film translation some fabulous and telling details - often the film had not been seen before, let alone a script provided. The skills of great film translators were widely celebrated, but I was most interested in the power they held. Any translator sitting between two people who don’t share a language has the power to bend the conversation in any direction they like. And if one of the people does, in fact, understand what is being said by the other, the transfer of power becomes even more interesting.

 

In The Wolves of Leninsky Prospekt, I introduced the idea of layers of communication, of someone secretly trying to communicate messages through the medium of fairy tales. The idea of hidden meanings within words is something which fascinates me. In The Starlings of Bucharest, the same power and influence comes from the ability to speak more than one language. In spy novels there are many ways to listen into conversations, with tapped phones and bugs in lampshades, but no one can spot and remove language skills. As superpowers go, it’s a pretty easy one to access, but one which many of use never bother to acquire. At least, that’s what we tell people. 

The Starlings of BucharestPublisher: Sandstone Press LtdPublication Date: 22/04/2021

The Starlings of Bucharest by Sarah Armstrong - Reviewed by Adam Colclough

 

The Starlings of Bucharest

Sarah Armstrong

Sandstone Press, Pbk £8.99  April 22, 2021

Ted Walker a working-class young man with aspirations to be a journalist moves to London from the provinces in the mid-seventies. Down on his luck he takes a job with reviewing films for a magazine that seems forever one issue away from going under. Sent to Romania and then Moscow to cover the film festivals Walker finds himself immersed in the looking glass world of the Cold War. As a useful innocent both sides have plans to use him as a piece in a game he barely understands.

 

This is one of the most intelligent espionage novels I have read in the past couple of years. For once the comparisons Armstrong has drawn with le Carre is more than just reviewer’s hyperbole.

 

Like the master of the genre, she presents the spaying game as being anything but glamorous. There are no battles with super villains bent on world domination here, just a lot of grubby tail chasing that might produce a small advantage; then again it might just as well not.

 

Armstrong gives her central character a voice that is by turns touchingly naïve and strikingly observant of the action playing out around him. This is convincingly a story told by a young man just waking up to his capacity to make sense of what might be going on behind the surface of life.

 

She also describes the grimy and angst-ridden London of the seventies with an accuracy that means you can almost smell the Britain in decay. Her portrayal of life behind the Iron Curtain is equally grim, showing us a society in which revolutionary fervour of revolution has fossilized into inept bureaucracy. The reports written on Walker and his activities by the various agencies watching him are masterpieces of paranoid assumption that are both comical and alarming.

 

Anyone who thinks the Cold War spy novel sank without trace years ago weighed down by its own cliches should read the work of Sarah Armstrong and change their mind.

Sarah Armstrong is the author of four novels, most recently The Wolves of Leninsky Prospekt and The Starlings of Bucharest. She is also the author of A Summer of Spying, a short non fiction work about her experience of jury service during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Adam Colclough lives and works in the West Midlands, he writes regularly for a number of websites, one day he will get round to writing a book for someone else to review. 

Books to Look forward to from Sandstone Press

April 2020

The body of Paul Shore toppled onto him, a stream of blood pooling around them on the concrete. Bernard lay back and waited to see if he too was going to die.  An undercover agent gone rogue is threatening to shoot a civil servant a day. As panic reigns, the Health Enforcement Team race against time to track him down – before someone turns the gun on them.  Murder at the Music Factory is by Lesley Kelly. 

June 2020

Expiry Date is by Rachel Ward. Bea’s favourite customer, Julie, hasn’t been seen for weeks. Her abusive husband claims she left him – but when a corpse is found, it seems to confirm Bea’s worst fears. Then police announce that the body has been buried for fifteen years.  Who is the dead girl? What was her connection to Bea’s late father? And what on earth has happened to Julie?

Books to Look Forward to from Sandstone Press

July 2019

On the home front, defence lawyer Robbie Munro is looking forward to the birth of his second child, while at work he's called to defend George `Genghis' McCann on a charge of burglary, and Oscar `the Showman' Bowman, snooker champion, on one of betting fraud. Genghis has stolen - and lost - a priceless masterpiece, while Oscar doesn't seem to have a defence of any kind. With another mouth to feed and promises of great rewards if he finds both painting and defence, Robbie has never been more   Fixed Odds is by William McIntyre.

Songs by Dead Girls is by Lesley Kelly.  A deadly Virus. A missing academic with a head full of secrets that could embarrass the government. A prostitute on the run. And a music-loving drug baron who needs a favour. All in a day's work for the North Edinburgh Health Enforcement Team.

November 2019

In 1829, disillusioned young doctor, Mungo Lyon, is recruited by the Crown to investigate a mysterious murder and shipwreck off the coast of Scotland. His adventures lead him on a pursuit across the Scottish countryside, to kidnap and treason, an unwanted trip to the West Indies, an insurrection and love. The Crown Agent is by Stephen O’Rourke

Maria Butina: How to be a Woman and a Spy

Male and female spies are presented very differently. Male spies are represented as active investigators, professionals collating information in files, and handing coded secrets to each other. Male spies are intelligence agents.

Female spies are represented as domestic. They talk to people, gathering gossip and innuendo, and focus on making themselves attractive to men. Female spies are informers, maybe unaware of the importance of what information they pass on.

While writing my novel, The Wolves of Leninsky Prospekt, I was very conscious of the ways these gender lines are drawn within espionage. Set in 1973, it is the story of a young British embassy wife, Martha, who moves to Moscow with her new husband, Kit. Struggling to make sense of this restricted world, Martha is relieved to meet Eva, an ex-British citizen who has renounced her nationality to live in Soviet Russia. While Kit must disguise his homosexuality to be able to work in the masculine world of intelligence, Martha accesses a more marginal world - the world of women.

The old distinction between male spies as active and female spies as passive has long been challenged in literature, yet it still runs through the way real world spies are represented, just as strongly as when it was applied to Mata Hari or Kim Philby. Mata Hari is presented as making use of her body and men’s weaknesses to collect information, while Philby actively sought out intelligence which would undermine the British State to benefit the USSR. But is this an accurate explanation of a gender difference in spying, or it is lazy gender stereotyping? And could it explain the headline of an article about Butina in the New Republic (11/2/19), ‘The Spy Who Wasn’t’?

Maria Butina, in the vast majority of images found online (when not alone), is presented in the company of a man or men: Paul Erickson, Alexandr Torshin, Governor Bobby Jindal, Governor Scott Walker and former Senator Rick Santorum. There are photos of her with David Keene, President of the NRA 2011-13, Jim Porter, President 2013-15, and but not Sandra Froman who was the second female President from 2005-7. Despite Froman’s invitation to Butina to attend the NRA Women's Leadership Luncheon in 2014, there is no visual evidence of them together. The Women’s Leadership Forum has the tagline ‘Armed & Fabulous’, which would seem to suit many of the photos taken of Butina posing with guns, but where are the photos of her with women?

The overwhelming association of Butina with men in positions of power certainly suggests the popular Mata Hari image of female spies, the objectified beauty who exchanges favours for information. This was also seen in the case of the ‘sleeper agent’, Anna Chapman where, again, ‘sleeper’ suggests cosy, passive domesticity. Lacking the bureaucratic authority of the official office, the file and the safe, the actions of these women are seen as hidden and devious. Yet it’s so close to how women are often presented that, for some, it raises the question of femininity - could a woman this beautiful really understand the consequences of her actions? Isn’t this all a terrible error?

Representing female spies as sexually motivated, gossip gathering, and directed by men

undermines the active role of women, and not just in the world of spying. Eroding the agency of women, and disregarding any guilty pleas in the case of Butina, appears to make some men more comfortable. Yet, as my character, Martha, shows, sometimes it’s women who have to make the big decisions when it comes to deciding who is a spy.

Sarah Armstrong is the author of The Wolves of Leninsky Prospekt (Sandstone Press) – out now.

Escaping failure as an undergraduate and a daughter, not to mention bleak 1970s England, Martha marries Kit - who is gay. Having a wife could keep him safe in Moscow in his diplomatic post. As Martha tries to understand her new life and makes the wrong friends, she walks straight into an underground world of counter-espionage. Out of her depth, Martha no longer know who can be trusted.

Books to Look forward to from Sandstone Press

February 2019

This thriller brilliantly evokes 1973 Moscow and a world of diplomacy and counter-espionage. Escaping failure as an undergraduate and a daughter, not to mention bleak 1970s England, Martha marries Kit - who is gay. Having a wife could keep him safe in Moscow in his diplomatic post. As Martha tries to understand her new life and makes the wrong friends, she walks straight into an underground world of counter-espionage. Out of her depth, Martha no longer knows who can be trusted. The Wolves of Lennisky Prospekt is by Sarah Armstrong.

April 2019

Death at the Plague Museum is by Lesley Kelly.  Edinburgh is in the grip of a deadly flu pandemic.  One Friday, three key civil servants working on Virus policy hold a secret meeting at the Museum of Plagues and pandemics.  By Monday, two are dead and one is missing.  Mona, Bernard, and their other colleagues at the North Edinburgh Health Enforcement Team set out to find the missing bureaucrat, their investigation bedevilled by political interference.  The museum has a few deadly secrets of its own.  But not to worry – Bernard is a card-carrying Museum member.

May 2019

July 1932. When a drowned man is found in a freight elevator in Haus Vaterland, the giant pleasure palace on Potsdamer Platz, Inspector Gereon Rath is called in to investigate. It's not that Rath hasn't problems enough. His hunt for a mysterious contract killer has been stalled for weeks, and his on-off lover, Charlotte Ritter, has just begun her probationary year with Berlin CID. The corpse in Haus Vaterland looks to be part of a series of murders whose trail leads eastwards to the Polish border - and beyond.  The Fatherland Files is by Volker Kutscher.

June 2019

Finer Things is by David Wharton.  London: 1963. The lives of a professional shoplifter and a young art student collide. Delia needs to atone for a terrible mistake; Tess is desperate to convince herself she really is an artist. Elsewhere in London, the Krays are on the rise and a gang war is in the offing. Tess's relationship with her gay best friend grows unexpectedly complicated, and Delia falls for a man she's been paid to betray. At last, the two women find a resolution together - a performance that is both Delia's goodbye to crime and Tess's one genuine work of art.

Tartan Noir: no laughing matter?

Once upon a time, a very long time ago, I had a brief stint as a stand up comedian.  I’d always loved comedy but never considered it was something that you could just get up and do, until I started a new job and met a colleague who had a regular gig at a local club.

An advert for a Comedy Workshop at the Leith Festival finally persuaded me to take the plunge, and I spent a couple of years trying, and sometimes succeeding, to make people laugh.

When I started my first novel, A Fine House in Trinity, I was very keen to take the humour with me.  In fact, as a novice writer that was just about all that I took with me, and my first draft was a loosely connected series of jokes and set pieces.  Naturally, the jokes were hilarious and the set pieces benefitted from the trained observational eye of a comedian (IMHO).  But plot?  Non-existent.  Characterisation? Wafer thin.

In stand up I didn’t have time to develop an idea at length.  Lots of comedians do this really well; both Stewart Lee and Eddie Izzard excel in developing the simplest of issues in hilarious depth.  But they are at the top of their games, with their own shows.  They get an hour.  I was bottom of the bill and got ten minutes.

Ten minutes.  Ten minutes to get the audience on side, tell my jokes, and in the case of Glasgow get off the stage and into my car before anyone twigged that I was from Edinburgh (old rivalries die hard.)  Time wasn’t on my side, and while reaching for the occasional stereotype or cliché will get you through a comedy gig, it won’t cut the mustard in a novel.

With my second draft I had to put my ‘stand up’ head aside, and think like a writer.  The finished book had both humour and some resembling a plot, and it must have been OK, as it was long-listed for the William McIlvanney Award in 2016 (she noted modestly.)

When I moved on to writing my Virus series, I had the luxury of developing character quirks across more than one novel.   In The Health of Strangers, we meet the Health Enforcement Team members, who are fighting crime against the background of a deadly virus.  We have the Team Leader, Paterson (scary, old school cop), Mona (bossy), Bernard (confused, mainly), Carole (motherly), and Maitland (fancies himself as a ladies man).

Now, with the second book in the series, Songs by Dead Girls, I find myself with an opportunity to develop the humour that comes from knowing the characters really well.  And I’ve noticed that, however dark the situation gets, the HET team have got a quip for it.   And they are always pithy, relevant, and cutting.  It’s almost like someone is putting them in their mouths.  Some frustrated comedian, perhaps? 

I don’t do stand up any more.  A job, two kids, and the desire to write novels all got in the way.  I miss it, though.  I miss the immediate feedback that you get from a crowd.  It’s the worst feeling in the world when a joke falls flat, but better that than spending two years on a novel only to find out no-one likes it.

So, Songs by Dead Girls, it’s your time to fly and find your audience.  I hope they like you.  I hope they laugh in all the right places. 

Just remember, though, that you are set in Edinburgh.  If you play Glasgow, keep the motor running.

Lesley Kelly’s third novel, Songs By Dead Girls, is published by Sandstone Press in April.  Her Health of Strangers series is set in a virus- ravaged Edinburgh of the near future.   

Songs by Dead Girls by Lesley Kelly (Published by Sandstone Press)

Nobody likes the North Edinburgh Health Enforcement Team, least of all the people who work for it.  An uneasy mix of seconded Police and health service staff, Mona, Bernard and their colleagues stem the spread of the Virus, a mutant strain of influenza, by tracking down people who have missed their monthly health check.

When Scotland’s leading virologist goes missing, Mona and Paterson from the Health Enforcement Team are dispatched to London to find him. In a hot and unwelcoming city, Mona has to deal with a boss who isn’t speaking to her, placate the professor’s over-bearing assistant, and outwit the people who will stop at nothing to make sure the academic stays lost.

Meanwhile, back in Edinburgh, Bernard is searching for a missing prostitute, while Maitland is trying to keep the chair of the Parliamentary Virus Committee from finding out quite how untidy the HET office is.

More information about  the author and her work can be found on her website.  You can follow her on Twitter - @lkauthor and on Facebook.

Volker Kutscher talks to Shots Magazine

One of the delights of the recent Crimefest 2017 event in Bristol was meeting German writer Volker Kutscher, a writer who is gathering acclaim not only in his native Germany, but also internationally.

In the UK he is published thanks to Sandstone Press.

Volker Kutscher was born in 1962. He studied German, Philosophy and History, and worked as a newspaper editor prior to writing his first detective novel. Babylon Berlin, the start of an award-winning series of novels to feature Gereon Rath and his exploits in late Weimar Republic Berlin, was an instant hit in Germany. Since then, a further four titles have appeared, most recently Märzgefallene in 2014. The series was awarded the Berlin Krimi-Fuchs Crime Writers Prize in 2011 and has sold over one million copies worldwide. Volker Kutscher works as a full-time author and lives in Cologne. 

We were delighted to hear that the first two Gereon Rath novels have been released by Sandstone Press, and coming to Sky TV in the UK in a multi-million Euro miniseries – read more Here and Here

Babylon Berlin

Berlin, 1929. Detective Inspector Rath, was a successful career officer in the Cologne Homicide Division before a shooting incident in which he inadvertently killed a man. He has been transferred to the Vice Squad in Berlin, a job he detests, even though he finds a new friend in his boss, Chief Inspector Wolter. There is seething unrest in the city and the Commissioner of Police has ordered the Vice Squad to ruthlessly enforce the ban on May Day demonstrations. The result is catastrophic with many dead and injured, and a state of emergency is declared in the Communist strongholds of the city.

Shots have copies available from our bookstore HERE

The Silent Death

Berlin 1930. Sound film is conquering the big screen, leaving many by the wayside: producers, cinema owners – and silent film stars. Investigating the violent on-set death of actress Betty Winter, Inspector Gereon Rath encounters the dark side of glamour and an industry in turmoil. When his father requests that he help his friend, the mayor of Cologne, Konrad Adenauer, and his ex-girlfriend Charly makes a renewed attempt at rapprochement, things start to get out of hand. Trapped in the machinations of rival film producers, he roams Berlin’s Chinese quarter and the city’s underworld as he works ever closer to the edge of legality. Meanwhile the funeral of the murdered Horst Wessel leads to clashes between Nazis and Communists.

Shots have copies available from our bookstore HERE

So with acclaim from Peter James who stated ”Set in atmospheric 1930s Berlin where a maverick detective is hunting a serial killer The Silent Death, like its predecessor, Babylon Berlin, owes much to its author’s commitment to historical accuracy and the cynical feel of the times.”; Shots after meeting Volker at Crimefest tracked the author down in Cologne as we had a few questions - as part of our investigations into the life and times of Gereon Rath.

Ali       So how did an academic with an interest in philosophy and history find himself a published author?

Volker : Many years I worked as a journalist and writing fiction was nothing but a hobby to me. But then the Gereon Rath plan came up and I realised that for a project this large, I had to give up my newspaper job and had to try to change my writing hobby into a profession, a novelist.

AK       Wow you gave up the day-job; that was very brave!

VK      Well fortunately, it all worked out well.

AK       So tell me about what books you enjoyed and which made you decide to pen your own?

VK      There are so many books I enjoyed over the years, far more than I can mention here. But there are two authors who were favourites from my youth that I still re-read - namely Mark Twain and Erich Kästner. While the Berlin novels of Erich Kästner, Alfred Döblin, Hans Fallada or Irmgard Keun resonate deeply. I would even state that they inspired me to write the Rath novels. In fact I would say that Babylon Berlin is my attempt to combine the world of the authors I mentioned, with the world of Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett.

AK       In the UK you are published by Sandstone Press, so tell us how your work has been received outside of Germany?

VK      Happily it’s been received very well. There are translations in many languages: French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Danish, Norwegian, Hungarian, Serbian and even Japanese. But, of course, I’m more than happy that Sandstone Press made the English translation possible thanks also to Niall Sellar, and published my books in the UK.

AK       I worked in Munich many years ago, and was often told by my colleagues in this historic city, that ‘we’re Bavarian first, and Germans second’, so tell us where the fascination of the era of the Weimar Republic came from? And of course Berlin of that era?

VK      I think it’s Weimar Berlin that fascinates most people, not Weimar Munich as much. Berlin (as Cologne, the hometown of Gereon Rath) was part of Prussia, and Prussia in the Weimar years, from 1919 to 1932 was the most stable democratic state in Germany. The Prussian capital Berlin in those days was one of the most exciting cities in Europe, the city of Bertolt Brecht, Erich Maria Remarque, Albert Einstein, Billy Wilder, Marlene Dietrich and many more, until this all ends in 1933. And Munich, with all due respect, was the city which brought forth the Nazi movement, finally exporting it to the rest of Germany.

AK       And tell us about the genesis of your protagonist Gereon Rath, and where the interest in Detective fiction springs from?

VK      Detective fiction is the only fiction I have written so far. I don’t know why exactly. Maybe it’s about suspense. I think a good story is a good story and not necessarily to be Crime fiction; but it has to be thrilling nonetheless. My protagonist Gereon Rath is a Police Detective in a changing world. His employer is the state, but a state that is changing from democracy into dictatorship. Rath isn’t a flawless hero; he’s just an ordinary man. A man who tries to live is life and to do the right thing, but he also is corruptible in some ways.

AK       I assume your research into that era came from your interest in history, or did you have to work harder on the Berlin of that era, as it reads with a vivid eye on that surreal time?

VK      I had — and still have — to do a lot of research. During this process I learned many things previously. But I enjoy researching because I’m very curious about the Weimar Berlin era in general, so it doesn’t bother me that I only can use a small fraction of my research results for the novels, for these are novels and I have stories to tell.

AK       With Babylon Berlin and now Silent Death featuring Gereon Rath on our bookshelves can you tell us where the TV series came from, and if you will be continuing the novels as we hear that there are other not translated into English as yet?

VK      It was Tom Tykwer who wanted to adapt my novels for the TV screen, and it soon became really big. The first novel is going to be told in 16 episodes and two seasons for the international TV market. But Tom wants to go further than the first two seasons, and I appreciate this hugely, because I’ve written much more. There’s not only the second novel “Silent Death”, just published in the UK, and waiting for adaption, and there are six other Rath novels so far published in Germany; and I have three more to come. My Rath series will end after nine novels concluding in the really dark Nazi Era year of 1938. Let’s see how far the TV series will go.

AK       Thank you for your time

VK      Thank you, it was a pleasure.

Inspector Norse and Friends

With Crimefest Bristol [Thursday 18^th May – Sunday 21^st May] convention later this month, we were delighted to hear of an exciting event as part of the Nordic Noir Bookclub which takes place immediately following Crimefest.

I always find it a tad melancholic when Crimefest closes and our friends and colleagues from Literature’s darkest genre, all depart; but this year we have an event to look forward to, on Monday 22^nd May in London.

Prepare for an evening of Scandinavian thrilling bestselling crime fiction with Jorn Lier Horst (Norway), Lone Theils (Denmark) and Stefan Ahnhem (Sweden). Prepare for battle, as the authors and audience engage in the historic sibling rivalry of the Scandinavian countries to decide, once and for all, which of the Scandinavian countries is more "Nordic Noir".

Jorn Lier Horst will present his latest novel When It Grows Dark (Sandstone Press), a prequel to his now 10-volume William Wisting series.

Lone Theils will present her debut novel about the journalist Nora Sand, Fatal Crossing (Arcadia) - a true Scandinavian crime novel, which takes place mostly in the UK.

Stefan Ahnhem will present the second instalment in his Fabian Risk series, The Ninth Grave (Head of Zeus).

The event will also feature the launch of the founder of the Nordic Noir Book Club, Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen's book Scandinavian Crime Fiction (Bloomsbury).

Books will be available for purchase and for signing at the event.

Click Here to reserve your seat

For further and updated information about the event, visit the Nordic Noir Book Club blog – Click Here

And if you haven’t discovered the work of Inspector Horst, here’s a primer

Jørn Lier Horst is a Former Senior Investigating Officer in Norway – and it shows in his popular William Wisting series. He has said that working as a chief investigator allowed him to “go behind the barrier tapes and to walk among the remains and traces of severe crimes. See the aftermath of a relentless struggle. Stepping into rooms that have been closed yet contain unexplored secrets.” This professional experience and how it has changed him as a human being is essentially where he would also like to bring his readers. Lier Horst has the following interesting perspective on how his background has influenced and strengthened his crime writing:

Now one of the most popular crime writers in Scandinavia. In his native Norway, Jørn sells about 1,000 books a day. He has won the most prestigious awards including the Riverton Prize for the best Norwegian crime novel, The Glass Key and The Martin Beck Award for The Hunting Dogs. Like his compatriot, Jo Nesbø, Lier Horst enjoys international success with his William Wisting series – translated for publication in 25 countries from Japan to Portugal. In the UK, where Sandstone Press has published six of his novels, his seat in the Valhalla of Nordic Noir was cemented with the 2016 Petrona Award for the best Scandinavian crime novel of the year for The Caveman. Book 10 in the Wisting series, Ordeal, was published in 2016, and a prequel, When it Grows Dark, was published just a few months ago in the UK. British fans of Scandinavian TV crime series will no doubt be looking forward to adaptations of six of his Wisting novels scheduled to start filming later this year.

Thanks to Lucy Ramsey for the information