When the Devil Holds the Candle

"I remember reading the first 30 pages of this book and I was stunned. I had just got news that my first novel was going to be published, and I really didn’t know that much about Norwegian crime so I picked up a book by Karin Fossum. I was told that she is the best Norwegian writer—she is actually known as the Queen of Norwegian Crime. And the reason I was so stunned after 30 pages was because of the quality of her writing—it was so much better than I thought it would be. Well, I got into writing through reading the great Norwegian writers like Henrik Ibsen but also American and English writers like Ernest Hemingway and Mark Twain . Jim Thompson and Lawrence Block were the only crime writers I had read before I started writing. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter But I wanted to write and I wanted the easy way out so I decided to write crime. And no, it wasn’t the easy way out but I thought that my first novel wouldn’t get published so I thought on my first attempt I will write something that isn’t that time-consuming and in order to do that I have to write something which already has a head and a tail, so I thought, OK, a crime story. I know how to construct a crime story so I can send it into a publishing house and then it will be rejected with a polite letter of rejection asking me to send them something else. And then that is my chance to write the big European novel. No, I got caught up in crime."