Writing in Ice: A Crime Writer's Guide to Iceland

  I was still on the hunt for real-live Icelanders with which I could people my second Magnus novel. The banker I met Birna, a middle executive in one of the banks, who had lost all of her savings in the bank’s money-market fund, and then her job. In London I met Kristján, an Icelandic graduate student. Pétur told me about Icelandic writers. I was getting to know my characters. Now we come back to the thorny issue of stereotypes. In the first draft of my very first financial thriller, I included a character who was the ‘muscle’ working for an American businessman. I called him Luigi, gave him thick dark hair and an overcoat. As one of my friends said, he was a cliché. So it’s all very well figuring out what a typical Icelandic fisherman, or student, or banker is like, but sometimes you need to make them different from the typical. The priest An example is Hákon, a rural priest in Where the Shadows Lie . I found myself an Icelandic priest, a woman named Sara, and she gave me a portr...

   A major area of difference between crime in Iceland and crime in the US that Magnus would notice immediately is firearms. It turns out there are loads of guns in Iceland; you guessed it, t he country has the highest per-capita gun ownership in the world . But these are entirely for hunting: handguns and assault rifles are banned. Guns are rarely used in crimes, and the police are unarmed. Unlike the police in the US. Guns in America Guns are really important to American policemen. The bad guys are heavily armed: the police need guns to protect themselves and their colleagues. To research this series I read a fascinating book called  Into the Kill Zone  by David Klinger , which is a thorough analysis of what happens when American police officers shoot civilians.   We have seen in the news examples of this that are unjustified. But many times, police use their weapons in legitimate acts of self-defence. In tough areas they are aware that they might come under f...

I have decided to pull together these blog posts into a book, which will be published at the beginning of July. Like this blog, the title is Writing in Ice: A Crime Writer's Guide to Iceland .  The book includes the posts I have published here and more that I have already written.  You can pre-order the ebook or paperback from Amazon .  If you would like a signed copy, or one not sold by Amazon, you can order one from my local bookshop, Lutyens and Rubinstein in Notting Hill, London. By far my most important appointment on that first research trip to Reykjavík was with my police contact, Páll. Some very successful crime writers get by without worrying at all about police procedure — Agatha Christie springs to mind, but there are many other more modern examples. Others are obsessive, like Peter James. I had always aimed to get the details right in my financial thrillers, and I wanted to do the same in these Magnus mysteries if only to create as vivid a portrait as I coul...