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

The higher the latitude, the greater the difference between summer and winter. Iceland is only just below the Arctic Circle, so in midwinter it is dark nearly all the time. Daylight is only a few hours. In practice dawn turns into dusk at lunchtime.  As you can imagine, this has a depressing effect on locals. They go to work in the dark; they come home in the dark. It was even worse in the old days when most Icelanders lived on isolated farms. They essentially stayed indoors all winter in their living quarters above the animals whose heat kept them warm. They knitted, they read, they milked the cow, they moved hay about. They hibernated. Because of its proximity to the Arctic Circle, in theory, the sun is visible for a short period every day in Iceland, even at midwinter. But that is not true for the town of Ísafjördur in the West Fjords, which is wedged between high mountains. There they last see the sun on 16 November and it returns on 25 January. They have sólarkaffi - coffee ...

  For years, a group of old friends, who have also been loyal readers of my books, have been asking me to show them around Iceland. I promised I would one day, and this year I decided to take the plunge. If not now, when? So I drew up an itinerary for the eight of us – four couples - and we went at the beginning of October. The trip worked very well. And since readers often ask me to suggest places to visit in Iceland, I thought I would share the itinerary with you. There were some important decisions to be made first. When to go? Iceland gets very crowded in July and August and the weather isn’t very good anyway. It’s dark in winter. For a land with no trees, the autumn colours can be quite spectacular . So we chose early October. How long to go for? There would be plenty to see on a two-week trip to Iceland, but it would also be expensive. So we settled on five days. What about Reykjavik? Once again, there is plenty to see in Reykjavik, but we decided since we had li...

  The weather in Iceland is terrible. But then it changes. A perfect example of this was my research trip to Saudárkrókur in northern Iceland in November 2016. It was snowing hard in Reykjavík. I only had four days to get to Saudárkrókur and back, a distance of about three hundred kilometres there and three hundred kilometres back, and I was worried. According to the government website , road travel was not recommended. You don’t argue with Icelanders on the subject of snow: if they say it’s too bad to drive, it’s too bad to drive. I lost a day, spent in the snow in Reykjavík. The following morning, at about 10 a.m., the website advice changed to a go. So I went. The first hundred kilometres along the Ring Road were fine. I passed the windy headland by Borgarnes successfully, and drove north through the snow.  Then the road climbed to the notorious Holtavörduheidi, the highlands between the west and the north of Iceland. People lost their way and di...

The weather in Reykjavík is uninspiring. Winters are about the same temperature as Hamburg, but summers don’t get as warm. It is milder than you would think in winter: the temperature only dips a few degrees below zero, nothing like the freezes felt in Chicago or Moscow, which are much further south. Trouble is, it doesn’t get that warm in summer: temperatures rarely rise above 15 °C - the average high is only 13 °C in July. The real problem is the wind and the rain. Rain comes in many different forms. When it rains hard, it can feel like someone pouring a bucket of water on your head. Or it can feel like someone throwing a bucket of water at you from the pavement, if it’s windy. No umbrella has been known to survive in Iceland: they die rapidly , torn to shreds by the wind. There are two ways of dealing with the wind. One is to face directly into it and lean. The other is to stay inside and read a book. However, they say that if you don’t like the weather in Reykjav...

Nordic countries are often depicted as being dark, gloomy and depressing. But that is only half the story. The other half is summer, when the sun shines for twenty-one hours – the photo above was taken in Dalvík at midnight. It is light at 11 p.m. in Reykjavík on a Saturday night when the crowds are going into the bars and it is light at 2 a.m. when they are leaving. It is an extraordinary sight to see so many drunk people so early in the morning. Icelanders become manic. Their eyes sparkle bright blue, but there are red rims around them. On the farms, if winter was the time of snoozing, summer was the time of eighteen-hour days. A whole year’s farming had to be crammed into a few short months. In particular, the hay had to be harvested to feed the livestock over the winter.  Today Icelanders are still busy eighteen hours a day in summer. Eight o’clock in the evening feels like mid-afternoon. It can be difficult trying to go to sleep at ten thirty when your body is telling...