It's not a lot of laughs being Harry Hole – "The Norwegian pronunciation is Hoola, but it's fine if you call him Hole" – the maverick cop at the centre of nine of Jo Nesbø's bestselling Scanda-noir crime thrillers. Over the past 15 years he has been shot, stabbed and beaten up countless times and has the scars to prove it, a titanium finger and a slash from mouth to ear among them. He is an alcoholic who keeps falling off the wagon. His two best friends in the police – pretty much his only friends – have both been killed and he can't get married to Rakel, his long-suffering girlfriend, because she would almost certainly be topped as well. And at the end of The Phantom, his most recent outing, he was left for dead in a sewer with two bullet wounds and rats gnawing at his body
So are there any laughs in being Harry Hole's creator? In person, Nesbø is relaxed, chatty and smiles a great deal and yet ... Pursuing similarities between authors and their characters can be a bit of a dead end and I wouldn't normally bother, only Nesbø frequently draws attention to them. "When I wrote my first book [The Bat, which has just been published in English], I thought I was starting with a blank slate. I remember thinking about whether to make Harry one of those heroes who was a bit different in some way – gay, priest, disabled or whatever – or to run with the stereotype of the hardboiled, troubled
Full story at The Guardian
So are there any laughs in being Harry Hole's creator? In person, Nesbø is relaxed, chatty and smiles a great deal and yet ... Pursuing similarities between authors and their characters can be a bit of a dead end and I wouldn't normally bother, only Nesbø frequently draws attention to them. "When I wrote my first book [The Bat, which has just been published in English], I thought I was starting with a blank slate. I remember thinking about whether to make Harry one of those heroes who was a bit different in some way – gay, priest, disabled or whatever – or to run with the stereotype of the hardboiled, troubled
Full story at The Guardian
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