PURE EVIL - Jo Nesbo and the rise of Scandinavian crime fiction

This is the title of a marvellous six page story by Lee Siegel in the May 12 issue of The New Yorker which arrive in my po box this morning.

This is how it begins:

When the Norwegian crime writer Jo Nesbø was in his early teens, he had a panic attack. The sun had set in Molde, the small city on Norway’s west coast where he grew up, and the apartment in which he lived with his parents and two brothers was silent. Thoughts of death descended on him, visions of being trapped in a coffin under the earth. He ran to his father, Per, woke him from a nap, and asked him what happens when you die. “Do you really want to know?” his father asked. The boy insisted. “It all goes black,” he said.

In the crowded field of Scandinavian crime fiction, Nesbø’s books stand out for their blackness. He has written ten novels about the investigations of Inspector Harry Hole, a cynical, alcoholic detective in the Oslo police department. Hole, who is both destructive and self-destructive, always gets his man, but by the end of the story he has inadvertently caused the death of someone he loves, or become an opium addict, or been disfigured. At the conclusion of “Phantom,” the ninth novel in the series, Harry is shot at point-blank range. Not until well into the next book, “Police,” do you find out whether or not he is still alive.

To read the rest you will need to buy the magazine as only subscribers can read the full version of this story on-line.
In the story we learn that Nesbo's Harry Hole novels have sold 23 million copies in forty languages. Impressive.

Drawing of Jo Nesbo, right, is by Michael Gillette and appears at the head of the story in The New Yorker.