An Interview with Arnaldur Indridason
by Chadwick Ginther - Monday Jul 14 2008 2:16 pm
Posted in: Interview, Mystery & Crime

August long weekend (Aug 1-4),Gimli plays host to Manitoba's Icelandic Festival: Islendingadagurinn. Luckily, I was able to have a short email conversation with award-winning Icelandic crime writer, Arnaldur Indridason.

CG: Thank you for agreeing to this brief interview. Voices has become one of my favourite modern crime novels, and so this is quite an honour.

AI: Thank you for the interest in my books, the honour is all mine.

CG: When you started writing did you have any difficulty convincing a publisher that Reykjavik could be a good setting for crime fiction?

AI: Everybody was very sceptical, publishers, readers and writers alike. They thought Iceland and Reykjavík was too innocent a place for crime novels. This is the main reason why we got so late to the game and why we have little or no tradition in crime writing. You had to convince the readers that the locale was exciting and that things could happen on the crime scene worth writing about. We have managed that now. Icelandic crime novels are hugely popular these days.

CG: Your father was a writer. Did this influence your desire to become one as well?

AI: Maybe indirectly. I was raised up with the clicking of a typewriter and it still is the most beautiful sound I hear. But the urge to write came from within. I felt I had some stories to tell and if it happened to be crime stories so be it.

CG: Sons of Dust, the first Detective Erlendur novel, has yet to be translated. What was the reasoning for starting the English translations with the third book, Tainted Blood?

AI: I am published now in some 36 countries and everybody starts with Jar City (the U.S. title of Tainted Blood). It was the breaktrough book for me and it is the best known book and publishers think it is a good start. And maybe it is. There are two books before it in the series and eight in all. I am writing number nine as we speak. Jar City is probably a good start. It gets you into the atmosphere of the books and the characters,the weather, the streets of Reykjavík and possibly you want to know more about this guy Erlendur, the sad policeman, after reading it.

CG: Bernard Scudder has thus far translated all of your novels that are available in English. How closely do you work with your translators to preserve your work's original idiom?

AI: Because English is the language I am most at ease with I worked very closely with Bernard and also because he lived in Iceland. He was a great translator that put a lot of his understanding and intelligence into my books and I will always be grateful for his work. He died a few months ago. I am not so much in touch with the others, they send me questions and we figure things out. I think I have been very lucky with my translators, they are of the utmost importance for a writer of the Icelandic language.

CG: Are you writing the Detective Erlendur novels with a series ending in mind, or do you see it as open ended?

AI: I am working on my ninth as I said and I don't know how it will end or how many books there will be on Erlendur. They say ten books on a character is a good rule but there will be more in my case.

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