MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
The writer Jo Nesbo has a knack for coming up with sentences like this - quote, "when Shannon Alleyne came hurtling into my life eight years ago, I was 35 years old, single, and a mass murderer who was absolutely ready to start a family." In other words, I dare you, reader, to attempt to stop reading there. You know you're going to turn the page. You can't help yourself.
Well, with more than 20 page-turners now under his belt, including the Harry Hole detective novels, Nesbo has established himself as the king of Nordic noir. His latest is "Blood Ties," and it reintroduces us to the unforgettable brothers Carl and Roy Opgard, which gives me the chance to introduce you to Jo Nesbo. Hi there. Welcome.
JO NESBO: Hi. Hi.
KELLY: So that sentence I just read - the guy talking about being a 35-year-old mass murderer who's now really ready to start a family...
NESBO: Yeah.
KELLY: ...That is Roy Opgard talking - one of the brothers. Tell us more about him.
NESBO: Well, he's really a nice guy. I mean, he's probably the nicest mass murderer I've been writing about. He's running a gas station in this small place in the mountains in Norway. He has a weakness - he tends to fall in love with his younger brother's girlfriends. And that is part of what has led him on the way to becoming a mass murderer. On the other hand, he has - some of the murders have been simply bad luck, and most of them have been out of love, not out of hate. So here is my challenge as a writer is, of course, to describe to you and convince you that Roy is a guy that you can root for.
KELLY: Yeah, just stay on that for a second because that is quite a challenge, to write a likable murderer who people want to root for in.
NESBO: I once spoke to a famous film director - it was actually Christopher Nolan - who told me that, you know, the old cliche that you have to have your protagonist save a cat at the start of a story, that is what makes the audience root for him - it's not actually true. What you need to do is to put your protagonist in trouble. Some kind of problem that needs solving, and automatically, as an audience or as readers, we will try to help this person solve his problem. Roy is a guy with a lot of problems that need solving, and he needs our help to solve them, I think.
KELLY: With all that in our head, tell us about the other brother, Carl.
NESBO: Well, Carl is the better-looking guy and intellectually maybe the smarter guy, but he is not as likable when you get to know him as Roy is. He's, you know, popular with the girls, popular with everybody. And he has returned to this small town in the mountains in Norway, coming from abroad. He brought his wife that Roy, of course, fell in love with - ended tragically. But he is now running a big hotel in this little town, and this hotel is actually what is saving the town from being erased from the map.
KELLY: You said Carl's marriage ended tragically. I mean, just to spell out a little bit more, the history of these two brothers includes Roy sleeping with Carl's wife, and then Carl, the married brother, kills the wife by hitting her on the head with an iron. And then they dispose of her body together. And I just want readers to know I'm giving nothing away here. All this has been revealed by page 28. How do you come up with this stuff?
NESBO: I don't know, really. It may sound a bit strange, but my job normally starts at, like, 5 o'clock in the morning when I wake up in bed, and I try to come up with an idea for the next chapter of a book. And I come up with quite horrific stuff like this, and it makes me really happy, you know? It's, OK, I know I have an exciting day in front of me to - trying to describe what's in my head. It can be a love story, or it can be a murder. It doesn't really matter. It just makes me happy if I sense that there's good storytelling in the idea.
KELLY: I want to hear more about this little town, the quiet, pretty spa town of Os, because it's such a stark contrast to your characters, who are, as we've already noted, lying and killing people and blackmailing other characters in the book. This one town, it contains so many secrets. Is that something particular to Norway, or do you think small towns everywhere have people papering over their dark secrets?
NESBO: Actually, I think that as a town, the novel is partly inspired by an American novelist, Jim Thompson, who wrote "Pop. 1280," but it's also a portrait of a typical Norwegian small town. I grew up in cities myself, but my parents, they were born and raised in small towns, so I spent summer and Christmas holidays there. I played in a band that, for the first few years, we traveled and toured mostly small towns in Norway. So I think I know quite well the pros and cons of little towns. It's the safety of people taking care of each other. On the other hand, it's the claustrophobic feeling of everybody knowing more or less everything about you. There are, of course, secrets, like you said, in this town. Most of them are in the open.
KELLY: I'm still just sitting here, turning over in my head what you just said. This is a - I think you just said a totally typical little Norwegian town (laughter). And I'm thinking, (laughter) my God, like, everyone in it is either sleeping with someone they shouldn't be sleeping with or killing someone, who they obviously should not be killing. Typical - really?
NESBO: Well, the town is typical. The body count is definitely not typical for Norway. Norway has probably one of the lowest murders per year in any country. So I'm using, of course, the crime genre and the thriller genre for telling stories about, hopefully, the human condition.
KELLY: Before you wrote novels, you were a star soccer player. You were, as you nodded to, lead singer and guitar player in a rock band. You were also a guy with a finance desk job. Talk a little bit more about that idea that as a writer, you put into your fictional characters a little bit of yourself. You had a lot to work with.
NESBO: Yeah. Well, I think it was good for me that I didn't write my first novel until I was 37, that I had lived a, let's call it a normal life up until then - a working life. So I had, like, this material that I had sort of stored up during those years. And I come from a storytelling family. My father and my mother and my brothers, my aunts and uncles, they were all storytellers. So that was, like, my writer's school, I think. And it was probably also one of the reasons why I wrote my first novel so late in life, that I was, you know, worried what they would think about my storytelling.
KELLY: Ah.
NESBO: But writing lyrics for my band, that was also like a writer's school. I think that writing story in three verses and a refrain is a great way of teaching yourself that you need to leave up to the readers to imagine most of the story. You can only point them in the right direction and give them certain ideas. And the more you leave up to the reader, the better it will probably be.
KELLY: That's the writer Jo Nesbo. His latest novel is titled "Blood Ties." Jo Nesbo, thank you.
NESBO: Thank you so much.
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