Talking To Jo Nesbo

If Jo Nesbo ever based a character in one of his own novels on himself, he’d be derided for overstretching credibility. A pro footballer turned wealthy stockbroker turned successful rock star turned best-selling crime novelist? Who sets up charitable foundations to help fight child illiteracy in the Third World? Oh, come on! That, however, is essentially the career trajectory of the ruggedly handsome, 53-year-old Norwegian sitting before me in the Merrion Hotel, wearing a pair of orange-tinted shades, and hungrily tucking into a plate of smoked salmon salad.

“I hope you don’t mind that I eat,” he apologises, speaking in a clipped Nordic accent. “I’ve just travelled down from Belfast, and I missed breakfast.”
Born in Oslo in 1960, Nesbo grew up in the small city of Molde. A talented soccer player, he briefly played professionally for Molde FK until a ligament injury ended his career at the age of 19. Following his military service, he returned to education and graduated with honours from the Norwegian School of Economics, which swiftly led to a lucrative career as a stockbroker. He held down his day-job even as the rock band he fronted, Di Derre (‘Them There’), became one of Norway’s biggest musical exports.
Asked by a publisher to write a memoir of his time with the group, he instead wrote his first crime thriller, The Bat, in 1997. His debut won the prestigious Glass Key Award for Best Nordic Crime Novel of the Year (Stieg Larsson later won the same accolade), and he has since gone on to sell more than 20 million books in 40 languages worldwide.
A true renaissance man, Nesbo maintains that storytelling is the common denominator in all of his separate careers.
“I guess as a stockbroker, and as a musician, and a writer, you are a storyteller,” he smiles. “Even in football, I guess I was a bit of a storyteller also. I would be this flamboyant football player that would try to do tricks. I would wear a hairband, and whenever I would score a goal I would run into the goal, get the ball and kiss it like I was Pele. So I was more of a flamboyant actor on the pitch, and I guess that was the storyteller in me, too.”
We’re meeting to discuss Police, his tenth thriller to feature the brilliant, but troubled, Oslo investigator Harry Hole. Although Nesbo has also written a number of standalone novels and books for children, much of his international reputation rests on the award-winning Hole series. Ten books in, do they get harder or easier to write?
“It’s a bit give and take,” he muses. “On one hand you feel that you’re getting towards the end of the story and it’s getting hard not to just repeat yourself, of course. On the other hand, you get to know the character better, and you know that the reader knows the character better. I do write each book as if it is the first book that the reader reads, but, when you build the universe, all the things are there already. You’re revisiting and you don’t have to start from scratch, and that’s a good thing.”
Dark, intense and often shockingly brutal, Police tells the story of the hunt for a serial killer who’s murdering Norwegian police officers at the scenes of crimes they once investigated, but failed to solve. Did the book require much research into police procedures?
“I still have to go and do stuff but it’s not too much,” he shrugs. “They may change their procedure at the police house, but I don’t change the procedure in my book just because they’ve done so in real life. It’s not a documentary on police work, it’s fiction. But I like to stay as close to reality as I can.”
Police is dedicated to his younger brother Knut, who passed away from cancer last year. Although Knut was Di Derre’s guitarist, the band is still going strong.
“Actually, we just recorded two new songs last month,” Jo says, “and we’ll be putting out an album, mainly just with old songs. We’ve already done a Best Of… so this is more of a rarities compilation, with two new songs, called The Story of a Band. So it’s our history, from the beginning to the end, and we’re going to go touring next summer.”
It’s been widely reported that Martin Scorsese is to adapt Nesbo’s novel The Snowman into a Hollywood movie, but the writer isn’t keeping too close an eye on the project.
“It’s still under development so I don’t follow it too closely,” he shrugs. “They don’t tell me, and I don’t need to know. I told them, ‘Tell me when you’re shooting!’”
He’s not overly precious about Scorsese’s script taking liberties with the plot of his novel, either.
“I’m an executive producer, but, being a storyteller myself, I like to leave the storytelling to whoever is going to direct it. If it’s a really good movie I will come up and say, ‘Hey, that is my book!’ and if it’s a bad movie, I’ll come up and say, ‘Hey, nothing to do with me!’”
With platinum albums, multi-million book sales, and a big pot still left over from his financial career, Nesbo freely admits that he doesn’t have to worry about money ever again. Wanting to give something back, a few years ago he established the Harry Hole Foundation, a charity to reduce illiteracy among children in the third world.
“We set up a fund and I think there’s now about £2 million in it,” he explains. “We’re giving away money every year to projects that support the fight against illiteracy in Third World countries. It’s going really well. The fund is still growing so we’re actually making more money than we’re giving away… so maybe we have to start giving away more money each year now.”
With so many successful strings to his Nesbo (sorry!), what drives him now?
“I think it’s the same thing that drove me when I started,” Jo reflects after a long pause for thought. “It’s to write something that will have some kind of lasting value. They sound like quite strange ambitions because I see myself as an entertainer. I write entertainment, that’s how I see it. But I take my entertainment quite seriously, and so my ambition is to always write something that hasn’t been written before in a well-known genre like the crime story.
“But it’s trying to create something original, something good, something with quality and lasting value,” he concludes. “Write one sentence that stands out, that says something true about the human condition. It’s as simple and complicated as that. I haven’t accomplished that yet and, in the back of my head, I know I probably never will. But it would be meaningless to get up in the morning if I didn’t have that ambition.”

Police by Jo Nesbo is published by Harvill Secker