A crime novelist disappears
Ragnar Jónasson's latest book Hvítalogn (White Calm) is coming to bookstores this week, but he has a lot of different projects on the horizon. mbl.is/Ásdís
At the top floor in the eaves of a beautiful house in the old part of downtown Reykjavik called Thingholt sits crime writer Ragnar Jónasson busy writing. He is now writing his first ghost story, which takes place in a similar house as he is working in, making it a perfect place to get an inspiration. The journalist is sitting across from Jónasson and suddenly she hears a strange, subdued sound. “Probably a ghost,” says Jónasson, smiling in his slow manner.
Jónasson has many manuscripts in progress, but one is finished and on his way to book store shelves next week. It’s his fifteenth crime novel, ‘Hvítalogn, (White Calm) which is the second in a trilogy about the criminologist Helgi. But there’s more on the horizon for Jónasson. Plays and poetry; movies and TV series; travels and crime novel festivals. There is not a dead moment for the man who plans a new murder every year.
No shortage of ideas
We’ll start with the latest book, ‘White Calm, but the first book in the trilogy is ‘White Death’.
“White Calm is about a crime-novelist who disappears, but I’ve been working on this book for many years. I’m writing about this world I know; the book-world and what it’s like to be a writer. This imaginary writer is the nation’s most famous crime-story writer; a woman in her seventies. She then disappears from the face of the earth and there’s a young book enthusiast that starts looking for her,” he says, admitting that he uses something from his own life to both these characters.
Lena Olin and Lasse Hallström met with Jónasson recently but shooting of the movie The Darkness, based on Jónasson's novel is starting.
“The story is an ode to the book world that I love, and I think this book could be called a mystery rather than a thriller,” says Jónasson, who goes a bit back and forth in time in the narrative. Similarly, this world is connected to Hulda, who is a character from Jónasson’s other books. The third book is expected next year, but Jónasson says he’s already written the bulk of it.
“It’s a great thing, with a trilogy like this, to have the opportunity to write the second and third books somewhat at the same time, to get the overall atmosphere I wanted to have present in all three books.”
You think like a chess player, many games ahead of time?
“Yes, to some extent, but at the same time I let the stories come to me, and I find what project I want to finish next, but there are usually many documents open in the computer at the same time. In White Calm I’m writing about writing and books, and the reason why you’re writing.”
Why are you writing?
“Because I can’t help myself. I feel the best when I’m able to create something every day, and the main point is not what it is, it is rather what is speaking to me at the moment. When I have new ideas, I write them down and then try to work on them gradually. Now I’m sitting here writing a ghost story, because I had never really done that before and I wanted to try it. I’m also writing a crime story that happened in Britain in 1935, which is quite different from the traditional Nordic crime novels. Then I’m trying to finish the third book about Helgi.”
You never run out of ideas?
“No, not so much. There are too many ideas and there is nothing more satisfying than trying to give them life.”
Here is Jónasson with his mother Katrín Guðjónsdóttir who passed away this summer.
Mom wrote her own memoirs
The book is dedicated to Jónasson’s mother, Katrín Guðjónsdóttir, who died this summer. She developed Alzheimer’s only 64 years old and died nine years later, at 73.
“My mother was wonderful and it’s really sad not to be able to share with her everything that’s happening anymore,” says Jónasson, and says they were really close.
“It was terribly difficult to lose her and watch her disappear into this terrible disease. One of the things I learned was that every moment was a good time. Even if it was worse today than yesterday, at least she was with us,” he says.
“Before we lost her completely, she wrote her own memoirs. Not in a coherent form, but rather a fragment of memory, which is great to have now. We read it to our daughters and we recount stories from when she was a child, a teenager, and a young woman,” says Jónasson, saying that his mother was a story-teller, so he doesn’t have to go far to find where he gets his talent from, although they come from other sources as well.
