Writing in Ice: A Crime Writer's Guide to Iceland

The Last Post

2024-09-16T11:50:00.000-07:00

This is my last post on this blog.

I started my Writing In Ice blog in October 2020, four years ago. Most of the posts relate to my research on Iceland for my Magnus series of crime novels. I have also published some guest posts about Iceland, especially by other authors of Icelandic crime novels. I have enjoyed writing this blog; I hope you have enjoyed reading it.

There are two reasons for stopping now. One is that after four years I am running low on material. The other – related – reason is that Whale Fjord will be my last Magnus novel for a while, so my attention will be turning away from Iceland. Not forever. I firmly intend to write more Magnus novels in the future and look forward to reacquainting myself with Iceland when the time comes. It's possible I may restart posting here at that point.

So what's next? I have begun writing a new series. A British First World War veteran and a young female American foreign correspondent solve murders around the capitals of Europe in the 1930s. They start in Berlin in 1930, then they move on to Vienna in 1931 and so on. Of my existing novels, these books will probably most resemble The Diplomat's Wife.

If you are already on my mailing list, I will send you an email before the first of these novels is published. If you are not on my email list you can click here to sign up. Otherwise, you can check my website at www.michaelridpath.com.

By the way, the photograph above is a picture of me in the middle of the Berserkers' Lava Field, telling their story to a bunch of bemused crime writers.

To those of you who have followed my blog from the beginning, thank you! And if you have just stumbled upon it on the web, I hope we will bump into each other again.

Sources on Iceland 4: Film, TV and magazines

2024-08-13T05:00:00.000-07:00

TV and Film

Iceland has become a favourite location for films and television series in the last few years. Here are some that I have enjoyed or found useful.

Several of these are adaptations of the novels I have mentioned earlier.

Trapped

A TV detective series created by Iceland’s foremost director, Baltasar Kormákur. It is set in a village in the East Fjords, cut off by snow. A body is found, the weekly ferry from Denmark is suspected, and the burly local police chief Andri investigates. Very good.

The Valhalla Murders

A classic police detective TV series. A succession of murders are linked to a children’s home - Valhalla. Kata must solve the crimes, with the help of an enigmatic Icelandic expat just back from Oslo. Beautiful images of Reykjavík in the snow and really quite a lot of blood.

Woman at War

My favourite Icelandic film. A choir conductor named Halla is an eco-terrorist, destroying power lines supplying an aluminium plant, all the time watched by three musicians who provide the score. Her plan to adopt a child from the Ukraine gets in the way of things. Quirky, in the best Icelandic manner.

101 Reykjavík

A film of the book about Hlynur, the slacker who lives with his mum.

Rams

A beautiful film about two neighbouring sheep farmers in a remote dale who hate each other and haven’t spoken for decades.

The Night Shift

A comedy TV series set in a petrol station at night. Jón Gnarr, who became mayor of Reykjavík, is the night manager. An Icelandic version of The Office, it built up a cult following in the UK.

I Remember You

A deeply unsettling film about a group of visitors to a remote island who stumble across evidence of a missing child. Scary. Based on Yrsa’s book.

Pressa

A TV series about tabloid journalists. All the ethical and professional conflicts you would expect, in an Icelandic setting. I enjoyed it.

Jar City

A film of the book by Arnaldur Indridason. A classic detective story with a biotech twist. Ingvar Eggert Sigurdsson makes an excellent Erlendur (he gets demoted to be the sergeant sidekick in Trapped, above).

Nói Albinói

A film of teenage anomie set in an isolated Icelandic town in the middle of winter - filmed in Bolungarvík. It’s a little bleak. Very bleak. But memorable.

The Seagull’s Laughter

Set in an Icelandic fishing village in the 1950s, it tells the story of a local girl made good in America returning to her home town.

Cold Fever

Distinctly weird Icelandic-Japanese film about a Japanese man lost in Iceland in winter. At one point he is saved by an elf. I enjoyed it, I’m not quite sure why.

By the way, here are Iceland Review's top Icelandic movies, a list compiled in 2024.

Magazines and Newspapers

Iceland Review

A beautifully produced quarterly magazine that has been going for decades. Its journalists are often articulate English-speaking foreigners who love Iceland - such as Eliza Reid, a Canadian whose husband was until recently president. Outstanding photographs. Worth becoming a subscriber: it costs about 60 euros a year, and it keeps you in touch with Iceland.

The Reykjavík Grapevine

An English-language newspaper. Irreverent, but relevant.

The Internet

It's difficult to recommend sources on the Internet, since there are so many of them and they change so frequently. Iceland Review and The Reykjavik Grapevine have good websites; the Grapevine has great video coverage of the volcanic eruptions in Iceland over the last few years.

Alda Sigmundsdóttir's various forays on the Internet have been a tremendous source of information for me over the years. She started with a blog which became a Facebook page called Iceland Weather Report. Her current medium is a substack newsletter, Letter from Iceland. She is always interesting and occasionally provocative.

What have I missed? Please let me know, either in the comments section below this post or by email.

If you would like to receive a free copy of my 60-page novella The Polar Bear Killing and occasional emails about my books, sign up here.

Sources on Iceland 3: The Sagas

2024-08-06T10:54:00.000-07:00

If you want to understand Iceland you need to read the sagas. But which ones – there are loads of them?

These are the ones I enjoyed the most. It is well worth paying for a good translation - here the Penguin Classics brand earns its reputation for reliability. Penguin publishes a 700-page compendium of about thirty of them, entitled The Sagas of the Icelanders.

Njal’s Saga.

The longest and best. A legal thriller. The hero is Njál, a canny lawyer who tries and fails to mediate between families bearing grudges.

Egil’s Saga.

Egil was a great warrior with a bad temper and a flair for poetry.

The Laxdaela Saga.

A love triangle between three inhabitants of Breidafjördur: Gudrun, Kjartan and Bolli. Much blood is shed. Gudrun is one of the most fascinating characters in the sagas: don't mess with her.

Grettir’s Saga.

Grettir is an outlaw with a bad temper who fights humans and the undead.

Eyrbyggja Saga or The Saga of the People of Eyri.

The quarrels of various families in Snaefellsnes with a few berserkers, ghosts and soothsayers thrown in.

The Saga of the Volsungs.

The story of the ring. It’s been around for a while (both the ring and its story).

The Saga of Erik the Red, The Greenlanders’ Saga.

The travels of Erik and other Norsemen to Iceland, then Greenland and North America.

Next time: film and television.

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Sources on Iceland 2: Fiction (non-crime) and poetry.

2024-07-30T09:54:00.000-07:00

Last week I wrote about some of the non-fiction books I have read over the years to understand Iceland better. This week I’m looking at fiction and poetry. I’m excluding crime novels from this list since I discussed those earlier. Also, I include a book ‘From the Reading Pile’, which I haven’t got to yet but which seem worth a look.

Let me know in the comments section what other books should be added to the reading pile.

I have been posting at the rate of one blog post every four weeks, but I think these Sources on Iceland posts should come out closer to each other than that, so I have published this second one only one week after the first.

Fiction (Non-Crime) in Icelandic

Independent People by Halldór Laxness (tr. J. A. Thompson). The great Icelandic novel. Bjartur is a tough, independent, stubborn-as-hell farmer in Iceland at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Under the Glacier by Halldór Laxness (tr. Magnus Magnusson). An emissary from the Bishop of Iceland arrives in an eccentric community under the Snaefells glacier.

101 Reykjavík by Hallgrímur Helgason (tr. Brian Fitzgibbon). A sardonic look at the life of a thirty-year-old slacker in Reykjavík who still lives with his mum. Great depiction of Reykjavík at night; I have yet to meet a slacker there, though.

The Thief of Time by Steinunn Sigurdardóttir (tr. Rory McTurk). The story of a love affair, which touches intriguingly on class, a phenomenon that lurks only half visible in Icelandic society. One of three Sigurdardóttirs whose books I have read: they are not sisters.

The Blue Fox by Sjón (tr. Victoria Cribb). A charming story by Iceland’s leading contemporary literary author and poet about the hunt for an elusive blue fox. Applies magical realism successfully to the Icelandic landscape.

Fiction (Non-Crime) in English

The Killer’s Guide to Iceland by Zane Radcliffe. An underrated novel about an Englishman’s visit to his girlfriend in Iceland, which goes badly wrong. Imaginative descriptions of the country and its people and a good story. Should be in the crime section, really.

The Sea Road by Margaret Elphinstone. A retelling of the life of Gudrid the Wanderer, with the gaps left by the sagas filled in.

The Sealwoman’s Gift by Sally Magnusson. The story of an Icelandic woman kidnapped by Barbary pirates in the seventeenth century and taken to North Africa. Bewitching.

Running Blind by Desmond Bagley. Classic 1960s spy caper involving a British agent with a mysterious package being chased all the way around Iceland, literally circumnavigating the island. Much loved by many.

From the Reading Pile:
Burial Rites by Hannah Kent. An acclaimed novel about an Icelandic woman sentenced to death in 1829.

Poetry

Letters from Iceland by W. H. Auden and Louis MacNeice. School reports in poetry and prose from two poets sent on a boondoggle to Iceland in the 1930s by their publisher, Faber.

Moon Country by Simon Armitage and Glyn Maxwell. A follow-up pilgrimage to Iceland made by two leading British poets, once again paid for by Faber.

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Sources on Iceland 1: Non-Fiction Books

2024-07-22T09:15:00.000-07:00

Here is a more detailed list of the various sources I have used to learn about Iceland over the years.

This list is far from comprehensive. Its obvious weakness is that it only lists books published in English, thereby omitting all kinds of books only available in Icelandic, as well as books about Iceland in German, French, Spanish and other languages. And I haven’t included every book I have read on the subject.

Non-fiction books in this post: future posts will run through poetry, fiction, film and TV, magazines and the Internet.

So, here goes:

Non-Fiction Books

Icelandic Saga by Magnus Magnusson. A trip around Iceland, beautifully combining its landscape and its history.

The Little Book of the Icelanders by Alda Sigmundsdóttir. A little book about Iceland and its quirks by an Icelandic-Canadian writer with a keen eye. Alda’s other ‘Little Books’ include Iceland in the Old Days, Tourists in Iceland and The Icelandic Language.

Dreaming of Iceland by Sally Magnusson. A wonderful tale of a week-long trip around Iceland by Sally Magnusson and her father Magnus.

Ring of Seasons by Terry Lacy. An affectionate description of Iceland by an American who lives there.

Names for the Sea: Strangers in Iceland by Sarah Moss. A beautifully written account of an English novelist and academic’s year at the University of Iceland during the financial crash and the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull. It wasn’t all easy.

Waking Up in Iceland by Paul Sullivan. An account of following the music scene in Reykjavík by a perceptive music journalist.

The Rough Guide to Iceland by David Leffman and James Proctor and Lonely Planet Iceland by Fran Parnell and Brandon Presser. Never underestimate the usefulness of well-written and carefully researched travel guides, of which these two are good examples.

Across Iceland by Olive Murray Chapman. An intrepid Scottish woman’s account of her travels across Iceland in 1930, describing the warm welcome she received and the primitive living standards of the time. This lady was a lot tougher than Messrs Auden and MacNeice, more famous visitors at about the same time. Long out of print.

Meltdown Iceland by Roger Boyes. A clear account of the kreppa, the financial crash that swept through Iceland in 2008-2010, by a foreign correspondent from The Times.

Frozen Assets by Ármann Thorvaldsson. Another account of the kreppa, this time from one of the bankers who helped bring it about.

Icelandic Folk Legends translated by Alda Sigmundsdóttir and Icelandic Folk and Fairy Tales translated by May and Hallberg Hallmundsson. Good translations of Iceland’s wonderful folk tales featuring trolls, elves, hidden people, ghosts, ravens, sea monsters and a polar bear. Best dipped in and out of rather than read all in one sitting, in my opinion.

A Traveller’s Guide to Icelandic Folk Tales by Jón R. Hjálmarsson. A fascinating book of sixty folk tales from different locations around Iceland, each story including a description of the countryside where it took place. Good to pack for an Icelandic road trip.

Looking for The Hidden Folk by Nancy Marie Brown. A clear-eyed discussion of Icelanders’ beliefs in elves over the centuries, which also respects the beliefs of the many Icelanders who don’t. As a foreigner getting to know Iceland, this is a subject you can only avoid for so long.

Secrets of the Sprakker by Eliza Reid. Eliza is the Canadian-Icelandic wife of the former President of Iceland. This book demonstrates how Icelandic society has allowed some remarkable women to flourish while acknowledging that even in Iceland there are still obstacles to be overcome.

Iceland in World War Two by Jökull Gíslason. A fascinating guide to how Iceland experienced the war after the British occupation of the island in May 1940. Great photographs too.

How Iceland Changed the World by Egill Bjarnason. A history of Iceland that manages to be clear, concise and very funny. I wish I had written it.

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Crime novels set in Greenland: Christoffer Petersen

2024-06-18T03:00:00.000-07:00

My last two blog posts described my researches in Greenland for my novel The Wanderer. Compared to Iceland, there are very few crime novels set in Greenland that are available in English. The only author I know of who writes these is the British-Danish crime novelist Christoffer Petersen.

His books feature the Greenlandic detective constable David Maratse and give a terrific picture of life – and death – in Greenland. Chris himself spent seven years living in Greenland and his knowledge and understanding of the country and its people shine through. They are fascinating novels, and great murder mysteries too.

I asked Christoffer to post here about living in and writing about Greenland:

Greenland. Where to start? I could begin by saying that Greenland was never on my radar. I grew up on Jack London stories, devouring them and everything else remotely connected to them. I developed a passion for the Arctic as a teenager, and it has consumed me for much of my life, guiding my decisions and leading me ever further north. I was supposed to follow in London's footsteps and go to Canada or Alaska. I was supposed to drive my dog sledge through forests. But when studying at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, Scotland, a Rolex advert in National Geographic featuring the Danish Sirius Sledge Patrol in Northeast Greenland changed everything, and I adjusted my sights. Some twenty years later, my Danish wife and I landed by helicopter on the remote island of Uummannaq, 370 miles north of the Arctic Circle with a population just over 2,000. There were plenty of icebergs. Not a single tree.

My 'furthest north' was Qaanaaq, a remote village of 600 people, just 800 miles from the North Pole, and north of the American Pituffik Space Base (Thule Air Base), from which the people of Qaanaaq had been forcibly displaced many years earlier. Jane and I lived there for two years. In all, we spent seven years in Greenland, and for different reasons, they were the toughest and most memorable years of our lives. They have shaped my writing, and, in no small measure, those years in the Arctic have shaped me and my outlook on the world.

The curious thing about writing about Greenland is that many people confuse it with Iceland. Readers have even left reviews on my books about Greenland, saying how much they enjoyed reading about Iceland. I think it's very easy to forget about the big island north and west of its smaller neighbour. In fact, a Greenlandic friend of mine once mentioned travelling to Greece on an exchange. When the teachers in the receiving school brought out the school atlas to show the kids where my friend lived, she was forced to point at a big blank white space on the map where Greenland should have been. Only it wasn't there.

"Ah, we thought it was just ice," the teacher reportedly said.

Ice. There is a lot of it. More, in fact, than in Iceland. A lot more.

The Danes have hundreds of years invested in Greenland, for better and worse. It was formally recognised as a Danish colony in 1814, when the Danes wrested it from the clutches of the Norwegians, and currently has an autonomous status within the Kingdom of Denmark. However, it's not difficult to forget about Greenland, or to get in a muddle when talking about it. A simple preposition often relegates Greenland, and its population of roughly 56,000 inhabitants, to a lesser land. The Danes say people live 'on' Greenland as it is an island after all. The Greenlanders say they live 'in' Greenland. It is their country, after all. Curiously, while writing this post, Word wanted me to write 'in' Iceland, not 'on'. And yet, is Iceland not an island? The Danish spelling of Iceland is 'Island', suggesting that it is. But semantics aside, Greenland is an imperceivably big country. The population, however, as I often mention in the author's notes in my books, can fit comfortably inside Dodger Stadium, the baseball park in Los Angeles, USA. It's no wonder Trump suggested he could buy Greenland. Nobody lives there. Right?

The people who do live in Greenland live on the coast, with the greatest concentration of inhabitants on the west coast. Nuuk, the capital, has a little under 20,000 people. It is a modern city boasting everything from Northern Lights, humpback whales, a university, and the best espresso money can buy in the far north. In some of the smaller settlements, you will find anywhere from 30 to a couple of hundred people. While I lived in Qaanaaq, the last two residents of the nearby settlement of Moriusaq relocated to the village. They were father and son. The son maintained the small electricity station, powering the settlement. Moriusaq also had a shop, water, and a lot of empty houses. Moriusaq was actually quite big and full of amenities when compared to the smallest of Greenland's populated areas.

Nuuk is a city. There are several towns. Then there are villages and settlements. The smallest populated area is what's called a bosted in Danish, and najugaq in West Greenlandic. I worked as a teacher in Greenland and had the pleasure of grading a teenager from a tiny najugaq in his English oral exam when I flew to Upernavik as an external examiner. The boy and his brother were self-taught until they moved to the small town of Upernavik for their last year of school. When I say self-taught I really mean it. There was no teacher where they lived, and they were not home-schooled as we might understand it. The boy had a strange accent when he spoke English, but his teacher and I gave him the highest grade, as there was nothing wrong with his grammar or vocabulary. The boy's parents spoke neither Danish nor English. He learned English from video games and DVDs. There was no Internet where he lived.

Greenlanders have been the subject of Danish prejudice and racism in one form or another for a long time. Not all Danes look down on Greenlanders, but the media often has a negative slant, and there are many legal sinkholes within which Greenlanders can get trapped within the Danish system. But for those Danes who spend a significant amount of time in Greenland -- and I include myself as one of them -- their appreciation of Greenlanders, their culture, and their country, is influenced by stories of determination, progress, and triumphs in the face of overwhelming odds, such as the story of the boy getting top grades in English.

The Danish media often forget to report such triumphs, although they are getting better at doing so. But they never mention the social dumping that occurs when Danes who are wholly unsuited to work in Denmark, often due to alcoholism, wind up in Greenland. You might wonder how that can happen, and the simple answer is there are not enough qualified people to fill positions in Greenland. They, the Greenlanders, are at the mercy of imported workers, and I would be remiss not to accept that I was one of them. That is to say an imported worker, not an alcoholic. Alcoholism is a problem in Greenland, as it is in many parts of the world, not least Denmark. It's just more visible when there is only one store in a small village from which to buy your booze, and everyone can see you doing it.

One post about Greenland will never be more than a glimpse into what I know is one of the most fascinating, inspirational, dramatic, tragic, and uplifting countries in the world. I think of it as a land of firsts, as there are so many things I did for the very first time in Greenland, and never again. There is a danger of thinking of Greenland as exotic, as different, and something else. This was evident when a Danish friend of mine announced that he and his wife and their one-year-old boy were coming to visit Jane and me in Uummannaq in winter. The sun had yet to return, and the temperature was often below minus 20 degrees Celsius. His friends urged caution, thinking that it was reckless to take their baby boy to the Arctic.

I think my friend's response sums it up rather well.

He said, "I'm quite sure they have children in Greenland, too."

They do, and I was privileged and fortunate to teach a whole bunch of them.

Michael and I write crime stories set in cold, Arctic countries. We do our best to bring those countries alive through stories. The stories we write include terrible crimes and mysteries to be solved. But you know what? In my opinion, the real mystery is that so very few people know about Greenland, the real Greenland. But as the world heats up -- climatically and politically -- I guarantee that Greenland will be on the lips of people all over the world. And that last blank white space on the map will be restored.

And, as they say, watch 'that' space.

Better still, go see it for yourselves.

I recommend seeing Greenland. I also recommend reading Chris's books. The first four of the David Maratse books are published as an omnibus on Kindle.

Christoffer Petersen's website is at christoffer-petersen.com and his Substack is at christofferpetersen.substack.com .

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Vinland: Gudrid and her husband discover America

2024-05-21T06:23:00.000-07:00

In my last blog post, I described how Gudrid the Wanderer wandered from Iceland to Greenland. But she didn't stop there.

The two Vinland Sagas disagree on who first made landfall in North America, which became known as 'Vinland'. One saga says it was Bjarni Herjólfsson, who got lost on the way to Greenland, the other says it was Leif Eriksson, Erik the Red's son. These days Leif seems to get all the credit. Anyway, Leif, Thorfinn Karlsefni and Thorfinn's new wife Gudrid made a series of expeditions to Vinland, or Vínland in Old Norse, so called because of the discovery of grapes there.

By the way, the photograph above is of Eiriksfjord in Greenland from where Leif Eriksson and his wife Gudrid set sail for Vinland. The iceberg seems to be giving me the finger, I'm not sure why.

The sagas describe the establishment in Vinland of temporary settlements at 'Leif's Booths' and 'Keel Point', as well as a tantalizing journey far to the south to a place called 'Hop', which is described in some detail.

There is much less archaeological evidence for a Viking presence in North America; indeed, until 1961 there was none. Despite the compelling descriptions in the sagas, many historians preferred to write them off as myth, ensuring that the credit for discovering America lay with the Genoese Christopher Columbus.

However, in 1961 a Norwegian couple, Anne and Helge Ingstad, discovered evidence of a Norse settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland. Since then various other Viking artefacts have been found in Canada, especially to the north on Baffin Island and Ellesmere Island.

Actually, of course, America was discovered by some Siberians who wandered over what is now the Bering Straits about 20,000 years ago.

There remains the question of how far Thorfinn Karlsefni and Gudrid travelled south, in other words where this mysterious place Hop is. The Vikings stayed there for a couple of summers, before being driven out by the locals, or 'Skraelings' as the Norse called them.

There are clues about grapes, self-sown wheat, a river running north to south, and a lagoon right by the sea (hóp means 'tidal lagoon'). Candidate locations include the St Lawrence estuary, Buzzard's Bay near Cape Cod, Narragansett in Rhode Island and even Brooklyn. The truth is we don't know. That's the kind of gap in the historical record I love. It's crying out for a novel to fill it.

A quantity of spurious Viking remains have been found in the United States. Most are clearly fakes.

One of the most famous is the Kensington rune stone - Kensington is a small town in Minnesota - which was discovered by a Swedish farmer in 1898. This bore an inscription in runes saying the equivalent of '30 Vikings woz here 1362'. This seems an obvious fake - Minnesota is a long way from the Atlantic.

But much to my surprise, having read the evidence, I suspect that the stone may indeed be genuine, and that a Viking party travelled down from the Hudson Bay or along the Great Lakes water system to Minnesota. It is extraordinary how far Viking trading routes stretched: from Byzantium in the east, through Russia and the Baltic to Iceland and then on to Greenland and Vinland. We shouldn't underestimate the Norsemen's ability to cover large distances by sea, river and lake.

Oscar Wilde is supposed to have said: "The Icelanders are the most intelligent race on earth, because they discovered America and never told anyone."

Much of the scepticism of historians towards the idea that Icelanders discovered America comes from Italians or Italian Americans who are big fans of Columbus. They have a particular problem with a visit Columbus may or may not have made to Iceland in 1477, fifteen years before he set sail on the Santa María. The journey was reported by Columbus himself in his letter to Queen Isabella many years later, but he was frustratingly vague, talking about a land called 'Thile' and tides of extraordinary variation. But his account agrees with the stories of an Italian nobleman staying near Ólafsvík.

The claims by some historians that if Columbus did visit Iceland he would have been unlikely to hear of Vinland are laughable. I quote from an article in a learned historical journal I read in the British Library:

There is no need to suggest that he [Columbus] learned of the medieval Greenland colony: Icelanders had lost interest in it after Norway took control of contacts with it . . . He is still less likely to have heard of the Vinland sagas, even if they had been retained in folk memory, which is very doubtful, or had been written down in unintelligible language between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries.

This is one of the all-time classic underestimations of Iceland. The fifteenth century was the greatest period when the sagas were copied. Iceland was full of priests who understood Latin. Icelanders had traded with Greenland in living memory; some had attended a wedding there seventy years before. If Columbus did visit Iceland in 1477, as he claimed he did, he would most certainly have heard about Vinland.

Plenty to get my teeth into. In September 2018, almost ten years after I had first heard of Gudrid and visited Ingjaldshóll where Columbus is rumoured to have stayed, The Wanderer was published.

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Greenland: Gudrid the Wanderer wanders all over the place.

2024-04-22T06:30:00.000-07:00

I first heard of Gudrídur Thorbjarnardóttir, or Gudrid the Wanderer, when I was visiting my ecclesiastical contact, the Reverend Sara. She showed me her church, an amazing modern building with an altar bathed in light reflected off water, in the Reykjavík suburb of Grafarholt. The church was dedicated to Gudrid. She told me about Gudrid's travels from Iceland to Greenland to North America and back again, and then on to Rome, all around the year 1000 AD. I found this extraordinary; I still do.

As I discovered more about Gudrid, I determined to write a book about her. But writing a twenty-first-century detective novel about a Viking explorer is not easy. It took me several years to alight on a way of doing it, but I got there in the end.

A TV crew is making a documentary about Gudrid, following in her footsteps to Greenland and North America, when someone is murdered. Magnus investigates. The resulting book is called The Wanderer.

Before Magnus could get on the case, I needed to do my own investigation. There are two sagas which give a broad picture of the Viking settlement of Greenland and exploration of North America: The Saga of the Greenlanders, and The Saga of Erik the Red, together known as The Vinland Sagas, and published as such by Penguin Classics. These describe the following story.

The outlaw Erik the Red sailed from Iceland and established himself at a farm at Brattahlíd in the south-west of Greenland. Gudrid followed him, with her first husband, who died soon after they arrived in Greenland. Vikings settled along the west coast of Greenland, at the 'Eastern Settlement' around what is now Qaqortoq, and the 'Western Settlement' further up the coast near what is now the capital, Nuuk.

The Norse remained in Greenland until the fifteenth century. Around the year 1000, Northern Europe was relatively warm, and it was possible to grow crops in Greenland. Greenlanders traded with Iceland and England, narwhal horns being a particularly profitable export, as we have seen.

Most of Greenland is covered with a massive block of ice, many miles deep, but there are small patches of lush green around the south coast. One of these is Brattahlíd, now known as Qassiarsuk, which is on the opposite side of the fjord from the former US airbase and now international airport at Narsarsuaq. You can still see the remains of Erik the Red's farm, and a replica stands a couple of hundred metres away (see photo above – notice how green it is?). In July, the ruins are knee-deep in lush green grass and wild flowers; white and blue icebergs drift sedately by in the fjord. Sheep farming was reintroduced to the area in the 1920s.

The mystery about Greenland isn't how it was settled but how it was abandoned. As the thirteenth century progressed, the climate became colder. The southern fjords were iced up for much of the year. Greenland had been uninhabited when the Norsemen arrived, but in the twelfth century, the Inuit appeared. It's not clear whether they and the Norsemen fought, but the Inuit were expert hunters, and it is probable that they outcompeted the Norsemen, especially when it became too cold for the Viking farmers to grow crops.

The last recorded mention of the Greenland settlement is the description of a wedding at Hvalsey in 1409 by a visiting merchant from Iceland - the ruins of the Norse church there still stand. Eventually, the harbours of Greenland were frozen all the year round. It's not clear what happened to the surviving settlers: some speculate that they headed south to Vinland, some think they were overwhelmed by the Inuit, and others believe they starved to death in the cold.

Six hundred years later, I shiver to think about those last settlers trapped year-round by sea ice, waiting for ships from the outside world that never came.

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Major Wise: Britain's dodgy Head of Intelligence in Iceland in World War II

2024-03-26T07:30:00.000-07:00

Those of you who have read my recent novel, Whale Fjord, will have come across an unpleasant character named Neville Pybus-Smith, the head of British military intelligence in Iceland during the British occupation in 1940-41.

Well, Pybus-Smith is loosely based on a real character named Major Wise.

One of my most fortunate discoveries when researching Whale Fjord, was an Icelander named Jökull Gíslason. Not only is Jökull one of Iceland's leading experts on the country's history in World War Two, he is also a police inspector. And helpful. The perfect source for me!

He has written an excellent book, Iceland in World War II, which I referred to frequently while writing Whale Fjord. He also wrote a fascinating article, entitled Spymasters, about the dodgy Major Wise. He has permitted me to reproduce it here.

"Major Alfred Roy Wise was the British spymaster in Iceland. He is a confusing character, described by his subordinates as pleasant and amiable while he was considered aloof by Icelanders. He was certainly a product of the old British Empire. His father was a judge for the Supreme Court of Hong Kong. He went to public schools in England and then was Assistant District Governor in Kenya.

When Wise returned to England he was a staunch conservative and a member of the Carlton Club. He was elected a member of Parliament for Smethwick in 1931, the seat previously filled by Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists. Initially part of the appeasement group he later joined Churchill's dissenters.

When war came Wise joined the Army and was commissioned as a captain even though he had no special training or qualifications other than being upper class. Wise was sent to serve with the British garrison in Iceland in command of the Intelligence section. In this capacity managed public relations between the British Army and Icelanders and dealt with matters of espionage.

Jón Múli Árnason, then 19 years old, was a translator for Major Wise. In an interview, he mentioned that not only did Wise have him translate his conversations with Icelanders, but he also had Jón translate conversations with British soldiers who spoke with working-class dialects, especially those from the north.

Wise dispatched his duties in an overzealous manner. He arrested and deported several Icelanders to England on charges such as owning wireless sets and the like. Wise even decided that one person, although he had done nothing wrong, exhibited behaviour that could lead to espionage and should be detained. Wise screened the passengers of the Esja, a ship carrying Icelandic refugees from Denmark, and took an active part in the arrests of the members of the left-wing newspaper Pjódviljinn.

Wise saw potential spies in every corner, even going so far as suspecting the Reykjavik chief of police. In fairness, the chief of police had been the guest of Heinrich Himmler in Germany in the years leading up to the war.

Many British were terrified that there were fifth columnists in Iceland. They blamed the disastrous campaign in Norway in part on Norwegian Nazi sympathizers – Quislings – and expected the same to be true of the Icelandic population. They also seriously overestimated the ability of the Germans to invade Iceland. In reality, there were very few Nazi sympathizers in the Nordic countries.

Major Wise's approach made him few friends in Iceland and his ambitions were too great for this posting. Wanting to do his part in the war, he only secured a minor role, and that he was ill-suited to. His overzealousness would have dire consequences for Icelandic-British relations."

Jökull says that Major Wise's successor, the affable American of Icelandic heritage, Lieutenant Colonel Dori Hjalmarson, was much better liked and consequently much more effective.

It's difficult to get hold of Jökull's book outside Iceland, but if any of you are interested, there is a great Webinar on YouTube featuring Jökull on the subject of Iceland in World War Two. Otherwise, you could try this link for the Reykjavik Grapevine. It may/should work!

Whale Fjord's sales have been pleasing. Thanks to all of you who bought a copy of the book, especially those who reviewed it on Amazon or Goodreads. On Amazon, the book has 217 reviews, with 4.5 stars, which makes me happy. Not that I look at reviews, of course!

If you haven't yet read it yet, and would like to, here is a link.

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New Magnus crime novel out: Whale Fjord

2024-02-27T07:32:00.000-08:00

My new Magnus novel is published! It's called Whale Fjord and is number 7 in the series after Death in Dalvik.

Iceland 1940. Britain invades Iceland. Lieutenant Tom Marks is a British officer tasked with defending Whale Fjord. He meets Kristín, a young widow from a nearby farm, who has a small son. Tom is smitten.

Iceland 2023. Inspector Magnus Ragnarsson is called to the shores of Whale Fjord where the skeletons of a man and a woman have been discovered, both shot with British wartime bullets. Magnus uncovers a web of anger and revenge that stretches back eighty years and forward to a shocking murder in Reykjavík.

'Magnus is a complex and totally compelling character, fitting perfectly into the bleak and intimidating settings of Ridpath’s Iceland.’ – New York Journal of Books

The book will be available worldwide, in paperback or as an ebook through Kindle (only). The ebook price is £2.99/$3.99 for the next week or so, but will go up to £3.99/$5.99 after that. This is the Amazon link.

If you want to buy a signed and dedicated copy, then please get in touch with my local bookshop, Lutyens and Rubinstein, who will send you one once I have come by and signed it.

If you do buy it, I hope you enjoy it!

World War Two in Iceland: the Subject for a New Book

2024-02-06T06:30:00.000-08:00

Very few people outside Iceland realize that Britain occupied the country in 1940; I certainly hadn’t heard of it until I started writing novels set there.

Royal Marines landed in Reykjavík in May that year and they were soon relieved by the British territorial 49th Division from Yorkshire – nicknamed ‘the Polar Bears’ – and a Canadian brigade including the exotically named Cameron Highlanders of Ottawa and Les Fusiliers Mont-Royal.

At its height, at the end of 1940, there were over 25,000 British and Canadian troops defending the country. This has always seemed odd to me – I would have thought they could more usefully have defended Britain from the Germans just across the Channel. But Major-General Curtis, the commanding officer in Iceland, was adamant they were needed. No one thought to check with the Royal Navy, who were equally certain the Germans could never have transported an invading force to Iceland and, more importantly, supplied it once it had landed.

In the summer of 1941, the Canadians and the British left for Britain, and handed over the defence of Iceland to the Americans. While the Allied soldiers never did anything more than fire at a few Luftwaffe aeroplanes flying overhead, aircraft from Iceland harried German U-boats in the North Atlantic, and Hvalfjördur was the mustering point for many of the Arctic convoys to Russia.

Life in Iceland for the occupiers was tedious – the main enemies were boredom and the weather. But many fell in love with the country, and some fell in love with its people.

The same troops landed in Normandy in June 1944 and fought their way through France, so in retrospect their time in Iceland was a period of peace and quiet.

The Icelanders’ reaction was mixed. No one likes to be invaded, and many were concerned about the conquest of their women, a situation known in Icelandic as “The Situation”.

On the other hand, there was plenty of money to be made, especially once the Americans arrived. The occupying soldiers generally behaved well.

Many, if not all, of the population might have agreed with the Icelandic MP Árni Jónasson when he said: ‘It was practically a unique example in history of an occupying army which was better liked on the day of its departure than on the day of its arrival.’

I have always wanted to write about this period in Icelandic history, but I couldn’t work out how I could link a murder in 1940 with a detective investigation in the 2020s. Any character still alive in 2023 would have been a small child in 1940. Very tricky. But, after several years of mulling over various ideas, I found the solution. And I was able to write the novel.

It’s called Whale Fjord and it’s out on 24 February. More details later.

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Winter in Iceland

2024-01-11T06:30:00.000-08:00

The higher the latitude, the greater the difference between summer and winter. Iceland is only just below the Arctic Circle, so in midwinter it is dark nearly all the time. Daylight is only a few hours. In practice dawn turns into dusk at lunchtime.

As you can imagine, this has a depressing effect on locals. They go to work in the dark; they come home in the dark. It was even worse in the old days when most Icelanders lived on isolated farms. They essentially stayed indoors all winter in their living quarters above the animals whose heat kept them warm. They knitted, they read, they milked the cow, they moved hay about. They hibernated.

Because of its proximity to the Arctic Circle, in theory, the sun is visible for a short period every day in Iceland, even at midwinter. But that is not true for the town of Ísafjördur in the West Fjords, which is wedged between high mountains. There they last see the sun on 16 November and it returns on 25 January. They have sólarkaffi - coffee and pancakes - to celebrate on the 25th.

But there are many good things about Iceland in winter. Icelandic houses are nothing much to look at from the outside, but they are cosy on the inside: small, warm, often lit with candles. Iceland can look beautiful under snow, especially if the sun manages to peek out between or below the clouds.

In my opinion, the best time to visit a hot pot at an outdoor swimming pool or the world-famous Blue Lagoon is in winter, where your body is warm, your nose is cold, and steam billows up from the water through which you catch glimpses of snow-covered rock. Admittedly, you have to endure the bracing dash over the few short yards from changing room to pool.

Then there are the Northern Lights. This phenomenon is present in winter and summer, but you can only see them when it is dark, so winter is much the better season than summer. And you need clear skies, which in Iceland requires optimism and good luck. The lights, also known as the aurora borealis, are the result of solar wind disturbing the magnetosphere and altering the trajectories of charged particles in the upper atmosphere causing them to emit light.

The Northern Lights come in many different forms: at their weakest they are thin trails of white; at their strongest they take the form of shimmering curtains of green, yellow and red, which drape the whole night sky. They don’t perform every night - their strength varies. It’s not the case that they are strongest near the North Pole; in fact, there is a band that surrounds the earth close to the Arctic Circle where they are at maximum strength, and the centre of this band passes right over Iceland, which suggests the country is a good place to see them. If it isn’t cloudy.

There have been magnificent pictures taken of the Northern Lights, but not by me. You need to be clever with a camera. Yet no camera can do the aurora justice. You need to be standing underneath the black of the night sky stretching from horizon to horizon all around you. Then the lights play, shifting, shimmering, disappearing and reappearing, first in one part of the sky and then another. It’s all about swivelling your neck and dropping your jaw.

There are a number of festivals to relieve the tedium of the long night-days. Christmas is as big a deal in Iceland as everywhere else. The mischievous ‘Yule lads’ come in the days before Christmas to place gifts in children’s shoes.

Like much of Northern Europe, Christmas Eve is more important than Christmas Day. There is a tradition of everyone giving each other books; I thoroughly approve of this. Carols are sung, board games are played, the Christmas tree glimmers. A traditional Christmas Eve dinner might be thick rice soup mixed with cinnamon and sugar, dark ptarmigan with red cabbage, and frothy pineapple mousse. There is a lot of hangikjöt around at this time of year, delicious smoked lamb.

Then, a few days later, comes New Year’s Eve. The entire nation watches a satirical comedy show on TV and then emerges to launch their elaborate arsenals of fireworks at each other.

In January or February, the Icelanders celebrate thorrablót, a feast of all the traditional foods: putrefied shark, ram’s testicles, congealed sheep’s blood wrapped in a ram’s stomach and boiled sheep’s head, all washed down with ‘black death’. Yum yum. Eventually, Icelanders display their elevated sense of irony with ‘the first day of summer’, which takes place in a snowstorm some time in April.

Whale Fjord is out in February! It's the next Magnus novel set in Iceland. Two skeletons dating from Britain's occupation of Iceland in 1940 are discovered on the shores of Whale Fjord. Magnus investigates. More details soon.

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Iceland blows its top. Again.

2023-12-29T06:19:00.000-08:00

Iceland blew its top last week. And then it calmed down.

This was the third eruption on the Reykjanes Peninsula in the last three years. It was the most spectacular – and the briefest – to date.

The volcano erupted on the evening of 18th December. Rather than a classic conical volcano, this eruption site is a four-kilometre-long fissure which threw a wall of fire into the air and spewed lava over the mountainside.

Within twenty-four hours the ferocity of the eruption had diminished and it was declared over after only three days. The first eruption, at nearby Fagradalsfjall, lasted months.

photo AFP/Viken Kantarci

Grindavík

The site is only three kilometres from Grindavík – see photo above. The fissure actually stretches under the centre of the town and for a couple of days in early November, it looked as if Grindavík itself might erupt. That doesn’t mean lava flowing down onto the town like it did at Herculaneum, say, but rather lava bursting up from beneath the streets and houses.

Scary if you are a resident. The town and the nearby Blue Lagoon tourist destination were evacuated in early November. By last week, the threat seemed to have diminished and residents were allowed back into town for brief periods during the day.

On Sunday the Blue Lagoon opened up again to tourists, and the following evening a hotelier who had defied the authorities and spent the night in Grindavík appeared on TV to declare that the emergency services were a bunch of wusses. The volcano erupted that night.

I was in Grindavík in October. The town is about 50 km from Reykjavík on the south coast of the peninsula that sticks out into the Atlantic to the west of the capital, and 15km south of the main road to the airport, just beyond the Blue Lagoon. The town has a population of about 4,000 people. It is not exactly picturesque – it’s a serious fishing town with many storage and processing sheds and equipment.

It’s also where Gunnhildur lives, the police officer in Quentin Bates’s excellent crime novels.

Evacuation

Back in November, the residents were told to evacuate in the middle of the night with no warning. Although they have been allowed back briefly, the situation does not look good. Their town might erupt again at any moment. From 23 December, residents were allowed back overnight over the Christmas period, but now the authorities think there may be another eruption on New Year's Eve. I can't help feeling very sorry for the Grindavíkers.

Needless to say, Icelanders pulled together to provide accommodation for the evacuees, including foreign workers who have no local support network of friends and relatives.

Amazingly, there have been no deaths directly resulting from the three eruptions so far. But it isn’t surprising that one hiker had to be airlifted to safety after hiking to the volcano and becoming disoriented.

Tongue Twisting

You thought Eyjafjallajökull was bad! This one is called Sundhnjúkargígaröd. I am practising. Snood–hnurr–gigglegarod? I’ll get it eventually.

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A Five-Day Iceland Itinerary

2023-11-28T12:28:00.028-08:00

For years, a group of old friends, who have also been loyal readers of my books, have been asking me to show them around Iceland. I promised I would one day, and this year I decided to take the plunge. If not now, when?

So I drew up an itinerary for the eight of us – four couples - and we went at the beginning of October.

The trip worked very well. And since readers often ask me to suggest places to visit in Iceland, I thought I would share the itinerary with you.

There were some important decisions to be made first.

When to go? Iceland gets very crowded in July and August and the weather isn’t very good anyway. It’s dark in winter. For a land with no trees, the autumn colours can be quite spectacular. So we chose early October.

How long to go for? There would be plenty to see on a two-week trip to Iceland, but it would also be expensive. So we settled on five days.

What about Reykjavik? Once again, there is plenty to see in Reykjavik, but we decided since we had limited time, we would spend most of it in the Icelandic countryside. The centre of Reykjavik is quite small, and you can get a little bit of a feel for it walking around for 3 hours or so.

Where to go? The Snaefellsnes peninsula has featured heavily in my books and there is plenty to do there. It’s also only three hours from Reykjavik. So that, plus the three big sights of Thingvellir, Gullfoss and Geysir seemed a good choice.

Here is the itinerary:

Day 1

Arrive in Iceland.

Dinner Apotek. A good restaurant just off the Austurvöllur square in central Reykjavík.

Hotel: The Reykjavik Residence Hotel. Rooms are in a series of old houses full of character in the city centre.

Day 2

Walk around Reykjavik. Cafe Mokka on Skólavördustígur; the Hallgrímskirkja including view from the tower; walk downhill through residential streets of old brightly coloured metal-clad houses; the Tjörnin pond; the Reykjavík City Hall with large relief map of Iceland; the Austurvöllur square outside Parliament; Baejarins Beztu Pylsur hot dog stand; the Harpa opera house; walk along the bay to the Viking longship sculpture.

Afternoon. Drive to Snaefellsnes.

Hotel. Hótel Búdir. My favourite hotel in Iceland in a spectacular location. View of the mountains, the Snaefelsjökull volcano, a lava field and the black church. Good food too – lamb and fish recommended.

Day 3

The Snaefellsnes Peninsula, as featured in a couple of my books, especially Sea of Stone. Pretty fishing village of Stykkishólmur; Helgafell the "holy mountain" of the sagas; the Berserkjahraun and the Berserkjagata (a path cut through the lava field by two berserkers a thousand years ago); the shark museum at Bjarnarhöfn; lunch in Grundarfjördur looking out on the photogenic Kirkjufell mountain; Hellnar and a 2km walk along the cliffs to Arnarstapi and back

Hotel. Hótel Búdir

Day 4

Drive to Hvalfjördur – "Whale Fjord" – and along the south shore of the fjord, where my next book Whale Fjord is set. Hvammsvik hot springs - an amazing series of hot pots by the side of the fjord with a wonderful view. Worth the expensive entrance, but you need to book online in advance.

Afternoon. Thingvellir, the open-air Parliament set next to a dramatic gorge between the two continental plates.

Hotel: Blue Hotel Fagralundur in Reykholt. Well run and not expensive. Dinner at the good Mika restaurant next door.

Day 5

Morning. Geysir – the geyser – and Gullfoss– a waterfall of magnificent power.

Afternoon either Reykjavik revisited or Kleifarvatn and the Seltún hot springs to the south-west of Reykjavík.

Hotel: Cheap hotel by the airport, but don't choose the one we stayed in!

Day 6

Morning flight home.

There are countless other ways of seeing Iceland, but this trip worked well. It is amazing how much variety you can squeeze into five days! If you have any questions about this itinerary, just ask me in the comments section.

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Snow in Iceland

2023-10-24T11:30:00.004-07:00

The weather in Iceland is terrible. But then it changes.

A perfect example of this was my research trip to Saudárkrókur in northern Iceland in November 2016. It was snowing hard in Reykjavík. I only had four days to get to Saudárkrókur and back, a distance of about three hundred kilometres there and three hundred kilometres back, and I was worried. According to the government website, road travel was not recommended. You don’t argue with Icelanders on the subject of snow: if they say it’s too bad to drive, it’s too bad to drive.

I lost a day, spent in the snow in Reykjavík. The following morning, at about 10 a.m., the website advice changed to a go. So I went.

The first hundred kilometres along the Ring Road were fine. I passed the windy headland by Borgarnes successfully, and drove north through the snow.

Then the road climbed to the notorious Holtavörduheidi, the highlands between the west and the north of Iceland. People lost their way and died trying to cross this on foot or horseback well into the twentieth century, and the weather hasn’t improved since then. Sure enough, I entered cloud and never left it for another hundred kilometres. I drove along at thirty kilometres an hour, both hands on the wheel, staring hard at the road ahead.

There are beautiful lakes and mountains on either side of the road here. So I am told. I didn’t see them. But the snowfall had eased off, the road had been cleared, and I made it to Saudárkrókur.

I didn’t have much time. I visited Glaumbaer in the snow. Glaumbaer is where Gudrid the Wanderer lived after she returned to Iceland from Greenland, and it was where a body was going to be found on page one of my next book, The Wanderer. In August, without snow, when it would look decidedly different. I then visited the local police station, saw two slightly sinister ravens circling in the middle of town, and stayed the night at the Tindastóll, one of the oldest hotels in Iceland. And yes, a discussion with the chambermaid confirmed that there was a ghost in that hotel.

I wanted to give myself plenty of time for the trip back to Keflavík to catch my flight, and so I set off from Saudárkrókur early, while it was still dark. The snow had stopped, the roads were clear, and the sun rose to reveal a sight of pristine beauty. The following hours I drove through some of the most beautiful landscape I have seen in my life.

It wasn’t any one mountain, or any one view. It was a combination of thick newly fallen snow, smooth lakes, dramatic mountain slopes and desolate emptiness, with only the odd, tiny hut showing any sign of habitation.

And the light. During his visit in 1936, W. H. Auden wrote: ‘Iceland is the sun colouring the mountains without being anywhere in sight, even sunk beyond the horizon.’ It’s still true.

The sun in Iceland is always low, but in winter it is particularly low. It appears above the horizon at about ten o’clock, brushing clouds, water and mountainsides pink. Then it rolls along the horizon before sinking in another glorious inferno of orange and red. As I drove, the sunlight reflected off the clouds in a diffuse pink, even at midday, shifting to yellow, grey and purple as it brought the shape of the towering cloud formations into dramatic relief. Patches of clear sky were light blue and pure. The rivers were pink or a burnished copper, depending on the angle the sun struck them; in shadow they were a ruffled black. Ice shifted colour from white to black, via grey, yellow and brown.

That day the scenery was constantly changing, and I was constantly pulling over to take photographs. As I approached the town of Borgarnes, billowing steam was added to the mix, as the vapour from geothermal pools condensed in the cold air.

It was all glorious.

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Weather in Iceland: If you don't like it, wait ten minutes and try again

2023-09-26T11:12:00.019-07:00

The weather in Reykjavík is uninspiring. Winters are about the same temperature as Hamburg, but summers don’t get as warm. It is milder than you would think in winter: the temperature only dips a few degrees below zero, nothing like the freezes felt in Chicago or Moscow, which are much further south. Trouble is, it doesn’t get that warm in summer: temperatures rarely rise above 15 °C - the average high is only 13 °C in July.

The real problem is the wind and the rain. Rain comes in many different forms. When it rains hard, it can feel like someone pouring a bucket of water on your head. Or it can feel like someone throwing a bucket of water at you from the pavement, if it’s windy. No umbrella has been known to survive in Iceland: they die rapidly, torn to shreds by the wind. There are two ways of dealing with the wind. One is to face directly into it and lean. The other is to stay inside and read a book.

However, they say that if you don’t like the weather in Reykjavík, just wait ten minutes and try again. That wind blows a series of weather fronts in from the Atlantic, where the warm water of the Gulf Stream creates small angry balls of low pressure, which sweep through Iceland, bringing dark clouds, heavy rain, but then crystal-clear skies, puffy clouds and rainbows. Lots of beautiful rainbows, many of them doubles.

They say there is no such thing as bad weather, just bad clothing. I’m not convinced by this. Icelanders mock tourists in Reykjavík for walking around their capital in cagoules or bright ski jackets. Icelanders own stylish dark-coloured coats, waterproof and windproof with warm padding and hoods for walking around the city. I suspect these are expensive. They have another wardrobe of expensive outdoor gear for prancing around the countryside in blizzards. Their fancy city coats would make no sense in Milan or Madrid, or even London or Paris, so I am with the tourists. If Thor, or whoever, is chucking buckets of water down on Reykjavík, then wear your bright orange rain jacket and be damned. Just don’t rely on an umbrella to protect you.

Reykjavík is in the south-west corner of Iceland and receives the brunt of the Atlantic weather. To the north, in Akureyri, the weather is slightly better. On the mountains - and much of Iceland is mountainous - the weather is naturally worse: the wind stronger and the temperature lower. Large areas of the highlands in the uninhabited interior of the country lie in rain shadow and don’t receive any rainfall at all. They are effectively deserts. Deserts with rivers, as meltwater from glaciers fifty kilometres away rushes through them on the way to the sea.

The photograph above is of three Ridpaths enjoying the weather in Iceland.

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Summer and Autumn in Iceland

2023-08-15T06:50:00.000-07:00

Nordic countries are often depicted as being dark, gloomy and depressing. But that is only half the story. The other half is summer, when the sun shines for twenty-one hours – the photo above was taken in Dalvík at midnight. It is light at 11 p.m. in Reykjavík on a Saturday night when the crowds are going into the bars and it is light at 2 a.m. when they are leaving. It is an extraordinary sight to see so many drunk people so early in the morning.

Icelanders become manic. Their eyes sparkle bright blue, but there are red rims around them. On the farms, if winter was the time of snoozing, summer was the time of eighteen-hour days. A whole year’s farming had to be crammed into a few short months. In particular, the hay had to be harvested to feed the livestock over the winter.

Today Icelanders are still busy eighteen hours a day in summer. Eight o’clock in the evening feels like mid-afternoon. It can be difficult trying to go to sleep at ten thirty when your body is telling you it is early evening.

Then comes autumn. Despite the lack of trees, there are autumn colours in Iceland. Various berries and dwarf willows and birches change colour, and the lava fields and heathlands glow in purples and oranges.

Autumn is also the time of the réttir, the annual round-up, when the members of a farming community get on their horses and spend three days scouring the mountains with their sheepdogs rounding up their sheep. The beasts are brought down to pens, sorted by the farmers, and put in barns for the winter. The farmers and their children get very excited at seeing their sheep again, all of whom have their own names, and a good time is had by all. I have no idea what the sheep think about it. I once wrote a short story called The Super Recogniser of Vík about a farmer who was expert at recognizing sheep and was dragged to Reykjavík by Magnus to look at CCTV to find a burglar.

So when is the best time to come to Iceland? Most people come in July and August: these are the two warmest months, and of course children are on school holiday. Personally, I avoid these two months. I’d rather spend the summer months somewhere where the temperature exceeds 20 °C.

More importantly, Iceland is crowded. Tourist numbers are rocketing: from only a few hundred thousand at the time of the kreppa in 2009 to over two million a year now. Despite a construction frenzy in Reykjavík, the infrastructure can’t keep up. It’s hard for locals to rent accommodation in Reykjavík because most apartments coming on the market are rented out on Airbnb. More worryingly, there are not enough public toilets, especially out in the countryside. This infrastructure is at its most overstretched in July and August.

The Icelandic landscape is much more delicate than it looks; hordes of tourists’ walking boots can wreak havoc on moss and lichens trying to establish themselves on new lava. The paradox of travelling a thousand miles to a desolate spot to enjoy the isolation is highlighted when dozens of others are doing the same thing. Summer is also the time when volunteer search-and-rescue teams become fed up with rescuing tourists who have wandered into the wrong place at the wrong time.

I see I have mentioned the idiotic acts of tourists a number of times in this blog. It’s not that all tourists are stupid - clearly, most are not - but the moronic minority gives the rest of us a bad reputation with the locals.

So I would visit in the slightly quieter months of May and June, or September to November. In September the grass is still green, the snow has yet to fall and it’s beginning to be possible to see the Northern Lights. In November, you can experience winter and yet still enjoy a little daylight. Go expecting bad weather; that way you won’t be disappointed.

I have a trip planned myself in the first week of October this year – I'm really looking forward to it. It will be nearly two years since I last visited Iceland.

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My Icelandic Crime Novels: How are They Different?

2023-07-18T08:18:00.030-07:00

In my last blog post, I gave you a brief survey of the amazing crime writers working in Iceland at the moment. Where do my own books fit into this crowded field?

Well, they are different. Right from the beginning, with my first novel, Where The Shadows Lie, I wanted to deal with how Iceland connected to the rest of the world, to examine issues that affect the globe beyond Iceland.

This was partly because I thought this was a good approach to take, but mostly because that’s the way I have always written my books.

My financial thrillers were about the international tribe that beavers away in international finance. The characters came from many different countries, and the novels were rarely stuck in one setting. I have never yet written an entire book set in England.

This simply reflects my own dreams from an early age. I was brought up in a tiny village in Yorkshire. I wanted to escape to see the world. I had an uncle who was a naturalist in the bush in northern Australia, and I thought he was very exciting.

When I left university, I joined an international bank, partly so I could travel for work and partly because there was a training programme in New York for six months. Which is where I met my American wife and met fellow trainees from all over the world, many of whom became my friends.

My Magnus novels have always included foreigners, just like all my other novels. Magnus himself, as I have explained before, although born in Iceland was brought up in America and learned his detective skills there. I don’t know as much about Icelandic society as the other crime writers who write about Iceland, but I think I can write about the way that Iceland interacts with the rest of the world.

Where The Shadows Lie is about how a lost saga got to Tolkien while he was writing Lord of the Rings; 66 Degrees North is about the global financial crash and how it affected Iceland; Meltwater is about how a volcano traps foreign whistleblowers in Iceland; Sea of Stone is about how a murder in Magnus’s own family spans America and Iceland; The Wanderer is about a hoax taking in Italy, Greenland, Nantucket as well as Iceland.

My most recently published book, Death in Dalvik, about the damage cryptocurrencies can do to a small village, is, I suppose my most Iceland-only book, although the cryptocurrency in question is brought to the country by foreign cypto-evangelists.

And the book I am working on at the moment is about that glorious moment in British history, May 1940, when we invaded Iceland. So glorious, almost no one in Britain knows about it.

The Icelandic saying glöggt er gests augad means something like clear is a guest’s eye. I hope my eye, as a guest of Iceland, is clear. Magnus himself is a guest and very aware of it. In my books, Magnus wrestles with the problem of being neither Icelandic nor American. In a similar way, his partner, Vigdís, struggles with what it is to be a black Icelander. As an observer of people who live in countries that are not their own, these are the kind of issues I think about a lot.

I said my books are different from those of the other writers of Icelandic crime fiction, but if you look closely at their books, they too reflect their own individual backgrounds. Which is part of the joy I’m sure they find in writing their novels, and the joy we have in reading them.

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Icelandic Crime Writers: a Wave of Fictional Murders Overwhelms a Small Peaceful Country

2023-06-20T00:08:00.009-07:00

When I started writing crime novels in Iceland, I assumed I would have the country entirely to myself. Idiot. It turns out that plenty of Icelandic writers were thinking the same thing at the same time.

There are now an extraordinarily high number of extremely good crime writers in Iceland; why this is so would make a good subject for another blog post. Here is a brief survey of them, starting with the big four who have been published widely abroad, and have reached bestseller lists all over the world.

A caveat. I haven’t read all of the books of all of these authors. And I am friends with a number of them.

Arnaldur Indridason

Arnaldur’s detective, Erlendur, is a policeman of the old school. He yearns for the farm of his childhood in the east of Iceland and he enjoys a sheep’s head for lunch. Arnaldur’s books examine the conflict between the old and the new in Iceland’s society, as well as solving some fascinating crimes. Silence of the Grave, about the discovery of bones dating from the Second World War, won the British Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger in 2005, so I have no excuse for my assumption that I would have the country to myself. I’m not sure whether that is my favourite or Tainted Blood, also known as Jar City, a novel about genetic research, which was made into a film.

Yrsa Sigurdardóttir

Yrsa’s first crime novel translated into English was Last Rituals, featuring a young, disorganized lawyer, Thóra. She followed up with several more Thóra books, and then another series featuring the child psychologist Freyja, as well as a few suspense novels. Yrsa is not afraid of ghosts, or at least writing about them. Her wonderful, wry sense of humour creeps into her books in the most unlikely places, leavening her darker subject matter. I Remember You is deeply unsettling. I think my favourite is The Legacy, one of the Freyja series.

Ragnar Jónasson

Ragnar was obsessed with Agatha Christie as a child and started translating her novels into Icelandic at the age of nineteen. He loves the concept of the locked room mystery: often his characters are stuck in a snowed-in town, or an isolated island, or a hut in a blizzard. His first series featured the naïve detective Ari Thór. His more recent series is about Hulda, a detective coming up to retirement. I would recommend Outside, a fiendishly clever story about a group of friends stuck in a snowstorm in a mountain hut.

Lilja Sigurdardóttir

Lilja has written three novels about Sonja, a desperate single mother driven to drug smuggling: Snare, Trap and Cage, and a political thriller, Betrayal. Sonja’s problems include her lesbian love life, her bankster ex-husband and assorted unpleasant types. Original and absorbing, Lilja’s books have won worldwide acclaim. The French, in particular, seem to like them. She has embarked on a new series which ostensibly features her Anglo-Icelandic heroine, Árora, but I like to think is actually about her nice British accountant friend, Michael.

Quentin Bates

Quentin’s detective is Gunnhildur a no-nonsense detective with a complicated family. Although English like me, Quentin knows much more than me about Iceland: his wife is Icelandic and he spent many years working on Icelandic trawlers. He depicts the chaos of Icelandic life: the messy family structures of half-brothers and step-sisters and he is good on the criminals, especially of the hapless variety.

There are plenty of other excellent authors to choose from.

I have not yet read any of Eva Björg Aegisdóttir’s books, but her debut, Creak on the Stairs, won the Crime Writers’ Association Debut Dagger and I hear her novels are very good.

Viktor Arnar Ingólfsson’s The Flatey Enigma is set in 1960 on the tiny island of Flatey, home of the famous saga collection the Flateyjarbók. It’s a murder mystery with a literary puzzle included. A different flavour from the other crime novels on this list. His day job is to write the traffic signs in Iceland.

I have also read excellent books by Árni Thórarinsson (set in Akureyri in the north), Solveig Pálsdóttir and Jónína Leósdóttir (who have both featured in guest posts on this blog) and Óskar Gudmundsson.

Credit should go to two publishers – Orenda Books and Corylus Books – who have brought most of these authors to the English-speaking world and to Quentin Bates for translating many of them into English so well. I am impressed at how he manages to convey the very different voices of each writer.

If you would like to read some novels about crime in Iceland, there is plenty to choose from here.

In my next post, I will talk about my own crime novels. They are different from these. Not better, not worse, just different.

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Favourite Places – The Beach and Cliffs at Vík

2023-05-23T06:30:00.005-07:00

Vík is a pleasant little town crammed between the beautiful glacier of Mýrdal and the sea, at the southernmost point in Iceland halfway along the south coast.

It has no harbour, just a long stretch of black beach. To the east lies the Mýrdalssandur, the sandy desert created by Katla’s jökulhlaups. Spectacular cliffs rear up to the west, alongside beaches and dramatic rock formations. It’s well worth exploring these.

You can see the rock formations from Vík: a line of tall rock spires just offshore, one of which is purported to be a petrified ship grabbed by a troll (of course).

You can get closer to these stacks, driving out of town and inland around the headland to the black Reynisfjara beach. On one side of the beach a cluster of basalt columns rises like a giant church organ on cliffs crowded at nesting season with birds: kittiwakes, fulmars and puffins. Out to sea, the extraordinary rock formations slosh through the waves as if approaching the land from the Atlantic. And to the west, the spectacular rock arch of Dyrhólaey, Iceland’s southernmost point, juts out into the ocean.

This beach is notoriously dangerous. Medium-sized waves wash against the black sand, and it is tempting to go within a few yards of them to look at the sea and the rocks, even to dip a toe in the water. Don’t. Seriously, don’t. The currents and the undertow are very strong here. But most deceptive are the ‘sneaker waves’, larger waves that very occasionally stretch up the shoreline to suck away the loose sand under the feet of people who are too close. Tourists die here: by my count of the press reports, two died in 2015, two in 2016, one in 2017, one in 2018 and one in 2022.

If you drive back to the Ring Road, go west a few kilometres and then turn off again, you cross a causeway and reach the top of the cliffs of Dyrhólaey.

The views from here are truly spectacular: of the basalt columns and the offshore rocks, but also of the outstandingly beautiful Mýrdal glacier to the north - thick white cream flowing between mountains. And to the east, you can see right along the southern shore of Iceland.

Birds nest here, including puffins, which means it’s possible that the cliffs are closed during nesting season (I didn’t notice any closure when I visited in May at 9 p.m., but perhaps I just missed a sign).

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Chapter 1: The Polar Bear Killing

2023-04-25T06:30:00.001-07:00

Following my previous post on polar bears in Iceland, here is the first chapter of my novella The Polar Bear Killing.

This was going to be the most important day of his life. He knew it. He could feel it. This would be the day when he left his mark on the world.

Constable Halldór’s fingers tightened on the wheel of his police 4x4 as it hurtled through the fog towards the farm by the river where the polar bear had been sighted. The professional hunters in their souped-up Super Jeep were at least ten kilometres away. He would get there first. He would have only a few minutes to make the shot.

The polar bear had been spotted on a beach six hours before by some fishermen, who had immediately called the coastguard. Polar bears were not native to Iceland, but once every couple of years one would pop up along the northern coastline, usually having ridden sea ice that had drifted eastwards from Greenland. Often they swam the last few miles to shore. By the time they reached Iceland, they were tired and hungry. And dangerous.

The fishermen had only caught a brief glimpse because of the poor visibility. But it had been enough for Halldór to organize a couple of parties to scout for the bear, including the two professional hunters armed with the kind of rifle that could kill a reindeer at a thousand metres. Halldór had been following on behind when he had been alerted by the call from a young girl – a farmer’s daughter – who had said she had seen the bear. Her mother was shopping in town, and her father was out with the other scouts.

The girl was alone with her little brother on the farm, and Halldór was closest to her. In the back of the police car was his .22 rifle. It was much too small a calibre to kill a big bear under normal circumstances. But many years before, Halldór had read the story of some hikers in the West Fjords in the 1970s who had come upon a polar bear while carrying only a .22. One of them had waited until the bear had approached really close and then shot it through the eye. That had taken real nerve. And marksmanship.

Halldór had nerve. And he was one of the best shots in the north of Iceland. As a policeman in Reykjavík, he had applied twice for the Viking Squad – the Icelandic SWAT team – but been turned down each time. The problem wasn’t his ability to handle firearms, but his physical fitness. And now, aged forty-nine, and after seven years driving his car around and around the small town of Raufarhöfn in north-east Iceland, his girth had grown even greater. But he still knew how to shoot. And he still had nerve.

After a lull of several years, there had been a spate of polar bear invasions from the sea. Each time the bears had been shot, and there had been an outcry from urban do-gooders (people like his daughter Gudrún) for a national polar bear policy. Anaesthetic darts had been stockpiled, and experts flown in from Denmark. But even then, when the next polar bear had shown up, it too had had to be shot before it harmed any of the sightseers who had driven out to gawk at it. And so the new polar bear policy had been determined: shoot on sight. It was too expensive and too dangerous to do anything else.

The road sloped downward and the police car emerged from the fog into a shallow valley with a fast river tumbling down its middle. A cluster of prosperous farm buildings, with white concrete walls and red corrugated metal roofs, appeared. The farmer made a little money from sheep and quite a lot from leasing fishing rights on the river.

Halldór scanned the fields and pasture surrounding the farm. A flock of sheep were scattering in all directions; something had spooked them. And then he saw it – a dirty white bear loping along towards the farmhouse. And in front of it, a little girl standing still, staring at it.

Jesus!

Halldór leaned on his horn, swerved off the road and onto the grass, accelerating towards the girl. The bear stopped to look at the new arrival. The girl, too, turned towards him.

He pulled up between the girl and the bear, which was now only about a hundred metres away.

He lowered the window. ‘Jump in, Anna!’

The girl opened the passenger door and climbed in.

‘What do you think you were doing?’ Halldór said.

‘I wanted to speak to the polar bear,’ she said.

‘Those animals are dangerous!’ Halldór said. ‘He’s come a long way and he’s hungry.’

‘He’s not dangerous. Egill told me about polar bears. They are friendly. They help people.’

Egill was the old man who lived in the run-down farm – now barely visible at the base of the cloud – on the slope on the other side of the river. He was about eighty and had long ago lost his marbles.

‘They are not friendly, Anna; they attack people, believe me. Now where is your brother?’

‘Back in the farmhouse,’ said the little girl.

‘Good.’ Halldór looked at the bear, which was staring at the vehicle. ‘OK, sit tight, Anna.’

Slowly he climbed out of the car and went around to the back to take out his rifle. The bear watched, but the girl couldn’t see him. Once the gun was loaded, Halldór made his way around the car, rested his elbows on the bonnet and aimed at the bear.

It was smaller than he had imagined it would be, and thinner; he could see its ribs. But it was still a magnificent animal.

It was also a hundred metres away, and had turned its rump towards Halldór.

A .22 bullet in the arse would do nothing to a polar bear apart from make it really angry.

‘You’re not going to shoot it!’ shouted Anna.

‘This is a dart gun,’ said Halldór. ‘I’m going to put it to sleep.’

‘It’s not a dart gun,’ the girl said. ‘My dad has a gun like that that he uses to shoot foxes. I’m not going to let you kill the lovely bear.’

What happened next would be etched in Halldór’s brain for the little time that remained of his life.

Anna jumped out of the car and ran towards the bear, shouting: ‘Look out, polar bear!’

The bear turned and, after a second’s thought, ambled towards the girl.

Halldór’s instinct was to run after the girl and pull her back. But if he did that, the bear would escape and run off into the mist. Sure, it would be shot eventually by one of the professional hunters. But not by him.

The girl stopped, suddenly aware that a very large animal with teeth and claws was approaching her. She was only a few metres from the police car, there was still time for her to turn and run, there was even time for Halldór to drag her back, but she froze.

Halldór took careful aim. The bear was coming directly towards him, its eyes two round black holes staring straight ahead.

At last, the girl screamed and turned. The bear was nearly on her, only twenty metres away.

Halldór took his time. He could make this shot ten times out of ten as long as he kept his nerve. He inhaled, then exhaled slowly and squeezed the trigger. The bear dropped to the ground as the bullet tore through its eye and into its brain.

***

The two young men – a German and an Icelander – breathed heavily as they climbed the hill. The sky was a pale blue, and there was no sign of the thick low cloud that had settled over the area during the previous five days.

The Icelander, a thin man with straggly long hair, wearing jeans and an Extinction is Forever T-shirt, paused to raise the binoculars that were hanging around his neck to scan the ponds and marshes of the Melrakkaslétta – the ‘fox plain’ – that stretched out to the north of the town.

‘Nothing,’ he said.

‘She must have drowned,’ said the German in English. He was a few years older than the Icelander, and a few years neater.

The bear that had been shot four days before was not yet fully grown, and the theory was that its mother might have landed as well. But now that the weather had cleared up and it was possible to see more than a couple of hundred metres, that seemed increasingly unlikely.

‘I’m afraid you have wasted your trip, Martin,’ the Icelander said, turning back up the hill.

‘Yeah,’ said Martin, following him. ‘It would have been cool to actually see a polar bear. And to stop those bastards shooting it.’

‘Here it is,’ said the Icelander, whose name was Alex. ‘The Arctic Henge.’

On the crest of the hill above them stood a half-built giant stone circle, designed in the manner of Stonehenge, with four tall stone gates at each point of the compass rising to a point. The low sun painted geometric shadows down the eastern slope of the hill.

‘Cool,’ said Martin again. It was his favourite English word. ‘You say it acts like some kind of sundial?’

‘Apparently.’

They walked around the site, trying to figure out what it all meant. Alex had brought with him a drawing of what the finished henge would look like. The layout was based on an ancient Icelandic poem, but he was confused about what signified what, and Martin’s questions were just confusing him more.

‘Well, let’s ask that guy,’ Martin said.

‘What guy?’

Martin pointed to a black-clad leg sticking out from behind one of the stone pillars of a gate.

As the two men approached the gate, more of the figure came into view.

‘Mein Gott!’

It was a man, wearing a black police uniform. He was slumped against the pillar. And where his right eye should have been was a bloody mess.

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Polar Bears

2023-03-28T06:30:00.000-07:00

In November 2016, I travelled to Saudárkrókur, in the north of Iceland, researching my book The Wanderer. As is my habit, I dropped into the local police station to speak to the chief constable. On his wall, I couldn’t help noticing a photograph of a polar bear charging down a hill.

The bear had arrived on Iceland’s shores eight years earlier. It had first been spotted by a farmer’s daughter, who was in the sheep shed when she heard her dog barking and running across a field towards a bear, which was busy eating eider ducks’ eggs. The dog was rescued, the alarm was raised and all hell broke loose. Vets from Denmark were summoned with tranquillizer guns and a cage, but the bear was hungry and it was dangerous.

And no one could see it. The weather had turned foggy, and a hungry predator was on the loose. People from all over Iceland drove towards Saudárkrókur to see the bear. It was spotted by a main road, and a crowd of fifty to sixty people gathered to watch.

The local police carefully approached a hill, behind which they believed the bear was lurking. But not carefully enough: whereas the police thought they were stalking the bear, actually the bear was stalking them. The bear charged down the hill towards the crowd of onlookers, and the police shot it.

The bear always gets shot.

At irregular intervals, bears show up on Iceland’s shores. They are swept out to sea from Greenland on ice floes, and when they are in sight of land, they swim ashore. They are tired and they are hungry and occasionally they are accompanied by a cub. Polar bears are dangerous at the best of times; in these circumstances they are very dangerous. They end up getting shot, usually by the local policeman. The town museums of Bolungarvík on the northwest coast, and Húsavík in the north, contain stuffed polar bears, shot soon after they came ashore.

Bears have been coming to Iceland in this way for centuries. The first was spotted in 890, sixteen years after Ingólfur arrived on the island, by a farmer in Vatnsdalur.

According to a local folk tale, a helpful polar bear once drifted near to the island of Grímsey, which is just off the north coast of Iceland, bang on the Arctic Circle.

One day all the fires went out on the island. It was in the days before matches, and so three islanders had to cross to the mainland to bring back embers to rekindle them. The sea was iced up, so they had to walk across the ice. One of the men got lost and drifted out to sea on an ice floe.

The next morning, the man was cold and hungry and thirsty, but he was still a long way from land. His ice floe drifted towards another chunk of ice, on which there was a mother polar bear trapped with her cubs. The man was scared, but there was nothing he could do to steer his ice away from the bears. Soon they collided. But the mother polar bear didn’t eat the man: she allowed him to suckle her milk with her cubs and kept him warm. When the man had regained his strength, she swam over to the mainland with him on her back. He gathered some embers and then returned on her back to Grímsey, and all the fires on the island could be rekindled. The man was so grateful, he gave the bear cow’s milk and two slaughtered sheep, and the bear swam off back to her cubs.

People like polar bears. Many people don’t like the police shooting them. In Canada and Alaska shooting polar bears is forbidden. Some say it should be possible to keep a helicopter, a cage and a tranquillizer gun on alert to sedate the invading bears and take them back to Greenland.

This is not as easy as it sounds, partly because of the tendency of fearless Icelanders to run around the countryside looking for a bear every time one is seen. The chief of police at Saudárkrókur genuinely regretted having to shoot the bear, but in a number of accounts of polar-bear killings it seems clear to me that the guy pulling the trigger was excited by it, even if he didn’t admit it. I can imagine the thrill of the chase, big-game hunting with a real purpose, namely to protect local citizens. And I can imagine the outrage afterwards. People get really upset about this. Possibly upset enough to kill?

The idea for my novella The Polar Bear Killing was born.

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Photo by Hans-Jurgen Mager via Unsplash

2023-02-28T06:30:00.001-08:00

When you are describing a landscape, it is important to describe movement. Things that move bring a scene alive. And the things that move most obviously in Iceland are birds.

These aren’t birds that sit quietly waiting to be ticked off birdwatchers’ lists. These are birds that do things.

The most common bird in Iceland is the puffin, which looks like a cross between a penguin and a parrot but can both fly and swim. The Icelandic word for them is lundi, but they also go by the rather lovely nickname prófastur, which means ‘provost’ or ‘dean’. They live in burrows, often on cliff faces, in large communities. They arrive in Iceland to nest in April or May. Puffin is frequently found on the menu in Icelandic restaurants - it’s tasty if cooked well.

One of the largest colonies in Iceland is on the Westman Island of Heimaey. In August the eggs hatch, and the baby puffins, known as pufflings, waddle forth. These are extremely cute: grey and fluffy and a little clueless. They often get lost and wander into town, but teams of local children are allowed to stay up late in the evening and rescue them. The children take the chicks home for the night. The following morning they find a spot near the sea and throw them high in the air. The pufflings glide down to the water and swim off. You have to put some effort into the throw, apparently, or the pufflings won’t catch the breeze and will splat into the ground.

I most often associate swans with St James’s Park, or perhaps the River Thames, gliding peacefully in sedate surroundings. In Iceland, you can suddenly happen upon small lakes surrounded by lava, in which up to twenty swans paddle. God knows what they are doing there.

Many Icelanders’ favourite bird is the golden plover. People eagerly listen out for its distinctive and persistent ‘peep’, which means that the plovers have arrived in Iceland and spring is here. It is a fine bird, with a royal coat of gold, black and white, and it lurks in the heather.

The word ‘eiderdown’ comes from the down of the eider duck. The males are black and white and the females dun-coloured. They spend the winter at sea, and then nest close to the shore, often on a farmer’s property. They pluck down from their breasts and leave it out to dry, before lining their nests with it to keep their chicks warm. For centuries, eiderdown was an important source of income for Icelandic farmers, who would watch over nests to keep gulls and ravens away.

There are so many spectacular birds in Iceland, all of them doing something: soaring white-tailed eagles, darting gyrfalcons, dive-bombing arctic terns, paddling harlequin ducks, black cormorants splaying their wings, gannets and fulmars diving into the sea, skuas mugging other birds for food, great northern divers or ‘loons’ gliding over lakes with their eerie cry, ptarmigans strutting their stuff in the heather, geese formation-flying in the evening sky.

All right, I can’t deny it: and chickens, or kjúklingar, as they are rather charmingly known in Iceland. Clucking in ugly metal Eimskip shipping containers in a farmyard.

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Too Much to Write: Guest Blog from Jónína Leósdóttir

2023-01-30T06:30:00.001-08:00

Time for another guest blog. This one is from Jónína Léosdóttir, an Icelandic novelist who has turned to crime, and the wife of a former Prime Minister of Iceland.

Life changed dramatically when my wife, Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir, became Prime Minister of Iceland at the beginning of 2009. But not in a particularly good way for me, personally.

You might think that being married to a PM must be glamorous and fun, even in a small country like ours. At least some of the time? Well, that might be true in ordinary times (if, indeed, there is such a thing as “ordinary times”), but that is definitely not the case when a country’s economic situation is extremely perilous and the International Monetary Fund is breathing down your neck.

The biggest and most immediate change in our household was that my spouse more or less disappeared from home, often spending twelve to fourteen hours a day at work. And when she was home, she was either on the phone, reading through stacks of papers or watching the news. What this meant for me was: Goodbye quality time, goodbye social life, hello computer, my old friend. Yes, I had plenty of time to write books and, admittedly, that was a slight bonus, as I absolutely love my job. (OK, I’ll own up: I’m a hopeless workaholic who writes one book per year.) But in 2009 I discovered that you really can have too much of a good thing.

I also had to take on some roles that I wasn’t prepared for or particularly suited for. Strangers started stopping me in the street or at the supermarket and even phoning me up to discuss economic policies and the best ways to stop a country becoming bankrupt. Yet, I am a simple book person with A-level Latin and a degree in English and Literature. And, at college, I opted out of anything to do with figures as soon as I possibly could. I couldn’t run a lemonade stall, let alone a country, in good times or bad.

But, of course, all those amateur economists, who were so keen to tell me about new and wondrous ways to save our country’s economy, didn’t really want to discuss their brilliant theories with little old me. What they wanted, was for me to relay it all to the PM, so that she could wave a magic wand, and all would be well again.

Naturally, I tried to be polite to all those well-meaning people, whether at the cheese counter or on the phone. Sometimes, I even took notes to be able to pass the messages on, but when it came to attempting that, I invariably messed it up.

I was much better at another role that I had to take on because of my spouse’s new job and busy schedule. Overnight, I became a stylist, without any qualifications except my mother’s genes. (My mom was a natural-born stylist.)

As we have already established, my better half didn’t have time for anything other than her job. Therefore, there was no way she could go clothes shopping, any more than she could come with me to the theatre etc. But she needed clothes and accessories. A Prime Minister, at a time of crisis, is in constant demand for media interviews, and a female PM can’t turn up in the same outfit and earrings for weeks on end. (Although Liz Truss might disagree.) So, what could be done? Enter, the multitasking wife/writer/cleaner/cook/sympathetic listener to economic magic solutions … now turned stylist, too.

I contacted the managers of a few clothes stores and shops that sold accessories, and they lent me stuff to take home for my wife to try on. That made things easier for her and turned out to be surprisingly enjoyable for me. I had loved dressing my dolls when I was a girl, and now I could play a grown-up version of that game with a full-scale “model”.

Amazingly, this worked out so well that no longer did I only get unsolicited phone calls about economics. People (well, women) also contacted me for information on the PM’s outfits.

Sometimes, however, it was a bit depressing to get a call, right after an important television debate or interview and be asked about the make and number of the PM’s lipstick.

Just in case you are wondering if the shops gave me the clothes etc. free of charge, I must disappoint you. There were no Hollywood-red-carpet-deals involved. Everything was paid for in full. And, naturally, no glamorous shopping bags for me. You don’t need fancy clothes when you sit around writing all day.

I think, in all honesty, that my brief period as a stylist was the only part of being married to a Prime Minister that I enjoyed.

My wife’s taking on that role not only put her under enormous pressure, due to the state of Iceland’s economy, it also put our private life in the spotlight. Before, we had led a rather quiet existence, mostly just working and spending our spare time with our nine grandchildren. Then suddenly we were getting requests for interviews (as a couple) from around the globe. That was both surreal and uncomfortable, but, of course, we understood the media’s interest in the first out LGBT+ leader in the world. And we knew that it was important to stand up and be counted. But dealing with the economic crisis didn’t allow Iceland’s PM time to also become a worldwide LGBT+ poster girl.

However, as soon as she retired from politics in 2013, having brought Iceland’s economy back from the brink, we published a book about our relationship. The book, called Við Jóhanna (Jóhanna and I), was her idea, but, as I was the writer in the family, I penned it.

In the book, I describe our turbulent 15 years in the closet, the long-awaited moment when we finally set up home together in 2000 … and how the global media came knocking on our door in 2009. And for a few years after publishing that book, we travelled to several countries to speak at LGBT+ events.

That is all behind us now. My wife has retired and enjoys life with no official engagements or demands. And I can concentrate properly on my writing, which has become even more exciting since I “turned to crime” a few years ago. My 20th book – and 7th crime novel – has just been published in Iceland – and now I also have a crime novel in English, Deceit, translated by Quentin Bates.

I couldn’t ask for anything more and certainly wouldn’t want to turn back the clock to those hectic days of 2009-2013.

Deceit, the first of Jónína's novels to be translated into English, came out recently, published by Corylus Books. The interplay between the sleuthing partnership – a fussy English psychologist and his ex-wife ‘The Bulldozer’ Soffía – is both an absolute joy and very perceptive. The translators are the ever-reliable Quentin Bates and Sylvía Bates.

Ravens

2023-01-10T06:30:00.000-08:00

I sometimes think that the ravens own Iceland and humans are allowed to live there only with their permission.

Remember, it was a raven that led Flóki to Iceland in the ninth century. There are loads of them in Iceland. Huge birds that look much like crows, but often act like eagles, they are extremely intelligent. They usually operate in pairs, exclaiming in their distinctive loud croak that can sound like human speech, although ravens produce a wide range of other cries. They seem to be watching you, whether they are soaring high above, or skipping between stones and fence posts. They circle over corpses, of birds, of sheep or of people.

This one above, I spotted while walking along the cliffs in Snaefellsnes.

This being Iceland, there are of course plenty of folk tales about ravens. Odin kept two ravens, Hugin and Munin, who served as scouts for him, flying off to gather intelligence. Ravens predict death or weather changes; one even led a girl away from a landslide. Some grandmothers can converse with them.

I visited the town of Saudárkrókur, on a research trip for The Wanderer, in November. There was snow on the ground. The police station is in Church Square, and the whole time I was there, two ravens circled and croaked, often perching on the church tower (see photo above). They owned the town. I had to put them in the book.

I always show the first draft of my books to an Icelander to weed out the mistakes, and I gave The Wanderer to the author Lilja Sigurdardóttir. The book takes place in August, and Lilja told me that ravens only come into town in the winter when they were hungry. It would be very strange to see them in town in August, but if they were there, the local inhabitants would believe that they were foretelling a death. Which was perfect.

This being one of my books, the ravens were pretty much correct.

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