Jo Nesbø, writer

0:00Hello, I'm Lauren Laverne and this is the Desert Island Discs podcast from BBC Radio 4. Every week I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, book and luxury, that they'd want to take with them if they were cast away to a desert island. For rights reasons, the music's shorter than on the original broadcast, but you can find a version with longer music tracks on BBC Sounds. Listeners will also get access to episodes 28 days earlier than everyone else. I hope you enjoy listening.

0:45My cast away this week is the writer Joe Nesbo. Known as the king of Nordic noir, his internationally best-selling crime thrillers, following the exploits of renegade detective Harry Hula, have been translated into 50 languages, sold over 60 million copies and been adapted for film and TV with Netflix, the latest production company, to snap up the rights to his stories making him the most commercially successful author Norway has ever produced. Yet writing wasn't his burning ambition or even his first career. He grew up determined to become a pro footballer a dream he achieved at 17 when he was signed by his hometown's football club Molde FK.

1:23After an injury put paid to that, he joined the army became a successful stockbroker and then a rock star. By 36, he was wondering what was next, so he took a break and booked a flight to Australia. By the time he landed, he had Harry Hula and the outline of his first adventure, The Bat. As well as 13 stories about Harry, he's written short story collections, numerous standalone novels and five children's books. According to their author, Dr Proctor's fart powder series shares a certain dark humour with his famous detective. He says, It's a very strange job what I do. You're lying in bed in the morning, still half asleep, and you come up with a crazy way to kill someone.

2:04Then you get up a happy man and get right down to work. Joe Nespo, welcome to Desert Island Discs. Thank you so much. So that's quite a dark way to wake up, Joe. I mean, you take your readers to the dark side. Is that really your happy place? I don't know if it's my happy place. It's not the dark side as such. It's just knowing that you come up with a story worthy of telling your two best friends for whom I have always been writing. From the start, I imagine those two friends with whom I share a taste in popular culture. And if I can make them interested, I've succeeded. This character's been with you for a long time, not just when you were writing.

2:47Wasn't it your grandmother who used to threaten you with him when you were a kid, when you were growing up? When I invented Harry, I was on a plane from Oslo to Sydney in 1996. The first thing I did was come up with a name. So, OK, I went with Harry as his first name, since that was the first name of my favorite football player when I grew up. And Hule then was the name of the local police officer in the village where my grandmother lived and where we would spend summer holidays. And I had never seen him. But because my grandmother said that if you're not home and in bed by eight o 'clock, then Hule will come get you.

3:27I always imagined this scary, tall, blonde guy with cold blue eyes. and actually some years ago I went to the village and I was sitting there doing a reading and this really old man comes up to me and yeah he is tall and he has white hair and he has this he must be in his 90s or something and he had this bony hand that he gave me and said hello I'm Hule and I remember even then my first thought was you know, but it's not eight o 'clock yet. Don't send me off just yet. I'm sorry. Now, listen, we're going to get into the music, Joe, because I know that's a big part of your life, as we'll hear in the programme today.

4:16You still play as part of your band. Is it similar to writing for you, making music? Yes, it is. I think I started out writing lyrics for my friends' bands and that was like my writer's school was to tell a story in three verses and a refrain. So I didn't pick up the guitar until I was 20, actually. And then we started a band first when I was a student and later on with my brother and some friends. They were like real musicians. I could play the guitar, but I was more the songwriter and still am. So I definitely see that connection, that in three verses and refrain, you have to rely so much on the listener to fill out the story and just point them in a direction and leave it up to their own imagination and intelligence.

5:12And I realised when I started writing novels that it's exactly the same. Well, let's get started. Tell us about your first disc today. What's your first choice? Yeah, my first choice is Lloyd Cole and the Commotions, Perfect Skin. I heard that when I was a student. I really liked the song. I liked the fact that it's so simple. But perhaps because I was writing lyrics myself, I loved the idea that he seemed to have too much to say, too much for a short song like that. He's rushing through his lyrics, and it feels like he's really passionate about what he has to say, so passionate that at the end of the song, the song is over.

5:57but he is still, you know, throwing words and lyrics at you. So there's too much lyrics and really minimalistic playing, even the guitar solo. I mean, you have these great guitarists in your band, and he seemed to think that, I think for this song, I'll play more or less one note. I just bend the string a little differently, and that'll be my solo. And I just love that.

6:27My eyes go out in vain She's got perfect skin Shame on you, you've got no sense of grace Shame on me, just in case I might come to a conclusion Other than that, which is absolutely necessary And that's perfect skin Lloyd Cole and the commotions, perfect skin. So let's go back to the beginning, Joe Nesbo. You were born in Oslo in 1960, the second of three sons, Tupur and Kirsten. I think your dad was brought up in Brooklyn, New York, though. How come? My grandmother, Selma, she went with her sister to the United States when she was 16 years old. Then she came back to Norway to this little small village on the West Coast when she was 38.

7:23She must have been an early cougar because she then hooked up with my grandfather, who was 23. They had my father. They had your dad. Yeah, they had my father and then they went back to Brooklyn, New York. Was that common for many Norwegians at the time? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And this was in the 20s when it was really hard times in Norway. You say you come from a family of readers and storytellers. Tell me more about that. What qualified as a good story at your family table? Could be any story, really. It was more about the storytelling than the story itself. And sometimes I didn't even get the point of the story.

8:00there was punchline in there because I can remember at the end the grown ups would all laugh but I was more into the way they went about it, all the details throughout the story all the efficient way of painting a picture of a character and it was like a storytelling competition Your mother meanwhile she was a librarian so also a lover of stories, did she encourage a love of reading in you and your brothers? Definitely. She would work sometimes late and I would at least go to the library and wait for her and sit in the room just reading. Maybe because my father grew up in the United States, I was more into Mark Twain and Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer and Fennie Smoll-Cooper, American literature more than and Astrid Lindgren and Pippi Longstocking and those stories.

9:00So when you were 13, you were asked to write a story at school, which turned out to be quite a prescient piece for you. It was called A Walk in the Woods. Yeah. Tell me about it. I guess you have the same thing here, that the teacher will give you the title of the story, and then you have to write two pages. And I wrote 12 pages, and it was a nice day in the woods, only in my story nobody came back alive. so you know it was So the clues were there from the beginning Yeah well my mother I don't know if this is true but my mother claimed that the teacher phoned her you know I was worried about her son So this kind of you know appetite an interest in the darker side of life was that with you then in terms of you know what you were consuming what you were reading what you were your sense of humour all of that I was drawn to the dark side but on the other hand And I was also really, I was afraid of the dark.

9:55And I was fascinated, I guess, with my own imagination that it would just go off the rails. Joe, it's time to go to the music. Your second choice today. What are we going to hear and why? This is The Beatles. And it could be actually any Beatles song. My older brother, Perry, was five years older than me. So I grew up with the singles of The Beatles being released. and it was always a celebration when there was a new Beatles single. I've chosen Ticket to Ride just because it's a great song.

11:03The Beatles and Ticket to Ride. So, Joe Nesbo, I want to ask you a bit more about your dad because he served in the Second World War. What was his role and how did you find out what he had done? I was 15 years old and nowhere was occupied in 1940 and stayed occupied throughout the war. And the royal family fled here to London. And it was like the quintessential evil person was the person with a German helmet. And what I didn't know at the age of 15 was that when my father and my grandparents moved back to Norway, being Americans, strongly anti-communist, they saw Stalin and Russia a country with which Norway has a border they saw that more as a threat than Germany and Hitler and at the time they saw that the European democracies like England and France they were more or less bankrupt so they saw this as an area where you had to go with one of the strong men of Europe so my father decided he wanted to fight for Norway against Russia, meaning joining the Germans on the Eastern Front.

12:23And he volunteered to do that at the age of 19. And when he told me this at the age of 15, I mean, after the war, he had to spend three years in jail for treason. That was like the punishment all of them got. And it was a total shock to me because my father was my hero. And I really respected him in so many ways. And he said that, OK, your older brother already know this. But now I'm telling you, now you're old enough and to make up your mind about it. And if you don't want to talk about it, we don't have to talk about it. But if you want to talk about it, I'll answer any question. And did you have questions?

13:05I had many questions. Of course I had. Did you know about Holocaust, for example? That was more or less the first question, of course. What did he say? He explained to me about the fog of war. He said that we heard about it, but we didn't believe it. And this turned out to be true, and I couldn't believe it. So it was, I mean, he had grown up with Jewish friends in New York. So to him, it was just a total shock. But then I asked him about, didn't you think that you let Norway down, you know, being an occupied nation? And he didn't make any excuses. He said that actually, in hindsight, being as wrong as it was, he thought it was a fair punishment to spend three years in jail.

13:45Actually, they let them out after a year and a half or something like that. But he didn't make any excuses. And I think that was the reason why this was the start of a lifelong conversation with my father about choices, about judging the choices based on what we know now compared to what you knew then. Well, it's interesting that, Jo, because I know that's something you say about your characters in the books that you write, that you're not providing answers, you're asking questions. you're watching them make choices and you're not judging them. You're not judging the choices that they make. I think that was what I learned from that long conversation with my father.

14:27If you have the tolerance to talk to somebody about stuff that you totally disagree with that will get you to interesting places to gain insight. It doesn't mean that you start agreeing with them but that you understand and you also start maybe understanding that your own points of view comes from the culture in which you were raised. It's not like you have this morality built into you and that you are born with that morality. It's a development and formed by circumstances. Your book, The Red Breast, is dedicated to your father's story. How many of his experiences and the stories that he told you after you started that conversation feature in it?

15:09Most of them. It's the story of the soldier who joined the Germans in that novel is more or less my father's story, including the love story, including the New Year's Eve, where he's sitting with a Norwegian friend of his, also a volunteer, and they're talking about how it is at home, how they are eating dinner at home now because they are hungry all the time. And in the middle of that conversation, there's a gunshot and my father's friend's head explodes inside his helmet. and it's 20 degrees below zero. So for the rest of that New Year's Eve, he has to pick out the pieces of brain on the machine gun to make it function again.

15:58And I was asking him, what an experience like that, what does that do to you? And he said, I thought I would get crazy. Some of my friends did. PTSD. and he never did. He told me that there was a friend of him that one evening phoned him from another city and committed suicide there and there in the phone booth because he couldn't take it any longer, the nightmares. But my father said he was always waiting for the nightmares, but they never came. So he was just lucky, I guess. And interestingly, your mother's family had a very different story. So they were in the Norwegian resistance. how did she feel about your father's history and how did her family react to his story?

16:46My mother's family I think because they were in the resistance movement they were, you know, strangely enough some of the few people that understood my father because they had made a choice too the opposite choice but still they had risked something during World War II so it was not a problem Your dad died in 1994, so he didn't get to see you become a writer in that phase of your life. What do you think he would have made of seeing his story in print, becoming a bestseller around the world? He would have loved it. The Red Breast is kind of a tribute to my father, not because I'm proud of the choice he made, but in the end, I'm proud of the man he was with all his flaws and his bad decision making.

17:36yeah Joan Esbo, let's go to the music it's your third choice today what are we going to hear and why? This is Steve Hawley and Cockney Rebel the song is Make Me Smile and my older brother Per he had a record collection so me and my younger brother Knut we sort of just had to listen to what he listened to

18:05How can you tell so many laughs? Come up and see me, make me smile. I'll do what you want, running wild.

18:25Steve Harley and Cockney Rebel and Make Me Smile. Wow. Joe Nesbo, I know that school took a second place to your love of football when you were growing up. What was your dream back then? I wouldn't even call it a dream. It was a plan that seemed like a realistic plan at the time. And that was to play forward for Tottenham Hotspur. My illusion was that I had talent enough and you don't need anything more than that. Just talent will get you all the way to London and White Hart Lane. You didn't do too badly. I mean, you and Knut, your younger brother, both ended up playing professionally. We played for Molde, which was one of the top teams.

19:05And I had my debut when I was 17. So, yeah, we had some talent. Then I broke the ligaments in both knees when I was 19. And so I had to come up with a plan B for my life. But at that age, you refocus quite quickly. and maybe I wasn't meant to be a soccer player after all. Looking back, I could see that I had the talent. I'm not sure I had the talent for having a talent, meaning I don't know if I would have, you know, I would skip the training when we were running or, you know, things I didn't like. I would show up only when we were, you know, there were fun trainings. So I knew the trainer's program for the different days.

19:50So I wouldn't have the discipline really to be a pop player, I think. You also said that, you know, you were in it for the kind of social aspect of it. I know that football was a bonding thing for you and your brothers, but music was an important connection for you too. And you and Knut were in a band together later. Tell me about that. What did you play and what kind of music were you making at the beginning, the two of you? I started playing the guitar quite late in life. I was 20 at that time. I had written lyrics for my friend's bands but I didn't really play or I wasn't in the band myself I learned to play the guitar while I was in the army and then when I started studying one day a guy walked into the cantina and he shouted out is there anyone here who plays the guitar and I raised my hand and he said okay how many chords do you know and I said three actually at the time I only knew two chords and he said, okay, that's enough.

20:47So we started playing in that band and later on when I moved to Oslo after college, my brother was there and he had played in the band since he was 15 years old. He played the guitar. He was a bassist there, he was a professional musician and he liked my songs. So he said, okay, let's start a band. And how were the dynamics between you and your brother? I mean, you know, there are a lot of siblings in rock and roll history, aren't there? Yeah. And sometimes it can be quite a kind of tempestuous, combustible relationship. What was it like for you and Knud? No, yeah, we weren't like the Davis brothers or the Gallagher brothers.

21:21We were on friendly terms. Because there's only a year between the two of you. Yeah, yeah. We weren't planning to go anywhere. We just wanted to have fun. So it was sort of a surprise when actually two record companies showed up on one of our gigs and offered us a record deal. Joe, I think we better go back to the music before we hear what happened next. It's your fourth choice today. What are you taking to your island next and why? It was the first concert I went to. It was a Muddy Waters concert. I was, I think, nine or ten years old. It was because Molde, my small hometown, population 20 ,000, they had this famous international jazz festival.

22:04And so Muddy Waters was coming there with his band. And I remember sitting there in the cinema listening to this great band and it was just being mesmerized. And the title of the song is I Can't Be Satisfied.

22:53Muddy Waters and I Can't Be Satisfied. So, Joe Nesbo, your 1990s was a decade of very much two halves. You were in a successful band and working as a stockbroker. And to find out how you got there, we sort of have to go back to you taking on military service. So this is after your football injury. You decided to sign up and you stayed for three years, which is longer than the required year. You were posted to the north of Norway. In what way was that a formative experience for you? I got time to think about my life. I think up until then, I've been just riding the waves that came along. If it was football, I had some talent.

23:35I played football. It was hanging out with friends writing lyrics for their songs. I do that. I really didn't have a plan. And the first thing I did was I went to officer school and I was two and a half, three years in the Air Force. And after that, I still didn't know what to do. And what do you do when you don't know what you want to do? You study economics. but in order to get into the school that I wanted to get into I had to improve my grades so I also, when I was doing service in the Air Force I took the high school from the ground up and got good grades which meant that I could actually start studying at the school my father wanted to study in when he was young he didn't have the money at the time He was just out of jail after the war.

24:35So he went to evening school. Oh, yeah, night classes. Yeah, and studied economics there while working. So it was me kind of not being that interested in economics. So I guess my looking back, the reason why I went there may have been that I was fulfilling my dad's dream in a way that he, I could do what he couldn't. So you spent the 90s living quite a double life, really. You would be a stockbroker by day and then a rock star by night. Why did you decide to keep the day job? I didn't want music to pay the rent. When I looked around, I saw so many bands that were cool at the time. And no way not being a big market for musicians.

25:19You have to compromise sooner or later. And I didn't want that. So I decided that, OK, let's do something else that can pay the rent so I can do exactly what I want as a musician. What did the rest of the band make of that and what did your co-workers at the office think? My co-workers, they, well, up until our break, they didn't know I played music at all. And after that, they thought it was just very strange that I kept on working there. The other guys in the band, they were full time musicians at the time. and the routine was that I would work until the stock exchange closed. Then I would run out in the street, grab a taxi, go to the airport and go to wherever my band was at the time.

26:03Probably not in time for the soundcheck. I would play the gig and the rest of the band would go off to a party with beautiful girls and I would go back to the whole hotel to grab some hours of sleep to get on the first plane back in time for when the stock exchange opened. I did that for a full year. I was more or less burnt out at the end of that year. And that was when I told my band and my boss at the brokerage firm that I need some time off. And so I went to Australia. Well, I want to find out what happened next. But first, I would love to hear your fifth choice today. What's it going to be, Joe?

26:39Lucinda Williams, Bus to Baton Rouge, which is just one of my favourite artists and one of my favourite songs. It's just this really sad, sad song about her singing about where she grew up, which was not a happy place. But for me, it's a song about going back, trying to go back and realizing there's no going back, that time and people moves on. It's lost. Do you relate to that in your own life? Yeah, I do. It's this bittersweet feeling when you have had a good time somewhere and you go back and you can see that other people have taken over the place it's not yours any longer and there's not even a trace of what has happened and you're thinking but the same thing will happen again, these people who look so happy now and are happy here, I'm happy for them but they will experience the same thing in 10 years they will go back here and it's not theirs any longer I'll turn the bus to Baton Rouge I'll turn the bus to Baton Rouge

28:07Lucinda Williams and bus to Baton Rouge. Joe Nesbo, in 1996, you took a sabbatical for music and finance. You went to Australia with only a laptop. Harry Huller was born on that 30-hour flight. Did he arrive with you fully formed? No. He was a combination of some characters I knew from real life and some characters from fiction. Frank Miller's Batman played a big role. I just started reading graphic novels and also Frank Miller's Sin City, in which he sort of takes the cliché of the hard-boiled detective and really embrace those clichés and sort of build them out, make them even bigger than they were before.

28:54I just love that. And so I guess my Harry, he was this idea of a typical Norwegian male and Batman. And I wanted him to be vulnerable. I wanted him to be a cynic romantic, which is sort of the recipe for the American hard-boiled detective. But after all, that was the kind of detective I loved. And so when I sat down after we had landed, I checked into the hotel. I didn't know where it was going. The only thing I knew was that he had just landed in Sydney and I checked into the same hotel I was staying in. My plan was to travel all over Australia. I mostly stayed in the red light district in Sydney and wrote about Harry.

29:43So you and Harry, your progress kind of developed together. Yeah. Your story evolved together. Okay, so your first novel, Harry Horler novel, The Bat, won the Glass Key Award. That's a big award for Nordic crime writers. What was your reaction? I mean, what had your expectations been? Did you think, oh my God, this is easy? Yeah, that was exactly my reaction. You know, either they have misunderstood the novel or it is this easy. It wasn't a big commercial success. Critics liked it, but it wasn't like I sold enough to make a living. but I had then quit my job before I knew I was going to get published.

30:21When I came back from Australia, I was so hooked on writing so I knew that this is what I have to do and I had calculated and found out that because you make a lot of money as a store broker so I had money enough for five years. I didn't have to work for five years. So my plan was, okay, I'll write for five years. If I can make a living writing, I'll do something else. and then much to my surprise the script that I had sent in on the book I've written in Australia was published and then I started writing a second novel and it didn't sell much much more and Harry still wasn't fully formed. I wasn't sure I was going to use him in the second novel.