The dark world of Håkan Nesser

There is something about writers and their best known creations. If you haven’t actually met the writers themselves, in your mind they somehow start looking like their creations. Ian Fleming, for me, will always look like Sean Connery but talk like Roger Moore (Connery’s Irish brogue never fit the image). So it is with Håkan Nesser.

Having devoured each of his mysteries as soon as they arrived in translation, I had somehow imagined that he would look like his most famous protagonist — Chief Inspector Van Veeteren of the Maardam Police: massive and lumbering, with a large bald head and ‘old man’ ears, a grumpy man with a face so homely and weary with age that it startles even its owner when he occasionally catches a reflection of himself.

So it’s quite a surprise when the towering (he’s well over six feet), whippet-thin figure standing in the courtyard of the India Habitat Centre, incongruously clutching a rose (handed over by a young Indian writer, he later tells me), turns out to be the man I have to meet.

In person, Nesser is nothing like any of his principal characters. He has quite a droll sense of humour, with a keen interest in people and places.

He is in India to attend three back-to-back literary festivals (in Kolkata, Delhi and Jaipur). This is unusual, since he is rarely seen at such events, but he says he grabbed the chance to see a new country and meet new people.

He likes meeting readers, though he hates doing readings from his books. “Some of my colleagues do a hundred a year. I’d never be able to do that.”

He is fascinated by the number of languages visible on an Indian hundred rupee note, and wants to know how my wife and I communicate if we both don’t share the same mother tongue. He is even curious about the state of the press in India. “My son’s a journalist and he tells me journalism is dying everywhere,” he tells me. “But that’s not true here, is it? I’ve met so many people from the media already…”

This wide-eyed interest is a sharp contrast from his fictional creations — conflicted, overworked policemen for the most part, with a crumbling personal life and a grim determination which keeps them plodding on even when the situation appears hopeless and the faceless criminal far beyond reach, but with an underlying core of determination to uphold the law, even if the law, many times, is an ass.

But it is this determination which lifts Nesser’s police procedurals above the ordinary, riveting readers to the painstaking progress of the policemen as they trudge stolidly through twists and turns and blind alleys and dead ends, before finally arriving at the solution, if not quite the truth.

In a scene in The Unlucky Lottery , Van Veeteren’s colleague Munster goes to meet his former boss (the Chief Inspector is on an indeterminate leave of absence from the job, and has started running an antiquarian bookshop): “He wondered vaguely how many times he had sat here at Adenaar’s with the chief inspector. Listening to his bad-tempered expositions and gloomy observations…and noting the absolutely clear and incorruptible spirit that was always present under the surface.”

Nesser is one of the most famous exponents of so-called ‘Nordic noir’.

It’s a term he doesn’t like, even though blurb writers inevitably put it on his book jackets. I ask him about this pervasive greyness of life in his books, but he argues that what he writes about is just life. Life as it happens to ordinary people.

“Life is complicated,” he says, “life is dark. We are all pessimists because we know we are all going to die. Our friends will die, people we love will die, we will die. Disasters will happen, you have to keep on living.”

“To learn to live,” he insists, “is to be able to tackle your depression.”

Was he always this sombre? He insists he is not, and indeed, never was. “I was a teacher, you know,” he tells me. “And one cannot be gloomy around young people.”

So how come he has never attempted to address this age group in his books? “How’s your Swedish?” he counters.

It turns out he has written a couple of books for younger readers. One of them — which translates as Kim Novak Never Swam in Genesaret’s Lake — even led to his most memorable encounter with a reader.

At one reading, a man thanked Nesser for saving his life. It turns out he had had cancer and was taken off pain medication before surgery. The pain was so intense the man thought he would die — but listening to an audio book of Kim Novak took his mind off the pain!

“The kids used to ask me what I wrote about (he continued teaching till 1998, though his first book was published in 1986), and I told them I write about life and love and death.”

These are universal themes, he argues, stuff people can relate to. “Every writer — whether he admits it or not — tries to describe the profound questions of human life.” Crime fiction just focuses on one problem, an individual problem (though he admits that fellow Swedish crime writers like Henning Mankell or Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo did comment about contemporary social issues).

This is something he avoids, he says, because he feels that the best stories are stories which have something readers relate to. “Crime fiction is by definition realistic — psychologically realistic. Also thrilling. It is a fight between good and evil, but you must keep the reader also interested in what happens to the people. Keep them interested, keep a question mark in their minds… that’s a good story.”

So is there a message at all in his books, an underlying thread?

“I just want to know — to try to understand — why we do the bad things we do, what are our motives.”

Beyond that — just like his mysteries — any message is left for the reader to decode.

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