Fire and Ice

Yrsa Sigurdardóttir chats with Sydney Jones at his blog devoted to crime fiction’s relationship to settings, Scene of the Crime. She gives some coordinates for her next book to be translated into English, Ashes to Dust:

It takes place in a small fishing village on the Westmann Islands off the south coast of Iceland, an island on which a volcano erupted with much ado in 1973. Being pretty used to lava and seascapes it was an archeological dig called Pompeii of the North that intrigued me the most. The dig involves excavating houses from underneath massive layers of ash to showcase them in situ, while my story adds a fictional twist when something other than broken roof beams and rusted iron is unearthed. On every visit to the dig I was just as impressed as the first time I laid eyes on the huge, deep canal, as the blackness of the all-encompassing ash and the effect it had on sounds was intimidating, not to mention the graphic reminder of nature’s not so gentle treatment of the houses we intend to keep us safe from the elements.

For more from Yrsa about Iceland and volcanoes, see her most recent post at Murder is Everywhere, a joint blog of several authors who set mysteries outside the US.

In the Going Backward Department, the Salomonsson Agency’s newsletter reports that the first of Jo Nesbø’s Harry Hole series, titled The Bat Man, will be published in English in 2012, after The Leopard, which is number eight in the series. Will we get the second in the series eventually? Fingers crossed.

Meanwhile, Glenn Harper at International Noir Fiction gives us a preview of his experience reading Nesbø’s The Snowman.

Nesbø writes beautifully, with a style that seems simple but is interlaced with humor, metaphor, character, and menace. Though many readers will figure out who the killer is long before Detective Harry Hole does, the fun in reading the book really comes in reading the prose and watching the plot twist and turn through numerous red herrings and false leads until it reaches its inevitable conclusion.

Ali Karim reports thoroughly from the evening at the Swedish Embassy in London where distinguished guests were invited to discuss “Crimes of the Millennium.” One interesting tidbit: about half of the 44 (!) translations of what is called in English The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo used a literal translation of the original title: Men Who Hate Women. Ali’s report is followed by a short essay written by Barry Forshaw, author of the forthcoming biography of Stieg Larsson, The Man Who Left Too Soon.

Maxine, who picked up a copy of Swedish Book Review at the big do, reports on a preview published there of Henning Mankell’s The Troubled Man written by its translator, Laurie Thompson, and reminds Maxine that she much prefers the books to any of the television adaptations. The final Wallander novel will be published in the UK in 2011.