Take a climb with the master of cliffhangers, Jo Nesbø

“Do not panic,” reads the message on my phone as I disembark in Oslo. I’m three minutes into my assignment and, in a scenario that seems apt for the subject I’m here to meet, a plot twist has taken place. I am in the Norwegian capital to rock climb with the master of mystery and suspense himself, crime author Jo Nesbø. However, the climb has been postponed at the last minute thanks to a Nordic perpetrator who strikes quite frequently, and at times ruthlessly: the weather.

“Sorry about the weather,” says Nesbø as he opens the door to his apartment of 20 years in the leafy borough of Frogner. A few days later, the weather shifts and Nesbø scales rock faces with our photographer. But for now? “Let’s get coffee,” he suggests, somewhat more meekly. We walk a few blocks and enter a place he says “has the best bread”. As he sips his oat milk latte, we discuss our intended activity: rock climbing. The creator of the Harry Hole crime series adopted the sport in his forties when a friend took him to a quiet peninsula in Thailand so “he could sit and write”.

He didn’t write. Instead, he joined in and “was instantly hooked”. It is the mental challenge of rock climbing that nabbed him. In fact, Nesbø, who is famed for his thrillers, is slightly scared of heights. Dangling off a cliff face is not a natural state for him, but the discomfort gives him that oft-chased adrenaline rush. “It is like playing when you were kids,” he says. “It isn't for real.”

He goes on to explain that when he would play cowboys as a child, Nesbø would die the most spectacular deaths. “Dying was my thing,” he laughs. “As soon as the game stopped when I was a kid, reality returned and it didn't matter anymore. It’s the same thing with climbing. It’s a place where I go and when I’m at it, it means everything, and when I stop, it sort of disappears.”

While most think of rock climbing as something that brings you closer to nature, Nesbø actually sees it as an “urban sport” that caters to adrenaline junkies. He explains that, oftentimes, the best rocks are found in or close to city centres. In Oslo he doesn’t have to travel far to be surrounded by “boulders or routes that are, like, 30 metres long” that can be “done as an afternoon activity”.

Along with a fear of heights, a young Nesbø was also scared of the dark and of getting lost. He believes that a constant state of fear is the best training ground for any wannabe crime writer. “I was quite good at being scared and I didn’t mind being scared,” he says. He can conjure serial killers and torturous scenes on paper as well as climb to death-defying heights because, in these situations, “you feel more fear than when there is actual danger.”

He was often asked to tell them. “I figured that they thought I was the best storyteller. It was only later that they told me it was because I was so young and they could hear the fear in my voice,” he says. “When I was telling the story, I was as afraid as they were.” For Nesbø, it’s this genuine ability to be scared that has been the secret recipe behind his thrillers being so thrilling.

When you hear stories of Nesbø’s childhood, it seems almost foretold that he would become one of Scandinavia's, if not the world’s, bestselling authors. Case in point: his first reaction to William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, was that he could have made it “more exciting”. However, it wasn’t until a long-haul flight to Australia in 1996, at the age of 36, that he realised this was what he “was going to do”.

As a teenager, Nesbø was a professional footballer, playing for Norway’s premier league team Molde, however an injury quickly put an end to that career. He then did three years of military service before attending business school and becoming a financial analyst. Working on the stock market by day, he gigged with his band Di Derre ('Them There') by night. Nesbø was the lead singer, songwriter and played the guitar. By the mid-1990s, the band had a breakthrough and was huge in Norway. “We were playing 180 gigs, sometimes while I was working,” he explains. “At the end of that year, I was on the edge of being burnt out. So I told my boss and band I needed some time off.”

Nesbø decided to join his friend on a trip to Sydney, Australia. Before he left, however, he’d been approached about writing a book on his band. He politely declined but the idea of a book niggled at the back of his mind. “I started writing on the plane. It wasn't like I had a master plan,” he says. “I had no idea it was going to be a series. I actually didn't think it would be published... but just like rock climbing, I was hooked right away.”

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While his friend may have found Nesbø to be a dull travel partner (“He was complaining because I was writing all the time”), that five-week holiday led to his first book, The Bat. This was the first time we met Norwegian detective Harry Hole. Now there are 13 books in the Harry Hole series with Blood Moon coming out this August. Along with Hole, Nesbø has created a series of children’s books called Dr Proctor's Fart Powder.

He also released the twisty, Hitchcockian novel Headhunters that was turned into a movie with Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, conceived the storyline for hit political thriller series Occupied and, last year, tried his hand at short stories with the release of The Jealousy Man. All while still playing with his band every summer. “We play 15 gigs every year, not too far from Oslo,” he says.

For the unacquainted, Harry Hole, who was played by Michael Fassbender in the movie adaption of book number seven The Snowman, is the typical anti-hero. He’s doggedly persistent when it comes to solving cases yet his strong sense of justice is one of his greatest flaws. While he is a man of the law, he’s not above breaking the law himself for justice to be served. A lady’s man, alcoholic and heavy smoker, he can be self-destructive in his personal life. Still, it is impossible not to root for him.

I ask if people expect to meet Hole when they meet Nesbø. He recounts that he once found himself on Icelandic band Sigur Rós’s rider next to bottles of beer and whiskey. The renowned band was coming to Oslo for a show and one of their green room requests was to have beers with Nesbø. “I was really tired. And it was a late concert and I came backstage afterward and they wanted me to drink whiskey and go out in the city and get really drunk.
I said I was just going to say hello, then go to bed. I could see the look on their faces, 'You're not Harry Hole'.”

He continues, “When people admire you or are really hardcore fans, the best thing you can do is say nothing. Shut up, just be silent and mysterious, because I'm not as cool as they think I am.” Scandinavia is renowned for its crime writing, commonly referred to as Scandi or Nordic Noir, but Nesbø doesn’t want you to think he’s an expert on the topic. He sees himself as a storyteller, not a specialist of crime or thriller writing. Rather than focusing on crafting with in the confines of a genre, he sees writing through musical reference points.

To him, a Harry Hole novel is like “conducting a symphony orchestra, you have to get the details right and you have to write the sheet music so that musicians will do exactly what you want them to do.” A comedy like Doctor Proctor’s Fart Powder is more “like jamming with a small band”.

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So does he have a process that ensures readers will want to sleep with the lights on after reading his books? He explains that he was once interviewing a comedian about his process of writing jokes. The comedian said that, “In the end, it has to make your laugh start to bubble inside, and you don’t know why it did it, but it made you laugh.” For Nesbø, this rings true for fear as well. “What you are aiming for is to move people emotionally and move yourself emotionally first.” You need that bubble.

Danish Norwegian writer Aksel Sandemose, who Nesbø admires, once claimed the only two things worth writing about are murder and love. I ask what a ‘Jo Nesbø love story’ would look like.

He smiles and thinks before saying, “I’ll take a scene from one of my Harry Hole books...” “There's a man and a woman in a waterbed. He has taken her home for what may be a one night stand or may be the start of a love story. We don't know. But they are having sex in this bed and while they're having sex, she has this feeling that there's something that is hitting her behind the shoulder blades. When he walks out of the room to shower, she pulls the sheet to reveal a profile of a woman in the waterbed.”

I interrupt with an audible, “Oh my god”. “As she's looking down at this woman, she realises that the shower has stopped running and she can hear water drops dripping on the wooden floor behind her.” Nesbø goes on to explain that the woman inside the waterbed is the man’s ex-wife, who was trying to leave him. He loved her so much that he killed her and preserved her in alcohol in the bed. “Now she is there for him every day when he gets home. That is a love story.”