![]() ![]() “For me, as a storyteller, that was my school,” Nesbø told me. He attributes his skill to hearing his father and his relatives tell the same stories over and over. Nesbø likes to rip plots up in this way, to play with the conventions of his genre. Not until well into the next book, “Police,” do you find out whether or not he is still alive. ![]() At the conclusion of “Phantom,” the ninth novel in the series, Harry is shot at point-blank range. Hole, who is both destructive and self-destructive, always gets his man, but by the end of the story he has inadvertently caused the death of someone he loves, or become an opium addict, or been disfigured. He has written ten novels about the investigations of Inspector Harry Hole, a cynical, alcoholic detective in the Oslo police department. In the crowded field of Scandinavian crime fiction, Nesbø’s books stand out for their blackness. “Do you really want to know?” his father asked. He ran to his father, Per, woke him from a nap, and asked him what happens when you die. Thoughts of death descended on him, visions of being trapped in a coffin under the earth. The sun had set in Molde, the small city on Norway’s west coast where he grew up, and the apartment in which he lived with his parents and two brothers was silent. When the Norwegian crime writer Jo Nesbø was in his early teens, he had a panic attack. ![]() “I learned at a young age,” Nesbø says, “that you have to see things from different sides.” Illustration by Michael Gillette ![]()
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