For many writers, a sense of place serves as a backdrop—an aesthetic choice that enhances the story. But for author Ørjan Karlsson the landscapes of northern Norway are more than just scenery. They are characters, shaping the people who live there and the stories they tell.
On the eve of his first publication in English, Into Thin Air, Ørjan Karlsson spoke to Nordic Watchlist’s Glen Pearce on how his roots, past, and experiences have influenced the world he’s created on the page.
Having already written over 20 books, writing a crime thriller wasn’t top of author Ørjan Karlsson’s to-do list. Having already penned a successful military action series (as yet untranslated into English) alongside science fiction and young adult books, the traditional Nordic Noir police procedural may have seen an obvious choice but was something Karlsson initially resisted.
“It was in my mind for quite some time, but reading a lot of crime novels it’s very hard to find a voice that can stand out. And for me, it was something at the end of the day that turned out to be obvious,” he explains.
That ‘obvious’ moment came when returning to the place where he had spent his childhood and seeing it with fresh eyes.
“During COVID I went up north and visited my father who lives on the island of Røst, which is in the middle of the ocean between Bodø and Lofoten. I hadn’t been there since I was eight or nine and seeing it with your adult writing eyes you get ideas,” he reflects.
The remoteness of Røst and the fact that you can almost see the entire island from its highest vantage point sparked a thought in the writer’s head.
“I was out running that day, and I was just struck by the thought of what would happen if all of a sudden I, or someone else that was out running, just disappeared and you couldn’t explain it?”
While Karlsson couldn’t immediately find a vehicle for the idea, the image stuck with him, alongside the idea of setting this story in the remote Norwegian landscape in which he’d grown up. So, with a seed of multiple disappearances in a landscape that can easily swallow people up, the spark of a crime novel was born.
Of course, a setting and a crime are only part of the picture in a crime novel and a writer needs his lead detective. Jakob Weber, the Chief Investigator of Nordland Police that we meet in Into Thin Air, isn’t your standard Nordic Noir flawed detective, something that for Karlsson was important.
“When Jakob came to me I always imagined him like the person you can meet on the street that doesn’t really stick out. He doesn’t have any of those cliche things that most of the literary detectives have – you’re a womaniser, you’re drinking, or you’re both a womaniser and drinking,” Karlsson explains.
No detective operates alone and Into Thin Air also delivers a team around Weber. The process of creating this community provided an unexpected bonus for the author.
“Around Weber, this group of people came alive and when I started to write the first chapters, I thoroughly enjoyed being in their company. I also rediscovered my hometown because I realised I hadn’t really seen the city of Bodø through Jakob’s eyes” he reveals.
“I’d been away for so long that the city that I had in my mind was the one that was there at the beginning of the nineties and so I need to reacquaint myself with the city.”
It was the introduction of a new detective partner for Jakob, Noora Yun Sande, a detective transferred from Oslo and so new to the area, which provided Karlsson the key to exploring this region both as a writer but also a vehicle for readers to discover new character and new locales.
“I figured out that Noora would be an interesting character in the book, because she would help the reader to see the city for the first time as well, whereas Jakob more or less sees it like I used to see it.”
Alongside the human protagonists, the remote rugged landscape of northern Norway becomes a character in itself, something the author sees as key to the book’s authenticity.
“My aim was to have the landscape as a character or a presence,” he explains. “If you join me on this journey, you will realise that the landscape will form the people that live there for good or bad or better or worse, and, for me, that was important.”
As he was writing, a particular childhood memory kept reoccurring to Karlsson.
“I had this reoccurring dream when I was young where I was standing at the shoreline. It was that part of the day when it’s overcast and the ocean is grey and you lose the horizon, so everything blends into one. In my dream, I started hearing this roar coming from somewhere and I could see this fog rolling in, coming to sweep everything away. Of course, it was scary. I was young and probably had read too many Stephen King books but I never got that out of my mind.”
For Karlsson, that interaction with landscape and nature shapes us from even an incredibly early age.
“When I write these books I always keep with me that it’s not only the people you grew up with, but the landscape and the structures around you that make this kind of perfect imprint on you in some way.”
For readers more used to the urban setting of say Jo Nesbø’s Harry Hole series in Olso or Gunnar Staalesen’s Varg Veum in Bergen, the Nordland setting for detective Jakob Weber may seem quite different. It’s a comparison Karlsson is very aware of.
“If you compare the Weber novels with, for instance, Gunnar Staalesen, Jørn Leir Horst, or Jo Nesbø, they write from what is, in Norway at least, a big city and it shows.” He continues: “Sometimes the city seems bigger in the novel than it really is in real life. I probably do the same thing with the landscape and what goes on there, but even though you find urban environments that are distinct, if you compare them they would have more similarities than you would find when it comes to certain types of landscape.”
The mix of miles of coastline and mountains, the extremes of midnight sun and arctic winter darkness gives an author plenty of scope as a backdrop. “Bodø has this advantage that it is, in English terms, a small city but still for me it gives me some kind of plausible playground for the detectives.”
Character is clearly a strong driver for Karlsson, so does that drive his writing process, or does he plot out each story arc in meticulous detail?
“Character is important for me because my story grows with what the character experiences. I have already written a few books, so I feel confident when the story tells me to go in a certain direction. I don’t always get it right and I must backtrack, but this infuses the story with a few more surprises maybe for the reader.”
“Some Norwegian writers, Jørn Lier Horst, for instance, are very plot-driven. If you see in his workroom, you’ll see all these yellow post-it notes, and you’ve got the timeline” he continues “He’s very clear about what happens almost down to the second sometimes and I think that’s a method that works really well for him.”
“I’m more of an intuitive writer. I have a clear idea of what the beginning is. I know approximately where there’s going to be some kind of turnaround in the middle, and I have an idea of the end.”
Into Thin Air is the first in what is planned to be a 10-book series, the first three of which have already been published in Norway, with the fourth due later this year. With a character-led approach and the ability to run story arcs over multiple instalments, Karlsson is keen to keep readers interested long-term.
“If the character stays static, I think it will be less interesting” he explains. “Each character will have their own arc. I can’t guarantee you that all of them will make it to book ten but I think that’s also interesting.”
“Relationships will grow stronger, sometimes they will weaken or disappear, and I think that having that going on at the same time as you have the mystery, or the drama makes the story more interesting.”
With the initial books now published, does Karlsson know how the remaining novels will progress? Yes and No.
“I had this overarching story that will go until book five but then something happened during the writing, especially on book two, that I needed to take a step back. Book three will get a big reveal for the overarching story. Book four there will be one key discovery that will probably put some of the readers on the right track of what’s going on and then in book five, you will have the end of the first story arc. And then I’m probably going to have book six where there is going to be an open and close mystery and the last four books this kind of finale building up.”
Despite having mapped out the plot for his series, Karlsson still faces the challenge of balancing suspense and character development. Writing about dark subjects—particularly from the perspective of the antagonist – is a psychological toll, and he’s learned to separate those chapters from the rest of the story to maintain the emotional distance he needs.
“When I’m working on the antagonist chapters, I have to write them separated from the others to make the voice as distinct as I can.
“When I wrote in the voice of the antagonist in book one, I even had discussions with my editor about how far I should go, because you can come to a point where the scenes can be so disturbing that you might lose track of the rest of the story.” He explains. “I need to isolate these sections as to make them as distinct and believable as possible and don’t let them interfere with the descriptions and the thoughts and the dialogue of the main characters.”
Despite his realistic descriptions of police investigations, Karlsson has never had the urge to join the police himself.
“I was an officer in the Norwegian Army for six years and then I had to decide, should I shed my uniform, or should I just go all in? I think that when I took that decision, wearing a uniform, be it police or military, was off the table. Now I work as a civilian in the Directorate for Civil Protection.” He continues, “but when you work in this field, you meet a lot of police and people that have a police background.”
Those conversations with current and former police colleagues however have shaped his writing, with the theme of disappearances being based on actual Norwegian statistics.
“One of the sounding boards for the series is that we have very few murders in Norway, but we have a lot of people that disappear.” Karlsson explains. “Who disappears, who commits suicide, who just voluntarily goes away. Even though in the computer and electronic age, our world has less of a chance to disappear completely, still the numbers are high.”
“In Norland, where this book series takes place there are areas where it is easy to hide someone. If you commit such a crime in Norway and you are good at what you’re doing, unfortunately for the victim and the investigators, your chances of getting away with it, I will say, are quite good.”
With Into Thin Air marking his debut in an English translation, Karlsson hopes it will introduce readers to a new part of Norway.
“I think that for English readers, the north will be exotic, but at the same time, it will be believable when it comes to the characters. Jakob is a smart guy, and he is not afraid, at the end of the day to do the right thing, when he’s making his decisions his colleagues are there following him, that’s not because he is a leader, he’s a people person and he doubts himself sometime. These characters and the landscape hopefully will be enough for this novel to stand out as something new in the plethora of crime novels published in the UK.”
Into Thin Air by Ørjan Karlsson, translated by Ian Giles, is published by Orenda Books on January 16 2025
