Arnaldur Indridason

Arnaldur Indridason is the author of Jar City, Silence of the Grave, Voices, and The Draining Lake, all published by Minotaur. He won the CWA Gold Dagger Award for Silence of the Grave and is the only author to win the Glass Key Award for Best Nordic Crime Novel two years in a row, for Jar City and Silence of the Grave. His latest novel, Arctic Chill, releases on September 15 in the US.

From a Q & A with Indridason:

Inspector Erlendur is sometimes described as a “gloomy Scandinavian?” Is there anything to that stereotype? If so, to what do you attribute it?

Many of them are gloomy but you don’t always know why. My books tell the story of this inspector who is very isolated, very lonely and very gloomy and with each book you get a little bit more answer as to why that is. There is a reason for it but we just don’t know it fully and it is one of the mysteries in the books. So it is a question of how you tackle it and if you can make it interesting and part of the whole story instead of just putting it up there and not use it at all. Why the gloominess? I think it is much more interesting to write about lives gone wrong than happy lives, there is no fun in happiness, I always say.

What do you think American readers would be most surprised to learn about Icelandic people or society?

Well, the question I most often get from my foreign readers is if there really are crimes in Iceland. People seem to have an innocent, trolls-and-elves-like image of Iceland with the great landscape and clean air. But...[read on]

Read more about Arctic Chill.

--Marshal Zeringue