There are worse things than being called “the new ‘it’ boy of Nordic noir,” which is how the Times of London hailed thriller writer Jussi Adler-Olsen, comparing him to Stieg Larsson, Henning Mankell, and Jo Nesbø. A wildly popular author in his native Denmark, Adler-Olsen was introduced to American audiences last year with the acclaimed Keeper of Lost Causes, the first in a series featuring the put-upon, world-weary police detective Carl Mørck and his sidekick, Hafez el-Assad, both employees in Department Q, the Copenhagen police division for the coldest of cold cases. The Absent One (Dutton) is the second book in the series, with many more no doubt to come.
Adler-Olsen has put in time as a publisher, an in-house editor, a composer of music for movies, and a worker in the peace movement. He has also written three highly successful international thrillers. The Department Q series got its start when a well-known Danish film producer suggested Adler-Olsen do a police story in the tradition of Swedish crime coauthors Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö. His initial reaction was that that wasn’t for him. “What interests me is writing about preventing crime, not solving it,” he says. “The police work under loads of regulations and rules which restrict each individual officer. Nevertheless, I was intrigued and thought a great deal about how to sidestep these restrictions. When I came up with the scenario of having a police officer who was not welcome anywhere in the system and who didn’t care what people thought about him and basically just wanted to do what he himself wanted, I realized that the concept had materialized.”
Thrillers, Adler-Olsen says, have the clear advantage that no subject is off-limits: “To me that opens up possibilities and gives me room for more in-depth research, which is a huge part of my motivation. I find that the reader gets involved in the story in a different way, and the good old bag of tricks which, for example, Alfred Hitchcock used—such as suspense where we know something about a person which is unknown to that person—are forceful elements which make people read faster. And then there is the fact that thrillers are often more exciting to watch than crime movies. Who would not like to see a great thriller? I certainly would.”
Adler-Olsen has huge respect for booksellers, without whom, he says, he would not “have achieved anything. Thanks to their word-of-mouth recommendations my readership has slowly evolved year by year. I feel indebted to the booksellers and do everything I can to return the favor.”
