Prime Suspect

In a genre full of disgruntled middle-aged detectives, Nesser knew, early on, that there was only one way for his protagonist to make his mark. “I thought it would be interesting if he had a wider world-view. If he liked books as much as his job, and if he didn’t think of himself as a hero,” he says. A fan of Dutch writer Janwillem van de Wetering, Nesser was particularly fond of his detective fiction featuring Grijpstra and de Gier, police officers in the murder brigade of the Amsterdam Police, who loved the blues and jazz, played musical instruments and engaged in philosophical discussions. “So, I decided to name my detective Van Veeteren, after van de Wetering and there he was, for better or for worse,” he says.

One of the reasons behind the popularity of crime fiction is how it looks at the shortcomings of society through the prism of the laws breached. In Nesser’s books, there is a thin line that separates the perpetrators from the keepers of the law. Veeteren, who begins the series as Detective Chief Inspector of Mardaam — a fictitious town in northern Europe that Nesser says is closest to Amsterdam — is an intuitive detective, acutely aware of social underpinnings. Like Inspector Barbarotti, Nesser’s other fictional detective who has featured in five mysteries since the Van Veeteren series drew to a close in 2002, Veeteren finds his sympathies tested in the cases that he solves.
“When a bad guy commits a murder, it is not really interesting. But when a good person does it, it’s because the society has failed him somehow,” says Nesser, confessing to an affinity for motives which go back into the past. “Revenge is best served cold, preferably 30 years ago and spanning generations,” he says.

A teacher for close to 25 years before he turned to writing, Nesser is uncomfortable by the blanketing notion of Scandinavian noir. “People expect a certain kind of literature from the region and they talk of the weather and the bleakness of the landscape. Most people know little of Swedes beyond Ingmar Bergman, so the general perception is that we are a nation of depressed, gloomy people who take off their shoes before they enter a house. There is really no such thing as Nordic noir,” he says. But it’s a notion that took shape after 2006, with the publication of Larsson’s trilogy and the proliferation of English translations of the works of other writers from the region. “For a long time, Sweden had a robust social welfare system, but when it began falling apart, many writers took to offering social critiques through crime fiction. English readers love to read about things going down the drain, so that could be a reason for it, but really, the generalisation is rather precarious,” he says.

Instead, he would rather turn his mind to the demands of his readers in the book that he is working on at present. At a reading session in New York some years ago, a woman had caught him unawares with her query. “She asked me, ‘You have written 10 books with Van Veeteren, but why is it that he never drank milk?’ Honestly, I had never thought about it before!” he says.