2024-04-22 13:30
I first heard of Gudrídur Thorbjarnardóttir, or Gudrid the Wanderer, when I was visiting my ecclesiastical contact, the Reverend Sara. She showed me her church, an amazing mode… Read More
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Writing In Ice:a Crime Writer's Guide To Iceland Blog
writinginice.com
WRITING IN ICE is the story of how I fell in love with Iceland: a memoir of researching and writing a detective series set in the Land of Fire and Ice.
2024-03-26 14:50
Those of you who have read my recent novel, Whale Fjord, will have come across an unpleasant character named Neville Pybus-Smith, the head of British military intelligence in Iceland during… Read More
2024-02-27 15:32
My new Magnus novel is published! It's called Whale Fjord and is number 7 in the series after Death in Dalvik.Iceland 1940. Britain invades Iceland. Lieutenant Tom Marks is a British office… Read More
2024-02-06 14:30
Very few people outside Iceland realize that Britain occupied the country in 1940; I certainly hadn’t heard of it until I started writing novels set there.Royal Marines landed in Reykj… Read More
2024-01-11 14:30
The higher the latitude, the greater the difference between summer and winter. Iceland is only just below the Arctic Circle, so in midwinter it is dark nearly all the time. Daylight is only… Read More
2023-12-29 14:19
Iceland blew its top last week. And then it calmed down.This was the third eruption on the Reykjanes Peninsula in the last three years. It was the most spectacular – and the br… Read More
2023-11-28 20:28
For years, a group of old friends, who have also been loyal readers of my books, have been asking me to show them around Iceland. I promised I would one day, and this year I decided to take… Read More
2023-10-24 18:30
The weather in Iceland is terrible. But then it changes. A perfect example of this was my research trip to Saudárkrókur in northern Iceland in November 2016. It w… Read More
2023-09-26 18:12
The weather in Reykjavík is uninspiring. Winters are about the same temperature as Hamburg, but summers don’t get as warm. It is milder than you would think in winter: the temp… Read More
2023-08-15 13:50
Nordic countries are often depicted as being dark, gloomy and depressing. But that is only half the story. The other half is summer, when the sun shines for twenty-one hours – the phot… Read More
2023-07-18 15:18
In my last blog post, I gave you a brief survey of the amazing crime writers working in Iceland at the moment. Where do my own books fit into this crowded field?Well, they are different. Ri… Read More
2023-06-20 07:08
When I started writing crime novels in Iceland, I assumed I would have the country entirely to myself. Idiot. It turns out that plenty of Icelandic writers were thinking the same thing at… Read More
2023-05-23 13:30
Vík is a pleasant little town crammed between the beautiful glacier of Mýrdal and the sea, at the southernmost point in Iceland halfway along the south coast. It has no ha… Read More
2023-04-25 13:30
Following my previous post on polar bears in Iceland, here is the first chapter of my novella The Polar Bear Killing.This was going to be the most important day of his life. He knew it. He c… Read More
2023-03-28 13:30
In November 2016, I travelled to Saudárkrókur, in the north of Iceland, researching my book The Wanderer. As is my habit, I dropped into the local police station to speak to th… Read More
2023-01-30 14:30
Time for another guest blog. This one is from Jónína Léosdóttir, an Icelandic novelist who has turned to crime, and the wife of a former Prime Minister of I… Read More
2023-01-10 14:30
I sometimes think that the ravens own Iceland and humans are allowed to live there only with their permission. Remember, it was a raven that led Flóki to Iceland in the ninth ce… Read More
2022-12-20 14:30
If you travel all the way to Iceland, you want to see some ice. And the best place to do this is Jökulsárlón, literally ‘Glacier River Lagoon’, an astoundingly… Read More
2022-12-02 13:30
Another guest post – this time from the Icelandic crime writer, Solveig Pálsdóttir. Solveig is an actor. I have often wondered whether actors have an insight into chara… Read More
2022-11-08 19:30
During 2021, Reykjavik was entertained by a small, pretty volcano at Fagradalsfjall, between the capital and Keflavík international airport. It tossed fire safely into the sky like… Read More
2022-10-18 18:30
Time for another guest post. This one is from American author and horsewoman Nancy Marie Brown.When I wrote a recent post on elves in Iceland, Nancy’s publishers sent me a copy of her… Read More
2022-09-27 13:30
As you fly towards Iceland from Europe, or as you drive along the Ring Road from Reykjavík to Vík, you see a group of cubic islands, which look like poker dice tossed into the… Read More
2022-09-06 13:30
There have been about thirty volcanoes active in Iceland since the Norse settlers arrived. The island was created only twenty million years ago. It stands on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, a c… Read More
2022-08-16 13:30
One evening in April 2010 I was on my way to an event in a library in Chiswick in West London to talk about Where the Shadows Lie, which had just been published. I was a little early, so I w… Read More
2022-07-26 13:30
The Hótel Búdir is my favourite place in Iceland. It stands next to its black church alone, halfway along the south coast of Snaefellsnes. It is a spectacular location. T… Read More
2022-07-05 13:30
The Icelandic countryside teems with folk stories. Every village or even farm has one, and they don’t just concern elves. We have heard about the trolls, but there are also sea monster… Read More
2022-06-16 06:49
Every now and then I intend to slip in a guest post from someone who knows Iceland or Icelandic crime writing.My first victim is Quentin Bates. Like me, Quentin is an Englishman who wr… Read More
2022-05-24 13:30
There are certain problems with writing about elves. I’m not the kind of guy who believes in them. I write about a tough Boston homicide cop: could Magnus really believe in elves… Read More
2022-05-03 13:30
What about the elves?I had written two full-length novels set in Iceland, and it was becoming clear that there was a question I could no longer dodge. What was I going to do about the elves?… Read More
2022-04-20 12:30
My new Magnus novel is published! It's called Death in Dalvik and is number 6 in the series after The Wanderer.When sixteen-year-old Dísa is given five bitcoin by her divorced father… Read More
2022-04-05 13:00
The Berserkjagata is signposted, but it’s hard to locate. As you descend from the pass, you turn left on the main road from Stykkishólmur to Grundarfjördur, the D54, and af… Read More
2022-03-22 16:23
I explored the north coast of Snaefellsnes, researching the location for my second novel.StykkishólmurStykkishólmur is the largest community on the peninsula. A natural harbour… Read More
2022-03-08 14:30
On my search for mythic Snefellsnes, I drove through the Berserkjahraun lava field to Bjarnarhöfn, Björn's Harbour.BjarnarhöfnI had tentatively decided that this would be Magn… Read More
2022-02-22 14:30
I had identified Snaefellsnes as a likely location for some mythic background for my second novel, so I needed to check it out.I jumped on a flight to Iceland, hired a car, and drove north… Read More
2022-02-08 14:30
I wrote my story about my demonstrators in the Parliament Square, and their plans to take justice into their own hands. I called it 66 Degrees North, which is the latitude upon which Iceland… Read More
2022-01-25 12:30
I am breaking out of my narrative flow with this blog post which describes a visit to a certain museum in Reykjavik. We will call it Lilja's Richard Museum. Why Richard? There is a big pr… Read More
2022-01-11 14:13
I was still on the hunt for real-live Icelanders with which I could people my second Magnus novel.The bankerI met Birna, a middle executive in one of the banks, who had lost all of her savin… Read More
2021-12-28 14:55
What if a group of ordinary Icelanders, angry Icelanders, met at one of these protests in the Parliament Square? What if they decided that those responsible for the crash deserved to be puni… Read More
2021-12-14 14:57
Throughout the world, people wanted to lock up those bankers who were responsible for the 2008 crash. Iceland is one of the few countries that actually managed to do it. It started with a pu… Read More
2021-11-30 15:30
The crash, when it came, was dramatic.The global financial crisis of 2008 didn’t start in Iceland. Bankers in the US found clever ways of lending too much money to mortgage borrowers w… Read More
2021-11-16 16:31
While I had been writing Where the Shadows Lie, happily losing myself in thoughts of sagas, rings, volcanoes and Gull beer, the financial world was melting down around me. I remembered how I… Read More
2021-11-02 15:19
There are two ways to get to the Blue Lagoon from Reykjavík – the Blue Lagoon is the large geothermal pool-spa next to a power station, and is well worth visiting, although it i… Read More
2021-10-19 12:29
Writing a novel is all very well, but at some point it has to be let out into the world to take its chances.My agent Carole Blake and I had agreed that her assistant Oli would act for… Read More
2021-10-05 12:09
Writing Magnus I was a lot of fun. I liked Magnus, and it was good to know that we were just getting acquainted; in my previous novels, my heroes, as I naively persist in calling them &ndash&hell…Read More
2021-09-21 12:05
Back to London, and time to write the book. I was looking forward to it, but I was also scared. I’m always nervous when starting a new book. Nobody wants to write a dud, but my f… Read More
2021-09-07 11:24
I was on the hunt for a plausible lost saga. How did it get lost? Whom was it about? Originally, the sagas were written down by monks on vellum (calfskin). They used quills from the left win… Read More
2021-08-24 10:36
I needed someone to speak to about sagas. I found a lecturer in Icelandic Literature, Thorsteinn. His office was on the top floor of the old building of the University of Iceland… Read More
2021-08-10 10:11
Reykjavík has plenty of good cafés, but my favourite is Mokka. It’s a few yards up Skólavördustígur (the Skola Street) on the left, in a building that… Read More
2021-07-27 13:30
I was looking for two things from my police contact Páll: the details of how the police would undertake an investigation from the discovery of the body to the eventual conviction of t… Read More
2021-07-13 09:56
If you have been enjoying this blog over the last few months, you may want to buy my new book Writing in Ice: A Crime Writer’s Guide to Iceland. It’s a compilation of… Read More
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