Everyone is looking for the person who can give us the next The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo-type books. The Telegraph looked to Iceland and found Yrsa Sigurdardóttir, crime fiction writer. She was also interviewed by J. Sydney Jones, here.
From the Telegraph piece...
“I was nine years old, living in the States at the time of the Eldfell eruption,” Yrsa tells me on the short flight to the island. “For me as a child this was spectacularly exciting, that Iceland was on the news. This was the only time that happened.”
The eruption saw the creation of a 700ft mountain where a meadow had been. All of the island’s 5,000-odd inhabitants were forced to leave and many returned to find their homes buried under solid lava.
A recent project to excavate some of these houses inspired Yrsa to set her third crime novel, published in Britain as Ashes to Dust, on Heimaey. It begins with a man returning to his newly disinterred childhood home and discovering three decades-old corpses and a severed head in the cellar.
She is astonished that nobody else beat her to the idea: Iceland bulges with crime writers. Yrsa, however, is one of only two to have been translated into English so far (the other is the chilling Arnaldur Indridason) and she is now published in 35 countries, appealing to fans of Nordic crime supremos Henning Mankell and Stieg Larsson, but free of the Weltschmerz of the one and the implausibilities of the other.
We head to the area the locals call “Pompeii” where the tops of a dozen houses poke out of the lava. These suburban villas lack the grandeur and aesthetic appeal associated with more famous excavation sites, but the effect is oddly poignant.
Yrsa has made friends with some of the people who lost their homes. “They were teenagers at the time. They remember the smell, and just being dumped on fishing boats wherever there was space. They were being seasick, some of them thought it was a war. It’s the middle of the night, you’re sleeping and then all of a sudden, boom, life is just collapsing."
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