Bio
Árni Þórarinsson was born in Reykjavík on August first 1950. After finishing high school in Reykjavík in 1970, he studied comparative literature at The University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, and gradated with a B.A. degree in 1973.
Árni has worked as a journalist and in the media for years. He started out as a journalist at Morgunblaðið newspaper in the summers of 1971 and 1972, and worked full time at the same paper from 1973 – 1976. He was the editor of the weekend edition of Vísir newspaper from 1976 – 1979, also writing film reviews, and the editor of Helgarpósturinn newspaper from 1979 – 1984, doing critique there as well. He wrote reviews for Morgunblaðið from 1984 – 1986 and did freelance work for radio and television. He was the editor of Mannlíf magazine from 1986 – 1988 and continued working for radio and television until 1999. Árni also worked as a journalist at Morgunblaðið, focusing on interviews and article writing, as well as continuing to write film reviews.
Árni was on the board of the Reykjavík Film Festival in 1989 and 1991 and he has been a member of several panels of judges at international film festivals.
Árni’s first novel, the crime novel Nóttin hefur þúsund augu (The Night Has a Thousand Eyes) was published in 1998, and since then he has sent forward more books about the investigating journalist Einar. He was one of the authors who wrote the novel Leyndardómar Reykjavíkur 2000 (The Reykjavík 2000 Mystery), all of them being members of “Hið íslenska glæpafélag” (Icelandic Crime Writers). He has also written crime novels together with his colleague Páll Kristinn Pálsson. They have written scripts for television together as well, Dagurinn í gær (Yesterday), aired by The Icelandic National Broadcast Company (RÚV) in 1999, and 20/20, which Óskar Jónasson directed for RÚV in 2002. The latter film was nominated for four Edda awards (The Icelandic Film Awards), one of them being for best script of the year. Árni has also published an interview book with filmmaker Hrafn Gunnlaugsson, and his translation of a book for teenagers by the Dutch writer Evert Hartman received the Reykjavík Scholastic Prize in 1984. Some of Árni’s books about Einar have been published in translations.
Author photo: Jóhann Páll Valdimarsson.
From the Author
From my point of view
I want to use this opportunity to tell you how the stories about the journalist Einar were formulated, from my point of view.
The idea was born in the summer of 1994. I was sitting on a sun deck by a cabin in the Swedish Skerries, reading a book by one of my favourite crime authors, the American Ross Macdonald, who at his time was a deserving disciple of Raymond Chandler. I was so immersed in the reading that I didn’t look out. Black clouds had covered the sun and before I knew, rain was pouring down. The book and I became drenched in a few seconds and we escaped into the house. There I sat for a while, trying to dry both of us off. While the book was drying out, I started contemplating possibilities for settings for a crime novel in Iceland.
Dashiell Hammet and Raymond Chandler were masters of the crime genre that has been called hard core. Chandler is however more romantic by nature. His hero, the investigator Philip Marlow, is more human and softer than for example Hammet’s Sam Spade. Ross Macdonald and his hero, the private investigator Lew Archer, are probably in between these two.
While thinking about this with the rain hammering on the roof, the idea of bringing the hard boiled hero to today''''s Iceland, not in “flesh and blood” from the aforementioned masters, but with certain arch-typical features, such as solitude, the drinking, the sense of justice and the cool or toughness. But I also wanted to have the hero evolve before the reader’s eyes, and also before my own. The journalist Einar is different at the beginning of the story that came out four years later, titled Nóttin hefur þúsund augu (The Night Has a Thousand Eyes), than at the end of it. He is yet another in the next book, Hvíta kanínan (The White Rabbit). And still different in the third one, Blátt tungl (Blue Moon). Even if certain characteristics are the same, others change. These stories, which take place in Einar’s mind through a first person narrative in the present tense, are for me the Bildungsroman of the hard boiled “hero”, who turns out to be soft boiled under the shell. This is revealed as he gets to know himself better by solving the puzzles of other people who come into his path. In The White Rabbit, Einar says: “I am thinking about an old fashioned private eye. At the beginning of the investigation he is alone, then he starts investigating other peoples’ lives in the search of a crime and when this investigation is over he is alone again.” And shortly after: “Perhaps old fashioned private eyes never investigated other peoples’ lives. Maybe they were always investigating themselves.”
From my point of view, this is an important centre of the stories about the journalist Einar. He is the offspring of the hard-boiled hero, but in fact a black sheep in the family. He cannot be as cool as he is trying to be. That defence doesn’t work when he needs it. He is too frail and at the same time too open. His prejudices fall off as the stories progress – against women, races, homosexuals, all the types of people, all the standards and human values that he encounters and are up to a point inherited from the predecessors in hard core crime fiction, but also, and no less, from the ideas – including the disillusions – that all of us have about other people, most of all because of our own insecurity.
The book The Night Has a Thousand Eyes in a sense evolves around Einar’s connection to his own origin, The White Rabbit around his connection with his own child, Blue Moon around his relationship with himself.
This may seem to be too formed and too serious, especially since the main objective of crime novels is to keep readers alert and to amuse them with a thrilling plot. But one doesn’t have to rule out the other. On the other hand, these stories are crime novels that look at our society and the currents that run through it, hopefully with some sort of a blend of suspense and humour. All of this should be able to fit within “Einar Group.”
The stories about Einar play with what many want to call “formulas” of the tradition, but do not necessarily follow them. “Formulas” sometimes take up more room in the minds of others than the writers themselves. May God give that Einar never turns into a formula or becomes possessed with political correctness or finds a final psychological balance. Few things are more boring than a crime “hero” that is perfect and leads a happy life, void of conflict. The same can probably be said about people in general. Isn’t it precisely our weaknesses that make us human, rather than some formulas?
This is how the stories about the journalist Einar were thought out in the summer rain, more than a decade ago. This is how they are still thought out. From my point of view.
Árni Þórarinsson, autumn 2005.
Translated by Kristín Viðarsdóttir.
About the Author
Katrín Jakobsdóttir: The New Icelandic Crime Novel On the Stories of Árni Þórarinsson
Árni Þórarinsson published his first novel, Nóttin hefur þúsund augu (The Night Has a Thousand Eyes), in 1998. Prior to that, he had worked in journalism and other forms of writing. Árni published the book, his first crime novel, a year after Synir duftsins (Sons of Dust), Arnaldur Indriðason´s first crime novel, and Morðið í stjórnarráðinu (The Murder in the Government Office), the first story about the tough attorney Stella Blómkvist, were published. One could argue, that in some way these three authors marked the beginning of a wave of crime novels in this country, which has not shown any signs of subsiding yet. Much has changed since then and the crime novel has in just a few years evolved from being a literary cul-de-sac, enjoying little respect or popularity, to becoming one of the most discussed literary forms in Iceland.
In the book Nóttin hefur þúsund augu, Árni introduces his main character who also occupies the central role in the next two stories, Hvíta kanínan (The White Rabbit) and Blátt tungl (Blue Moon) (incidentally, the titles are taken from the titles of well known songs). This character is Einar, a boozing and careless journalist at The Afternoon Paper who is a regular at local bars and enjoys a remarkable success with women. In this first story, Einar is sent out to write about a mysterious death in an airport hotel in Reykjavík. He breaks the story and is asked to follow the case. As a result, he becomes involved in a mystery which turns out to have a closer connection to himself than he initially thought.
Árni´s next story, Hvíta kanínan, came out in 2000. It takes place when Einar and his daughter, Gunnsa are on a summer holiday. They are staying at a sun resort abroad, when mysterious things start to happen. It turns out that this is not purely coincidental, because when Einar picked this destination, he was hoping to pursue an investigation he had been unable to finish in the previous book. But Einar soon loses control over the events and Gunnsa is put in grave danger because of Einar´s inquiry.
Blátt tungl came out in 2001, and is set at Christmas time. Einar is asked to conduct the Afternoon Paper´s New Year´s interview and the interviewee is an economics professor who brutally murdered his wife many years earlier, but has now joined a Christian cult. About the same time, Einar gets the assignment of writing a series of articles about winter depression, suicides and disappearances in Icelandic society. These two projects lead Einar to discover many unsavory things, for instance some which are linked to old enemies of his from the first two books.
Árni set out in a slightly different direction in 2002 when he collaborated with Páll Kristinn Pálsson on the story Í upphafi var morðið (In the Beginning Was Murder). The book tells of a family tragedy and its protagonist is Kristrún, a young film director, who has been suffering from depression. Einar appears in a small supporting role, mainly, it seems, to remind us that the time and the setting is the same as in Árni´s previous books.
Einar: A Lovable Alcoholic Misogynist
Árni makes his protagonist a journalist, thereby placing him in an environment that he knows well himself. The Afternoon Paper is a bit reminiscent of the newspaper DV, at least in terms of the writing style and the headlines. The journalist-as-crime-investigator is a familiar literary motif. The first known detective journalist is thought to have appeared in 1907, in Gaston Leroux´s story, La mystère de la chambre jaune (The Mystery of the Yellow Room), in which the main detective is the journalist Joseph Rouletabille. Rouletabille has not spawned many imitations, but journalists who take on the roles of detectives appear fairly regularly, among them Einar.
Making Einar such a heavy drinker has the advantage of connecting him closer to the underworld and the nightlife in the city. One might argue that the underworld is seen through the eyes of an insider in Einar´s case; by comparison, the policemen in Arnaldur´s stories always look like unfamiliar guests when they show up in bars for investigation work (they almost remind one of Derrick and Klein entering shady German bars in long overcoats in the TV series Derrick).
One could in fact argue that in the first story, Einar´s main personality trait is his constant drinking, and it appears quite incredible that anyone could think clearly with such high levels of alcohol in his blood. Yet, in Einar´s case, the hangovers take up as much space as the drinking and the drinking therefore becomes rather ironic. The detective work even takes second place to Einar´s drinking and emotional problems.
In that aspect, and many others in fact, Einar is much closer to the American crime novel tradition than many other Icelandic detectives. Einar is not the kind of a man who leans back in an armchair and assembles the pieces of a puzzle until they form a complete mosaic, as British detectives tend to do. He does not painstakingly work his way through it, by examining each clue carefully, like policemen in Scandinavian stories.
Instead, Einar charges forward, following his intuition and journalistic nose and does not give up until he finds the criminal, often by pure stubbornness. Detectives like this have their roots in characters like Sam Spade and Nick Charles, who feature in the stories of Dashiell Hammett, and of course in Philip Marlowe, who is the creation of Raymond Chandler. Another quality links Einar to these detectives; in the three of Árni´s books where Einar is the protagonist, he becomes involved in criminal cases in a very personal way. This happens for instance in the first story, Nóttin hefur þúsund augu, where the solution to the murder case lies inside Einar´s family album, so to speak. In Hvíta kanínan, his daughter Gunnsa is kidnapped in connection with his investigation into a mysterious case. After this, the criminal cases often turn into Einar´s personal search for justice.
Einar´s character goes through some changes; already in Hvíta kanínan he has reduced his drinking a bit, which makes him become a more pleasant person. He also starts to be more sarcastic towards himself, and the reader gets to know his more awkward side. The humorous approach lends Hvíta kanínan a spirit of fun and it is probably the best one of the three books in which Einar is the main character. Another factor is the interesting setting; the story takes place on an Icelandic group holiday in Spain and Árni manages to describe the atmosphere on such trips in quite an entertaining way. Icelanders are meanwhile placed in an interesting international context and the comparison is not at all favorable.
Harlots and Other Women
In books centering on Einar, other characters have been somewhat vague. Female characters have generally been rather flat and more akin to stereotypes than real characters. This applies not only to Árni´s stories, but to many Icelandic crime stories as well. It seems rather odd, since the classic crime novel (the whodunnit) has traditionally been a woman´s field and both the authors and the protagonists are often women. Yet, male centered story patterns are often found in popular novels and they are very common in the so-called hardboiled novels, derived from the American detective stories of Dashiell Hammet and Raymond Chandler.
Árni bases his detective character on that particular crime novel genre and therefore it is not surprising that the story pattern should be in a similar vein. It therefore seems rather odd that there isn´t a higher number of interesting femme fatales, the types of characters that were such a staple of Hammet and Chandler. Árni tries to create such characters, like Sigríður at the paper, Elsa Gröndal in Hvíta kanínan and Ásta the psychologist in Blátt tungl. Yet they would need a lighter touch to flesh out the stereotype as well as depth in order to become real characters.
In Nóttin hefur þúsund augu it could be said that the majority of the female characters in the book tend to be either party-girls or harlots – all described from Einar´s point of view. Perhaps his descriptions of women are meant to give us an insight into his personality, either he sees nothing but harlots all around him, or he only associates with women like that. One of those is Eyrún, his ex-girlfriend; she has a drinking problem and desecrates the dead body of a man whom she had loved, but who had rejected her.
Red Lóló also features in the book; she is Einar´s regular bed companion, despite being married to another man. She is looking for love and this quest leads her to promiscuity, as she has not been able to find love in her marriage. She does not seem to actively enjoy her sex life; if there is any truth in the narrator´s words, sex is a service that she provides: "she reminds me of a wide-mouthed harlot offering up her services." (20)
Lastly, there is Sigríður, a supervisor at the newspaper where Einar works. She has not acquired this good position on her own merit; she was hired politically. The reader learns nothing about her job. Yet, her appearance, clothes and mysterious smiles that she directs to Einar, are described in detail. A female boss becomes the wet dream of a male subordinate who has a deep contempt for her mental capabilities: "After six months on the job I am not aware of her knowing how the paper is made. But she looks attractive and long-legged in her suits..." (26). Sigríður is given more respect in Blátt tungl however, and can be considered a multi-dimensional character in that book.
All women in the first story are assigned traditional gender roles, are judged solely on their looks and are seen through the eyes of men. The only woman who is mentioned in connection to her job is a lesbian, the news photographer Jóa ljós. She is said to be a good photographer but her physical description is typical for the lesbian stereotype. It seems that lesbians can abandon traditional gender roles, a happy family life for instance, and concentrate instead on their careers. At the same time, a lesbian cannot be beautiful like "normal" women are, and Jóa ljós is described as entering, "thick and clumsy as usual." (8). The description is repeated in Hvíta kanínan, where she is said to be "muscular and massive" (16).
In Hvíta kanínan a steady relationship begins to form between Einar and his daughter´s boyfriend´s mother, Rúna, albeit a stormy one, as Einar seems to run into temptations everywhere when it comes to women. It could in fact be argued, that the first real female character in Árni´s stories is Kristrún in the latest story, Í upphafi var morðið. It may be because the story pattern is different; its model is no longer the hardboiled American story. Kristrún is also the narrator, which of course alters the perspective.
A Double Plot
In contemporary Icelandic crime novels, authors frequently use a double plot. A crime is committed and as it is being investigated, another crime, often much more terrible and far-reaching, comes to light. The original crime thus often sets off a chain reaction which throws a light on other cases. Raymond Chandler repeatedly used a double plot in his stories and one could say that in Árni´s stories, where the journalist Einar is the main hero, there is a continuous story about Einars battle with the same villains, even if the cases in the foreground are unrelated to each other.
Yet the books are individually different, which comes down to different settings and different supporting characters. At the same time, the reader gets to know Einar better and better, and in that sense the first three books might be viewed as a series. Einar´s fight against the criminals reaches it apex in Blátt tungl, which really is about many aspects of Einar´s life rather than a single criminal case. The film-noir style runs through it all, pessimism and paranoia dominate and although some cases are solved, the same cannot be said for others and evil forces continue to have a strong foothold in society.
Í upphafi var morðið combines the genres of family history and crime thriller, narrated in parallel. The different emphasis is explained by the fact that Árni is not alone this time, as he wrote the book in collaboration with Páll Kristinn Pálsson. This story, along with Hvíta kanínan, is probably the best of Árni´s works so far, although it is probably nowhere near finished. Both are readable crime stories, for different reasons. Hvíta kanínan is a successful mix of humor and suspense, whereas Í upphafi var morðið is a murder story combined with a melodramatic plot.
One could say that the trilogy about Einar (which might well become a bigger series) is the most notable attempt that has been made in this country to introduce the hardboiled crime story genre to the Icelandic literary world. Opinions may vary about individual books in the series, but it is clear that the experiment per se is a noteworthy contribution to the Icelandic crime novel tradition.
© Katrín Jakobsdóttir.
Translated by Vera Júlíusdóttir.
Articles
Criticism
Neijmann, Daisy L., ed. A History of Icelandic Literature.
University of Nebraska Press, 2007, p. 458
Awards
1984 - The Reykjavik Scholastic Prize: Einn í stríði (Oorlog Zonder Vrienden) by Evert Hartman (for translation)
Nominations
2005 - The Icelandic Literature Prize: Tími nornarinnar (Season of the Witch)
2002 - The Edda Award (The Icelandic Film Awards): 20/20 (best television script of the year)
Einn í stríði (Oorlog Zonder Vrienden)
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