Best-selling author Jo Nesbo has a specially imported desk with a stunning view across Oslo, the city which has been the backdrop for his Harry Hole thrillers for nearly two decades.
But this is the one place at which the footballer-turned-author cannot write.
Almost a decade ago, Jo revealed sitting at his imported desk made writing feel like work and he preferred to pen his stories in hotel lobbies or airport lounges.
The crime writer had switched to using a cafe near his home in the Norwegian capital before the pandemic, even buying it when it was faced with closure so he had somewhere to go to write.
Covid forced Jo to sell his cafe and learn to write at home – but he has yet to overcome the final hurdle of actually using the desk in his office.
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The 63-year-old says: “The cafe is gone.
“What happened during the pandemic was that I learnt to write at home. Up until then it was the only place I couldn’t write.
“Now I am writing more at home, which is kind of sad, actually. I kind of liked the fact I had to go out among people to write.”
Asked if that means he now uses the desk in his home office, he says: “That is the only place I can’t write. I have this beautiful desk that I imported, that I bought for a ridiculous amount of money.
“It is sitting there in the middle of the room. What I do is sit on a small table close to the wall, where I look directly into the wall and write there instead.
“I have seen where Stephen King sits when he is writing and it is exactly the same. He has this big house and he goes into this small room that looks like a closet and he can write there.
“I’m the same, I don’t want the distraction of a view.
“I don’t know why that is. I guess it’s easier to create a universe inside your head if that universe is more attractive than the universe you are sitting in.”
After a four-year absence, his most famous creation, Harry Hole, is back in Killing Moon, the 13th instalment in a series loved by readers across the globe.
Jo says: “At the end of the last novel Harry was obviously in bad shape; he had lost the love of his life and he is at the airport rolling a dice, and letting the dice decide where to go next because he has to leave Oslo and escape.
“So he ends up, we learn at the beginning of Killing Moon, in Los Angeles and his plan is simply to drink himself to death.
“He has found this bar in Laurel Canyon. He’s drawn to this place because of the music tradition there. He finds a bar close to the home of Frank Zappa and is about to successfully complete his plan when something happens.
“It’s a woman in need, a woman who reminds him of his mother and in trying to save her he actually saves himself.
“And that is the beginning of the story but just a starting point because in order to save her he needs to go to Oslo to help solve a murder case, not as a police officer but as a private eye.”
Born in Oslo, Nesbo grew up in Molde, a small city on the west coast of Norway, where his parents, Per and Kirsten, took him and his two brothers when he was eight years old.
A promising career as a professional footballer for Norwegian premiership side Molde FK – with a dream of playing for Spurs – was cut short by tearing the ligaments in both knees.
So Jo became a stockbroker by day and the frontman for his rock band Di Derre (Those Guys) with his brother Knut and a bunch of friends by night.
He wrote his first Harry Hole novel, The Bat, in Australia while taking a break from work and this was published in Norway in 1997. But it wasn’t until 2005 that he was finally published in the UK, when the fifth Hole book, The Devil’s Star, was released, just as the popularity of Nordic Noir soared after the success of Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.
Nesbo’s books have now sold more than 55 million copies and been translated into 40 languages.
The seventh in the Hole series, The Snowman, was adapted into a Hollywood film starring Michael Fassbender as Harry, alongside Silo star Rebecca Ferguson and Top Gun ace Val Kilmer.
Jo, who is midway through a book tour of the UK, Canada and the US for the release of Killing Moon, is also an executive producer for The Jealousy Man, based on one of his short stories.
In addition, he has written a “horror story in the Stephen King tradition” called The Night House, which is due to be published in September.
But Jo says Harry Hole will always be his “main man”.
“When I first invented Harry he was more of a camera lens for the reader, so he was meant to be your stereotype of a hard-boiled detective,” he says.
“But then when he gradually moved out in front of the camera he also developed as a character.
“I think this is what happens when we get older, we are not interested in getting new friends, we are interested in getting
to know our existing friends better.
“I will always return to Harry, he is my main man.”
- Killing Moon by Jo Nesbo (Vintage Publishing £22) is available from the Express Bookshop at www.expressbookshop.com or calling on 020 3176 3832. Free P&P on online orders over £25.
