In two noir novels, crime lurks beneath small town life in Norway and New England

Summary

NPR's Book of the Day: In Two Noir Novels, Crime Lurks Beneath Small Town Life in Norway and New England Release Date: March 21, 2025

NPR's Book of the Day delves into the shadowy realms of human nature with a spotlight on two gripping noir crime novels. Hosted by NPR, the episode features in-depth conversations with authors Joseph Finder and Joe Nesbo, exploring their latest works, The Oligarch's Daughter and Blood Ties, respectively. This summary encapsulates the key discussions, insights, and conclusions drawn from these interviews, providing a comprehensive overview for those who haven't tuned in.

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Exploring Modern Thrillers with Joseph Finder

Overview of The Oligarch's Daughter

Joseph Finder introduces listeners to his new thriller, The Oligarch's Daughter, a plot-driven narrative set against the backdrop of small-town New Hampshire. The story centers on Grant Anderson, whose seemingly ordinary life as a boat builder masks a perilous reality. As Mary Louise Kelly outlines, “Grant Anderson is not the man he claims to be. He is in hiding, on the run from Russians who want him dead” (02:52).

Navigating the Digital Age in Thrillers

Finder discusses the intricate challenge of crafting a thriller in today's era of pervasive surveillance. Addressing the difficulty of making a protagonist disappear amidst ubiquitous cameras and facial recognition technology, he reveals his research process: “The secret these days is to find a small town where they don't have CCTV cameras and to live a life based on cash” (07:28). This strategy underscores the heightened realism and complexity in modern suspense narratives.

Insights into Russian Oligarchs

A significant portion of the novel delves into the enigmatic world of Russian oligarchs. Finder characterizes them as the “new Medicis” and “princes of capitalism” before geopolitical shifts rendered them Persona non grata. He highlights Arkady, a billionaire hedge fund manager in New York, portraying him as both charming and sinister: “Arkady is a kind of a charming, jovial, lovable guy. And at the same time, he's quite sinister” (04:16). This duality adds depth to the antagonistic forces Paul (Grant Anderson) faces.

Character Development and Plot Dynamics

Finder emphasizes the importance of multi-dimensional characters and intricate plotlines. Mary Louise Kelly remarks on the lavish lifestyle of the characters, comparing it to a Bond villain scenario, to which Finder humorously responds, “I didn't sail on yachts with the rich Russians” (05:35). Instead, his meticulous research, including interviewing yacht captains, brings authenticity to the narrative.

Addressing Secrecy and Identity

The novel explores themes of identity and secrecy, particularly through Paul’s alias as Grant Anderson. Finder explains the meticulous steps Paul takes to vanish: avoiding bank accounts with interest, handling all transactions in cash, and cutting ties that could lead back to his former identity (07:58). This portrayal reflects the evolving complexities of evading capture in a hyper-connected world.

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Delving into the Human Psyche with Joe Nesbo

Overview of Blood Ties

Joe Nesbo, hailed as the king of Nordic noir, introduces his latest novel, Blood Ties. The story reintroduces readers to the compelling brothers, Carl and Roy Upgard, whose tangled relationships and dark secrets drive the narrative forward. Mary Louise Kelly sets the stage with a memorable quote from Roy: “When Shannon Alleen came hurtling into my life eight years ago, I was 35 years old, single and a mass murderer who was absolutely ready to start a family” (09:56). This captivating opening line exemplifies Nesbo’s ability to hook readers instantly.

Creating a Likable Mass Murderer

Nesbo delves into the challenging task of making Roy Apgaard—a mass murderer—a character readers can empathize with. He explains, “Roy is a guy who you can root for” by giving him relatable problems: “What you need to do is to put your protagonist in trouble, some kind of problem that needs solving” (11:48). Roy's complexities, such as his tendency to fall in love with his brother’s girlfriends and the unfortunate circumstances leading to his violent actions, add layers to his character, making him intriguingly human despite his flaws.

Character Dynamics and Conflict

The relationship between the brothers, Carl and Roy, is fraught with tension and tragedy. Carl, portrayed as the more intelligent and socially adept brother, contrasts sharply with Roy’s likable yet flawed persona. Nesbo reveals the dark history between them: “Roy sleeping with Carl's wife. And then Carl, the married brother, kills the wife by hitting her on the head with an iron” (13:09). This intense familial conflict becomes the driving force behind the novel's suspenseful plot.

Setting: The Quiet Town of Oz

Blood Ties is set in the serene spa town of Oz, a stark contrast to the dark deeds of its inhabitants. Nesbo describes Oz as “a typical Norwegian small town” with its close-knit community where “everybody knowing more or less everything about you” creates a claustrophobic atmosphere (14:40). This setting amplifies the suspense, as hidden secrets emerge within an otherwise peaceful locale, underscoring the universal theme that darkness can lurk anywhere.

Nesbo’s Writing Process and Influences

Nesbo shares his creative process, emphasizing spontaneous ideation and the influence of his storytelling background. He credits his family's storytelling legacy and his experience as a songwriter for his narrative skills: “Writing lyrics for my band... is a great way of teaching yourself that you need to leave up to the readers to imagine most of the story” (16:11). This approach ensures that his novels are both engaging and thought-provoking, encouraging readers to actively participate in unraveling the plot.

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Conclusion

NPR's Book of the Day masterfully navigates through the intricate worlds crafted by Joseph Finder and Joe Nesbo. Both authors excel in blending rich character development with suspenseful narratives, set against the nuanced backdrops of small-town life and high-stakes drama. Finder’s exploration of identity and modern surveillance intertwines with Nesbo’s portrayal of familial conflict and moral ambiguity, offering listeners deep insights into the complexities of human nature and societal structures. Whether delving into the high-stakes maneuvers of Russian oligarchs or the dark secrets of Norwegian brothers, these noir novels provide a compelling examination of crime and its impact on individuals and communities.

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Notable Quotes:

• Joseph Finder on Grant Anderson's true identity: “Grant Anderson is not the man he claims to be. He is in hiding, on the run from Russians who want him dead.” (02:52)

• Joseph Finder on the challenges of writing modern thrillers: “The secret these days is to find a small town where they don't have CCTV cameras and to live a life based on cash.” (07:28)

• Joe Nesbo on creating a likable mass murderer: “What you need to do is to put your protagonist in trouble, some kind of problem that needs solving.” (11:48)

• Joe Nesbo on his writing influences: “Writing lyrics for my band... is a great way of teaching yourself that you need to leave up to the readers to imagine most of the story.” (16:11)

This episode offers a profound exploration of modern noir fiction, shedding light on the intricate balance between character relatability and narrative suspense. Whether you're a fan of high-octane thrillers or psychological dramas, NPR's Book of the Day provides valuable insights into the artistry behind crafting compelling crime novels.

Transcript

[Andrew Limbong]

Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbong. Today we're digging into the deep, dark underbelly of humanity with two noir crime books. In a bit, we'll hear from a writer who has to pull off the impossible, which is write a likable mass murderer. But first, the Oligarch's Daughter is a new thriller from writer Joseph Finder. And it's one of those plotty, propulsive books that you kind of need a pen and paper to keep track of all the double crossing and hidden identities. Finder spoke with NPR's Mary Louise Kelly about how difficult, difficult it is to write a thriller set in the modern day with all the surveillance technology that we have now and still have a main character who is skilled enough to disappear. That's ahead.

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[Mary Louise Kelly]

The opening pages of the novel the Oligarch's Daughter introduce us to a man named Grant Anderson. He builds boats in New England. It is early morning. He is preparing to take a new client out on a fishing charter. The man arrives at the dock and Grant Anderson detects a whiff of a Slavic accent which makes his stomach turn. Turns out boat builder Grant Anderson is not the man he claims to be. He is in hiding, on the run from Russians who want him dead. And his client is actually a hitman there to kill him. Joseph Fender is the author of this cat and mouse tale and he's here with me now. Joseph Fender, welcome.

[Joseph Finder]

Thank you. Great to be here.

[Mary Louise Kelly]

Introduce us a bit more fully to Grant Anderson without revealing too much. How does he wind up in this mess?

[Joseph Finder]

Well, Grant, I guess I can reveal, is actually Paul. And Paul is a guy who is on the run from a Russian oligarch and his bad guys. And he's gone into hiding in a small town in New Hampshire where he's lived for five years. And Grant has set up a new life for himself, all cash in which he is building boats and takes payment in cash only. He doesn't want to leave a trace or record anywhere because he is not actually Grant Anderson. He is a guy named Paul Brightman.

[Mary Louise Kelly]

Well, let's go to the Paul side of the story and to the title of the book, the Oligarch's Daughter. The oligarch's daughter is one Tatiana Belkin. What is her story?

[Joseph Finder]

Well, Paul meets Tatiana at a fundraiser in New York and they immediately hit it off. They both decide to leave the fundraiser early and he thought, thought that she was working there. And she turns out to be a guest the way he is a guest. And they start dating. They really, really fall for each other. Tatiana does not reveal to Paul for months who she really is. She's living in an artist's studio apartment in New York and he just thinks she's a photographer. And only later does he learn that her father is a billionaire oligarch. And he becomes friendly with the father and with the family. And Paul realizes that he really likes Russian culture, he really likes the Russian family, that he's getting closer and closer to.

[Mary Louise Kelly]

You also remind us that when it comes to Russian oligarchs, there's rich and then there's oligarch rich. Tell us a little bit about how you made that distinct in the book.

[Joseph Finder]

Yeah, yeah. So, you know, I won't say I talk to oligarchs because nobody would self identify as an oligarch. But the oligarchs in Russia today, they're not rulers. They have made a deal with Putin to keep their fortune and stay out of politics. So this guy Arkady is a billionaire who runs a sort of hedge fund in New York and wants Paul to work for him. Arkady is a kind of a charming, jovial, lovable guy. And at the same time he's quite sinister. And Paul doesn't know what to make of him until the FBI comes up to Paul and tells them they want him to inform on his father in law. And Paul, of course, refuses, that he doesn't want to be unfaithful to his, to his wife. They get married, obviously, and he doesn't want to be disloyal to his father in law. And he's terrified.

[Mary Louise Kelly]

And he's doing all this while eating the finest caviar and sipping Dom Perignon on yachts. I'm so hoping, Joseph Fender, you will tell me that you got to go out sailing around with rich Russians on their yachts in the name of research.

[Joseph Finder]

You know, I didn't sail on yachts with the rich Russians. What I did was I tracked down the captain of a super yacht who is often hired by oligarchs. To captain their yachts. And I was able to get all kinds of great detail from this guy, including, for instance, the fact that one of the oligarchs he worked for had a custom made submarine inside his yacht that he would take out his guests on. So I thought, this is a detail I've got to use. Too good to be true.

[Mary Louise Kelly]

This sounds so Bond villain. This is real.

[Joseph Finder]

Yep, yep, it is real. It is real. And. But you know what's interesting about these oligarchs is that they are billionaires, they own sports teams, they are also patrons of the art in the us. They are sort of, I call them the new Medicis. And they are and were, I should say, princes of the realm, princes of capitalism, in a sense, until the war in Ukraine began. And then they were Persona non grata. Overnight, they were forced out of the country. And this transformation, going from being somebody that you wanted on the board of your museum or your hospital or your university, to someone who you wouldn't acknowledge was, to me, humanly fascinating. And it made this an interesting story to tell.

[Mary Louise Kelly]

One challenge you had to grapple with, that I imagine is new from when you were first writing about Russia, is how a person like Grant Anderson can disappear in the digital age with cameras everywhere, facial recognition everywhere.

[Joseph Finder]

How did you solve that exactly? I read a number of books on how to disappear. There's a lot of them. Most of them aren't very good, but I talked to one particular expert and he told me that the secret these days is to find a small town where they don't have CCTV cameras and to live a life based on cash. Do not open a bank account, or if you open a bank account, don't earn any interest. And there's all kinds of situations.

[Mary Louise Kelly]

So you don't have to report for taxes.

[Joseph Finder]

Exactly. You do not want the IRS tracking you down. They will find out who you really are. So it's a real challenge these days. It's not like the old days and early thrillers I used to read where you could just disappear by forging a passport. It doesn't work that way anymore. It's much, much more difficult.

[Mary Louise Kelly]

One last character I have to ask you about because of her name. You have a character named Mary Louise. She works in audio, She's a podcaster. She's a total busybody.

[Joseph Finder]

Yeah.

[Mary Louise Kelly]

What was the inspiration?

[Joseph Finder]

It wasn't you, I promise.

[Mary Louise Kelly]

You've disappointed me again.

[Joseph Finder]

I'm so sorry. But yeah, she's got a podcast. She's the wife of his best friend from college days. And Mary Louise is sort of a busybody and we like her and then we don't like her so much. You know, it's one of these things that you want a character who another character is going to rub up against and create sparks. And that's what Mary Louise is for in the book.

[Mary Louise Kelly]

Joseph Fender, he is author of the Oligarch's Daughter. Thank you.

[Joseph Finder]

Thanks a lot, Mary Louise.

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[Andrew Limbong]

Author Joe Nesbo gets into some reader psychology in this next interview about his book Blood Ties. How do you get readers to side with someone who is a monster? Apparently give the monster a problem to solve. Here's NPR's Mary Louise Kelly.

[Mary Louise Kelly]

Again, the writer Joe Nesbo has a knack for coming up with sentences like this quote, when Shannon Alleen came hurtling into my life eight years ago, I was 35 years old, single and a mass murderer who was absolutely ready to start a family. In other words, I dare you, reader, to attempt to stop reading there. You know you're gonna turn the page. You can't help yourself. Well, with more than 20 page turners under his belt, including the Harry Hole detective novels, Nesbo has established himself as the king of Nordic noir. His latest is Blood Ties and it reintroduces us to the unforgettable brothers Carl and Roy Upgard. Which gives me the chance to introduce you to Joe Nesbo. Hi there. Welcome.

[Joe Nesbo]

Hi. Hi.

[Mary Louise Kelly]

So that sentence I just read the guy talking about being a 35 year old mass murderer who's now really ready to start a family. That is Roy Apgaard talking. One of the brothers. Tell us more about him.

[Joe Nesbo]

Well, he's really nice guy. I mean, he's probably the nicest mass murderer I've been writing about. He's running a gas station in this small place in the mountains in Norway. He has a weakness. He tends to fall in love with his younger brother's girlfriends and that is part of what has led him on the way to becoming a mass murderer. On the other hand, he has some of the murders has been simply bad luck and most of them has been out of love, not out of hate. So here's my challenge as a writer is of course, to describe to you and convince you that Roy is a guy that you can root for.

[Mary Louise Kelly]

Yeah, just stay on that for a second because that is quite a challenge to write. A likable murderer who people want to root for.

[Joe Nesbo]

I once spoke to a famous film director, it was actually Christopher Nolan, who told me that, you know the old cliche that you have to have your protagonist save a cat at the start of a story? That is what makes the audience root for him. It's not actually true. What you need to do is to put your protagonist in trouble, some kind of problem that needs solving. And automatically, as an audience or as readers, we will try to help this person solve his problem. Roy is a guy with a lot of problems that need solving and he needs our help to solve them.

[Mary Louise Kelly]

I think with all that in our head. Tell us about the other brother, Carl.

[Joe Nesbo]

Well, Carl is the better looking guy and intellectually maybe the smarter guy. But he is not as likable when you get to know him as Roy is. He's, you know, popular with the girls, popular with everybody. And he has returned to this small town in the mountains in Norway. Coming from abroad, he brought his wife that Roy, of course, fell in love with, ended tragically. But he is now running a big hotel in this little town. And this hotel is actually what is saving the town from being erased from the map.

[Mary Louise Kelly]

You said Carl's marriage ended tragically. I mean, just to spell out a little bit more, the history of these two brothers includes Roy sleeping with Carl's wife. And then Carl, the married brother, kills the wife by hitting her on the head with an iron. And then they dispose of her body together. And I just want readers to know I'm giving nothing away here. All this has been revealed by page 28. How do you come up with this stuff?

[Joe Nesbo]

I don't know really. It may sound a bit strange, but my job normally starts at like 5 o'clock in the morning when I wake up in bed and I try to come up with an idea for the next chapter of a book. And I come up with quite horrific stuff like this. And it makes me really happy, you know, it's okay. I know I have a exciting day in front of me trying to describe what's in my head. It can be a love story or it can be a murder, it doesn't really matter. It just makes me happy. If I sense that there's good storytelling in the idea, I want to hear.

[Mary Louise Kelly]

More about this little town, the quiet, pretty spa town of Oz, because it's such a stark contrast to your characters who are, as we've already noted, lying and killing people and blackmailing other characters in the book. This one town, it contains so many secrets. Is that something particular to Norway? Or do you think small towns everywhere have people papering over their dark secrets?

[Joe Nesbo]

Actually, I think that as a town, the novel is partly inspired by an American novelist, Jim Thompson, who wrote the population 1280. But it's also a portrait of a typical Norwegian small town. I grew up in cities myself, but my parents, they were born and raised in small town, so I spent summer and Christmas holidays there. I played in a band that for the first few years we traveled and tour mostly small towns in Norway. So I think I know quite well the pros and cons of little towns. It's the safety of people taking care of each other. On the other hand, it's the claustrophobic feeling of everybody knowing more or less everything about you. There are, of course, secrets, like you said, in this town, most of them are in the open.

[Mary Louise Kelly]

I'm still just sitting here turning over in my head what you just said. This is a. I think you just said a totally typical little Norwegian town. I'm thinking, my God, like, everyone in it is either sleeping with someone they shouldn't be sleeping with or killing someone who they obviously should not be killing. Typical, really?

[Joe Nesbo]

Well, the town is typical. The body count is definitely not typical for Norway. Norway has probably one of the lowest murders per year in any country. So I'm using, of course, the crime genre and the thriller genre for telling stories about, hopefully, the human condition.

[Mary Louise Kelly]

Before you wrote novels, you were a star soccer player. You were, as you nodded to lead singer and guitar player in a rock band. You were also a guy with a finance desk job. Talk a little bit more about that idea that as a writer, you put into your fictional characters a little bit of yourself. You had a lot to work with.

[Joe Nesbo]

Yeah, well, I think it was good for me that I didn't write my first novel until I was 37, that I had lived a. Let's call the normal life up until then, working life. So I had, like, this material that I had sort of stored up during those years. And I come from a storytelling family. My father and my mother and my brothers, my aunts and uncles, they were all storytellers. So that was like my writer's school, I think. And it was probably also one of the reasons why I wrote my first novel so late in life. That I was, you know, worried what they would think about my storytelling. But writing lyrics for my band, that was also like a writer's school. I think that writing a story in three verses on a refrain is a great way of teaching yourself that you need to leave up to the readers to imagine most of the story. You can only point them in the right direction and give them certain ideas. And the more you leave up to the reader, the better it'll probably be.

[Mary Louise Kelly]

Ask the writer Joe Nesbo. His latest novel is titled Blood Ties. Joe Nesbo, thank you.

[Joe Nesbo]

Thank you so much.

[Andrew Limbong]

That's it for this week on NPR's Book of the Day. Let us know what you think you can write to [e-mail] I'm Andrew Limbong. The podcast is produced by Danica Panetta and Chloe Weiner and edited by Megan Sullivan. Our founding editor is Petra Maier. The show elements for this week were produced and edited by Gable Connor, Martha Ann Overland, Brianna Scott, Christopher Intagliata, Danny Hensell, Ed McNulty, Emiko Tamagawa, Todd Mundt, Erica Ryan and Patrick Jaron Watanan. Yolanda Sanguini is our executive producer. Thanks for listening.

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