Iceland is really astonishingly safe.
So safe, in fact, that it was national news in this Nordic country of under 400,000 people when the annual murder tally reached eight in 2024. (It was national news again this year when the average homicide rate roughly doubled: from about two annually before 2020 to about four annually since.) It is, according to several surveys, the safest country in the world.
But you’d never know that from the bookstores. On the shelves, at least, murder is everywhere.
“There are more fictional murders in Iceland every year than real,” said Katrin Jakobsdottir, a former prime minister who has co-written two crime novels. “Which is good,” she added, laughing.
In the past few decades, crime has become Iceland’s favorite literary genre.
The explosion of detective stories is part of the region’s broader Nordic Noir tradition. But countries like Sweden, with its gang violence, and Finland, with its shared border with Russia, live with the threat of real violence.
In Iceland, where few people even lock their cars outside the capital region, that sense of safety is the defining challenge for authors. Their plots have to be built on buried grudges and horrifying secrets hidden in the fog and the fjords. Otherwise, how else could they convincingly kill off their characters?
“It’s this idea that you think you know everyone because you live in a small country,” said Jakobsdottir, who is working on a third crime novel, this time writing it alone. “But that’s not really the truth.”
Thrillers, Told Over Generations
The canon is as good a place to start as any.
The epic Icelandic Sagas, written mostly in the 13th and 14th centuries and telling of Norse blood feuds and thorny love triangles, are still part of daily life in Iceland: High schoolers still read them for class work, and many people share their first names with some of the most famous characters. It’s to such an extent that the writer Olaf Olafsson called the sagas “Icelanders’ second Bible” in The New York Times’s literary guide to Reykjavik.
The crime writer Ragnar Jonasson, who has translated Agatha Christie into Icelandic and has sold about five million of his own books, said he thought the Sagas help explain why crime is such a popular genre in Iceland: They brim with revenge, deception and killing — the stuff of good crime fiction.
Many sagas, Jonasson said over breakfast this month in Reykjavik, are “proper thrillers.” Some are bona fide legal dramas. “They’re about outlaws and they’re about justice and revenge,” said Jonasson, who worked with Jakobsdottir on her two books. (His next novel, “The Body in the Bath,” about a detective arrested for murder, comes out in both the United States and Iceland in November.)
“Writing is in our DNA,” he added. “Everyone in Iceland is a storyteller.”
‘Two Drunk Guys in a Kitchen’
It’s not exactly surprising for people to go missing in a big city like Chicago or London. But in a country as small as Iceland, no one can really disappear in plain sight. So each murder needs to be carefully explained.
Yrsa Sigurdardottir, one of Iceland’s top crime writers, said it was still a challenge.
“We still struggle with this believability issue,” she said, sitting at breakfast next to Jonasson, with whom she is also co-writing a book and organizing a crime fiction festival this fall.
“The reader does not have to read it and think, ‘Oh yeah, yeah, this happened,’” she added. “The reader just has to think, ‘OK, this hasn’t happened, but it could happen.’”
Yet most Icelandic homicides aren’t good models for literature.
“The typical Icelandic murder was two drunk guys in a kitchen,” Sigurdardottir said. “One picks up a knife, they’re arguing, the police arrive and the murderer is standing there with a knife.”
And no one would believe in a rampaging sociopath, said Eva Bjorg Aegisdottir, another crime novelist. “We have had one serial killer in Iceland,” she said. But that was in the 16th century.
A Forensics Course for Writers
So writers often need to figure out ways to kill off their characters that could, maybe, look as if they’d died of natural causes. After all, most people in Iceland do. Many have turned for advice to Dr. Petur Gudmann Gudmannsson, the country’s only full-time forensic pathologist.
For years, they emailed him with very Iceland-specific questions. Aegisdottir, for instance, wanted to know what would happen to a body left out for months in a lava field. (That’s not the sort of thing you can Google, she said: “You want to have the details right.”)
Gudmannsson eventually started teaching a continuing education class for crime writers. Sigurdardottir is an graduate, as is Aegisdottir. But he stopped teaching it in recent years. It just got too gory, he said, too much of a sideshow.
He still gets questions from Icelandic crime writers spinning up murders. Usually, he advises them to treat these murders like the fantasies that they are.
Most murders in Iceland are fictional, he said — so they don’t have to be realistic.
“Why not?” he said. “You can say whatever you like.”
Hours of Darkness
Instead, many Icelandic writers look to buried secrets.
That’s easy to do in Iceland, which is so far north that it’s dark for much of the year. Margret Ann Thors, an Icelandic American writer, said that made for lots of deserted nights in which characters can easily disappear or wind up dead.
“You don’t have as many people out and about,” said Thors, whose debut novel, “Freyja,” a moody story about the 20-year-old disappearance of a child off the Icelandic coast, came out this month.
Many writers go for cold cases. In Sigurdardottir’s “The Wake,” which was published in an English translation last year, a buried secret rips through an unhappy reunion.
Some turn to mysterious disappearances. In one of Jonasson’s recent books, “The Mysterious Case of the Missing Crime Writer,” a detective spends much of the book wondering whether a beloved Icelandic author is dead — or if she actually just got lost on a hike.
Aegisdottir, too, looks for buried secrets. She recently published “Home Before Dark” in the United States, the story of a teenage girl who vanishes in a remote area.
“We can’t have books that have very brutal murders,” she said. “It’s more the idea of someone that you know is hiding something.”
There, in the unknown, is where its best crime stories bloom.
Egill Bjarnason contributed reporting.
