SCANDINAVIAN BEST-SELLING AUTHOR AND NORDIC NOIR STAR JESPER STEIN’S UNREST IS THE FIRST OF THE SERIES TO BE PUBLISHED IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE, GIVING HIS NEWFOUND AUDIENCE A PEEK INTO THE WORLD OF TOUGH-TALKING COP AXEL STEEN
You’re a former crime reporter, what is it like writing crime fiction from a policeman’s standpoint as opposed to being the one reporting on it?
It was not that difficult, having spent hundreds of hours talking to all kinds of policemen and women during my ten years as a crime reporter. You get to know how they look at things, and I have friends still working as cops, so if I have any doubts I call them. I want my novels to be realistic, so I have used my knowledge of police work a lot. But the most important thing about my protagonist Axel Steen is not that he is a policeman, it is that he is a human being with enough flaws, contrasts and inner contradictions to make him believable and authentic enough for the readers to recognise some of their own doubts about life and its difficult choices in him. If I was a police officer, I might have been a bit like him… sorry, now I’m daydreaming.
Throughout your book, Copenhagen is in the midst of riots, revolt and a bizarre murder case. Are there any particular crimes from your career as a journalist that inspired the goings-on in your book?
The whole ambience in Unrest is mainly inspired by the riots in Copenhagen because they were happening right outside my front door. And half of the plot, the backstory of the victim and the ending sequence that takes place in Macedonia is copied from my own experiences as a war reporter in the Balkans. When you go to these places to work you need a driver and a fixer/ interpreter, and mostly they speak bad English. But once, when I went to the town of Tetovo in northern Macedonia where there was fighting between Albanian rebels and the government forces, I met this guy who spoke fluent Danish. He knew everybody in town.
After a couple of days it turned out he was a convicted heroin smuggler who was expelled from Denmark after serving a 12-year sentence. He had this young boy back in Copenhagen, four years old, he hadn’t seen him for three years and would never see him grow up. We paid guys like him £50-80 a day and I used him for ten days. When the day came to go home I handed him the envelope with all the money and he gave it back to me and gave me an address in the suburbs of Copenhagen, where his son lived with his ex-wife. I knew he didn’t have much money and I knew he didn’t do it to impress me. But I was impressed all the same.
When I came back, I went to the address and met the mother. She opened the door, I stated my business, and she took the money without a word and closed the door. It makes you think quite a lot about perspectives. And perspective
