Michael Ridpath's Blog, page 5
August 10, 2021
Favourite Places: Mokka Kaffi
Time for another one of my favourite places in Iceland.
Reykjavík has plenty of good cafés, but my favourite is Mokka. It’s a few yards up Skólavördustígur (the Skola Street) on the left, in a building that used to be white but is now raspberry red.
It is supposedly the oldest café in Reykjavík, founded in 1958 by an Icelander returning to Reykjavík from Naples where he had been studying music. The warmth and friendliness of the place hits you as soon as you walk in, subtly conveyed by the smell of coffee mixed with waffles and strawberry jam, the house speciality.
It’s a small café with leather benches, booths and wood-panelled walls under yellow light. These are hung with pictures by Reykjavík artists that rotate monthly: abstracts, photographs, landscapes, all for sale. Often, the artist will be there too, willing to talk about their work.
The staff are young, friendly and of course speak perfect English. I have often suggested Mokka as a place to meet my sources. It has a reputation as a hangout for artists, writers and intellectuals, a sort of Icelandic Deux Magots, with better waffles.
Reykjavík has many good cafés. Grái Kötturinn (‘the Grey Cat’), on Hverfisgata, is just as cosy as Mokka and famous for its large American-style breakfasts. Babalú, further up Skólavördustígur, is like a little bit of Morocco swept in some Saharan storm to a wet rock in the Atlantic. And Reykjavík Roasters is a classic hipster artisanal coffee place complete with mysterious metal equipment and sacks of coffee scattered around.
There are no Starbucks in Reykjavík, but the local chain, Kaffitár, is pretty good: the kind of place where you can linger over a book or a laptop and a cup of coffee.
Reykjavík has plenty of good cafés, but my favourite is Mokka. It’s a few yards up Skólavördustígur (the Skola Street) on the left, in a building that used to be white but is now raspberry red.
It is supposedly the oldest café in Reykjavík, founded in 1958 by an Icelander returning to Reykjavík from Naples where he had been studying music. The warmth and friendliness of the place hits you as soon as you walk in, subtly conveyed by the smell of coffee mixed with waffles and strawberry jam, the house speciality.
It’s a small café with leather benches, booths and wood-panelled walls under yellow light. These are hung with pictures by Reykjavík artists that rotate monthly: abstracts, photographs, landscapes, all for sale. Often, the artist will be there too, willing to talk about their work.
The staff are young, friendly and of course speak perfect English. I have often suggested Mokka as a place to meet my sources. It has a reputation as a hangout for artists, writers and intellectuals, a sort of Icelandic Deux Magots, with better waffles.
Reykjavík has many good cafés. Grái Kötturinn (‘the Grey Cat’), on Hverfisgata, is just as cosy as Mokka and famous for its large American-style breakfasts. Babalú, further up Skólavördustígur, is like a little bit of Morocco swept in some Saharan storm to a wet rock in the Atlantic. And Reykjavík Roasters is a classic hipster artisanal coffee place complete with mysterious metal equipment and sacks of coffee scattered around.
There are no Starbucks in Reykjavík, but the local chain, Kaffitár, is pretty good: the kind of place where you can linger over a book or a laptop and a cup of coffee.
July 27, 2021
Locked Up
I was looking for two things from my police contact Páll: the details of how the police would undertake an investigation from the discovery of the body to the eventual conviction of the murderer, and what difference Magnus would notice to homicide investigations back home.
Icelandic police have a friendly, almost cuddly image, especially when compared to their American counterparts. They have become experts at Instagram and Facebook, on which they rescue kittens and perform weird dances. It is an entirely different experience being stopped by an Icelandic traffic cop with her helpful smile and bobbing blonde ponytail, than by a shaven-headed American policeman with peak cap, sunglasses, jackboots, a gun wobbling at his hip and that special unsmiling look that asserts authority and, occasionally, fear.
In 2009, the Icelandic police lost their weekend leave when they spent every Saturday protecting Parliament during the pots-and-pans protests. These occasionally turned violent, in a not-very-scary Icelandic fashion. The police mostly showed restraint, although they sometimes fired teargas. There was a lump in Páll’s throat a couple of years later when he told me how peaceful protesters had formed a line to protect the police from the skyr (a tasty Icelandic goo similar to yoghurt) and flagstones thrown at them by a minority of troublemakers.
Yet, there are differences between the Icelandic and American (and British) way of doing things, and they don’t always put the Icelanders in a good light.
Fortunately, the Icelanders have finally scrapped the law permitting the murder of any Turk in Iceland, which had been enacted following the Barbary pirates’ slave raids in the seventeenth century. In 1992 the law was repealed at the insistence of the visiting Turkish national handball team, and you can see their point. It did give the home team an unfair advantage.
The U.S., and to a lesser degree the U.K., set great store in a suspect’s right to remain silent, and in his right to a lawyer to tell him to remain silent. There are also restrictions on how long a suspect can remain in custody without being charged. The result of this is that investigators will often wait before charging a suspect until they have built a strong case against him.
Iceland has rules of arrest and evidence too; they are just different.
When an investigator arrests a likely suspect, he interviews him, usually without a lawyer present. If he thinks the suspect is guilty, he will then get a warrant from a judge to keep the suspect in custody in solitary confinement for three weeks. This is known as the ‘hot period’ when the bulk of the investigation takes place. After three weeks, and only then, the police are required to show their evidence to the defence lawyer, and to ask the judge for an extension, should they require one. The standard technique is to let the suspect sweat it out in solitary for two and a half weeks, and then suggest they confess. Apparently, they usually do.
I visited Iceland’s main prison once — I was planning a novel where Magnus would wind up in jail as a suspect for a couple of weeks.
Litla Hraun looms over the outskirts of the small coastal town of Eyrarbakki, about an hour south of Reykjavík. I was shown around by a tall, softly spoken, broad-shouldered warder named Hilmir. There are three wings for the permanent residents, and they are remarkably civilized. The communal kitchens are clean with a widescreen TV, the cells have en-suite showers and computers, although no Internet. The inmates appeared cheery and friendly. I saw a class of three men doing an online university degree; those three securing Iceland’s place at the top of the global rankings for per-capita prison population in tertiary education. It reminded me a little of my daughter’s hall of residence at university in England.
Those were three of the wings. The fourth, actually known as House No 1, was for remand prisoners, in other words, those who have not yet been found guilty.
I saw some of this: individual cells with an internal high-walled courtyard with a plastic roof, around which prisoners are allowed to walk one hour in twenty-four. Hilmir was going to show me some of the prisoners, but one of them was going ‘bananas’. It’s a bit of a problem, apparently, prisoners in that wing going ‘bananas’.
To be fair to Hilmir, his use of that word in English should not be used against him, and he did seem genuinely very concerned with his charges’ mental health. Nevertheless, I got the impression that suspects who were still assumed innocent were thrown into unpleasant solitary confinement. If they confessed, they got to move to the rather pleasant accommodation next door for a few months or years: prison terms in Iceland are low by international standards.
Hilmir told me there is a waiting list for Litla Hraun. Again, a bit like British universities.
It seems to me that this system relies on the fairness and integrity of Iceland’s police and prosecutors to work. But, as in any country, the police are not always fair.
Things are changing. Iceland recently built a newer facility closer to Reykjavík, at Hólmsheidi. I haven't paid a visit yet – I have yet to receive an invitation. And I understand that after criticism from international prison inspectors, the authorities are a little less quick with solitary confinement for suspects.
Iceland’s most notorious case of wrongful arrest involved what was probably a false confession. In 1974, two men, Gudmundur and Geirfinnur, disappeared from Hafnarfjördur, a town to the south-west of Reykjavík near the lava field. Six suspects were arrested, kept in solitary and interrogated. They confessed and were convicted. Over the years, there has been significant criticism of the investigation, and in 2018 five of the six were acquitted. A German security expert from Hamburg was drafted in to help with the original case, and some blame him for the miscarriage of justice.
Memories of this case are still strong in Iceland, and might lead to suspicion of Magnus as another foreign ‘expert’ adviser.
Icelandic police have a friendly, almost cuddly image, especially when compared to their American counterparts. They have become experts at Instagram and Facebook, on which they rescue kittens and perform weird dances. It is an entirely different experience being stopped by an Icelandic traffic cop with her helpful smile and bobbing blonde ponytail, than by a shaven-headed American policeman with peak cap, sunglasses, jackboots, a gun wobbling at his hip and that special unsmiling look that asserts authority and, occasionally, fear.
In 2009, the Icelandic police lost their weekend leave when they spent every Saturday protecting Parliament during the pots-and-pans protests. These occasionally turned violent, in a not-very-scary Icelandic fashion. The police mostly showed restraint, although they sometimes fired teargas. There was a lump in Páll’s throat a couple of years later when he told me how peaceful protesters had formed a line to protect the police from the skyr (a tasty Icelandic goo similar to yoghurt) and flagstones thrown at them by a minority of troublemakers.
Yet, there are differences between the Icelandic and American (and British) way of doing things, and they don’t always put the Icelanders in a good light.
Fortunately, the Icelanders have finally scrapped the law permitting the murder of any Turk in Iceland, which had been enacted following the Barbary pirates’ slave raids in the seventeenth century. In 1992 the law was repealed at the insistence of the visiting Turkish national handball team, and you can see their point. It did give the home team an unfair advantage.
The U.S., and to a lesser degree the U.K., set great store in a suspect’s right to remain silent, and in his right to a lawyer to tell him to remain silent. There are also restrictions on how long a suspect can remain in custody without being charged. The result of this is that investigators will often wait before charging a suspect until they have built a strong case against him.
Iceland has rules of arrest and evidence too; they are just different.
When an investigator arrests a likely suspect, he interviews him, usually without a lawyer present. If he thinks the suspect is guilty, he will then get a warrant from a judge to keep the suspect in custody in solitary confinement for three weeks. This is known as the ‘hot period’ when the bulk of the investigation takes place. After three weeks, and only then, the police are required to show their evidence to the defence lawyer, and to ask the judge for an extension, should they require one. The standard technique is to let the suspect sweat it out in solitary for two and a half weeks, and then suggest they confess. Apparently, they usually do.
I visited Iceland’s main prison once — I was planning a novel where Magnus would wind up in jail as a suspect for a couple of weeks.
Litla Hraun looms over the outskirts of the small coastal town of Eyrarbakki, about an hour south of Reykjavík. I was shown around by a tall, softly spoken, broad-shouldered warder named Hilmir. There are three wings for the permanent residents, and they are remarkably civilized. The communal kitchens are clean with a widescreen TV, the cells have en-suite showers and computers, although no Internet. The inmates appeared cheery and friendly. I saw a class of three men doing an online university degree; those three securing Iceland’s place at the top of the global rankings for per-capita prison population in tertiary education. It reminded me a little of my daughter’s hall of residence at university in England.
Those were three of the wings. The fourth, actually known as House No 1, was for remand prisoners, in other words, those who have not yet been found guilty.
I saw some of this: individual cells with an internal high-walled courtyard with a plastic roof, around which prisoners are allowed to walk one hour in twenty-four. Hilmir was going to show me some of the prisoners, but one of them was going ‘bananas’. It’s a bit of a problem, apparently, prisoners in that wing going ‘bananas’.
To be fair to Hilmir, his use of that word in English should not be used against him, and he did seem genuinely very concerned with his charges’ mental health. Nevertheless, I got the impression that suspects who were still assumed innocent were thrown into unpleasant solitary confinement. If they confessed, they got to move to the rather pleasant accommodation next door for a few months or years: prison terms in Iceland are low by international standards.
Hilmir told me there is a waiting list for Litla Hraun. Again, a bit like British universities.
It seems to me that this system relies on the fairness and integrity of Iceland’s police and prosecutors to work. But, as in any country, the police are not always fair.
Things are changing. Iceland recently built a newer facility closer to Reykjavík, at Hólmsheidi. I haven't paid a visit yet – I have yet to receive an invitation. And I understand that after criticism from international prison inspectors, the authorities are a little less quick with solitary confinement for suspects.
Iceland’s most notorious case of wrongful arrest involved what was probably a false confession. In 1974, two men, Gudmundur and Geirfinnur, disappeared from Hafnarfjördur, a town to the south-west of Reykjavík near the lava field. Six suspects were arrested, kept in solitary and interrogated. They confessed and were convicted. Over the years, there has been significant criticism of the investigation, and in 2018 five of the six were acquitted. A German security expert from Hamburg was drafted in to help with the original case, and some blame him for the miscarriage of justice.
Memories of this case are still strong in Iceland, and might lead to suspicion of Magnus as another foreign ‘expert’ adviser.
July 1, 2021
Writing in Ice published today!
Writing in Ice: A Crime Writer’s Guide to Iceland
Writing in Ice: A Crime Writer’s Guide to Iceland is published today!
Based on my blog of the same name, which I have posted here as well, it's a memoir of researching and writing a detective series set in Iceland – the breathtaking landscape, the vigorous and occasionally eccentric people, the volcanoes and the elves, with a little bit about how to pull together a good detective story.
It should appeal to readers of my Magnus novels, as well as anyone intrigued by Iceland as a possible tourist destination, or someone planning to write their own crime series set overseas.
Lilja Sigurdardóttir, one of Iceland’s top crime writers wrote: “I totally recommend this book for anyone who is interested in Iceland and crime fiction. It is fun to read, accurate and funny. LOVE IT!” But maybe she was just being nice.
Now, how to buy it. If you want to buy the ebook cheaply from Amazon, then try this link; it should also be available through other ebook retailers.
The paperback should be available to order from any bookshop worldwide, or from Amazon, of course. If you would like a signed copy or have trouble ordering it, you can try my local bookshop Lutyens and Rubinstein in Notting Hill in London: they have some copies in stock and will send one to you.
If you buy it, I hope you like it. And if you do like it, please leave a review: it really helps, especially at the beginning of a book’s life.
Writing in Ice: A Crime Writer’s Guide to Iceland is published today!
Based on my blog of the same name, which I have posted here as well, it's a memoir of researching and writing a detective series set in Iceland – the breathtaking landscape, the vigorous and occasionally eccentric people, the volcanoes and the elves, with a little bit about how to pull together a good detective story.
It should appeal to readers of my Magnus novels, as well as anyone intrigued by Iceland as a possible tourist destination, or someone planning to write their own crime series set overseas.
Lilja Sigurdardóttir, one of Iceland’s top crime writers wrote: “I totally recommend this book for anyone who is interested in Iceland and crime fiction. It is fun to read, accurate and funny. LOVE IT!” But maybe she was just being nice.
Now, how to buy it. If you want to buy the ebook cheaply from Amazon, then try this link; it should also be available through other ebook retailers.
The paperback should be available to order from any bookshop worldwide, or from Amazon, of course. If you would like a signed copy or have trouble ordering it, you can try my local bookshop Lutyens and Rubinstein in Notting Hill in London: they have some copies in stock and will send one to you.
If you buy it, I hope you like it. And if you do like it, please leave a review: it really helps, especially at the beginning of a book’s life.
June 30, 2021
Guns (or lack of them) and crime in Iceland
A major area of difference between crime in Iceland and crime in the US that Magnus would notice immediately is firearms. It turns out there are loads of guns in Iceland; you guessed it, the country has the highest per-capita gun ownership in the world. But these are entirely for hunting: handguns and assault rifles are banned. Guns are rarely used in crimes, and the police are unarmed. Unlike the police in the US.
Guns are really important to American policemen. The bad guys are heavily armed: the police need guns to protect themselves and their colleagues. To research my crime series I read a fascinating book called Into the Kill Zone by David Klinger, which is a thorough analysis of what happens when American police officers shoot civilians.
We have seen in the news examples of this that are unjustified. But many times, police use their weapons in legitimate acts of self-defence. In tough areas they are aware that they might come under fire at any moment, or that someone might make a grab for their gun. There is genuine danger, and genuine bravery. Magnus was a homicide detective in the rougher parts of Boston, and so the absence of guns in Iceland would strike him.
Clearly there is a need for the police to have some access to firearms, and so the Icelanders have a specialized unit, a kind of SWAT team called the Special Unit of the National Police Commissioner. They used to be known as ‘The Viking Squad’, a wonderful name, and in my books they still are. Rural police stations have their own firearms locked in safes; from what I can tell, these are never used on people, just polar bears.
Iceland has much of the technical support that is available to advanced police forces. Many of its senior officers have studied abroad. There is a forensics unit based in Reykjavík who will dash off anywhere in the country to a murder scene. They have a computer forensics department, something that is ever more important as phones and laptops contain so much of people’s lives. DNA must be sent for analysis in Norway or Sweden, which can take weeks.
There is an increasing number of CCTV cameras throughout Iceland. A camera I spotted on a trip north intrigues me. About 50 kilometres north of Reykjavík on the Ring Road that circumnavigates the country, is a tunnel beneath Hvalfjördur (Whale Fjord). As you emerge, a little camera snaps your license plate. This is about the only route to get from Reykjavík to the north, so it should be possible for the police to check every car that makes that trip. Useful when checking up on suspects.
At first, I was careful to note down the various departments within the Reykjavík Metropolitan Police, but they have been reorganized at least twice, and often the names don’t translate well into English. Many Icelandic crime writers and their translators use 'CID', and that’s probably the best bet, although I use the now-defunct title ‘Violent Crimes Unit’. The man in charge of the whole country’s police service is The National Police Commissioner, which is a good title.
Rural police organization changes just as rapidly. I have visited a number of police stations around Iceland. At the biggest one in a region, there is normally a chief superintendent, but he or she may have only a dozen officers whose job it is to police a large region encompassing several small towns. If there is a homicide, then they will often call in specialist support from Reykjavík (ie Magnus). There is therefore a lot of driving involved, but also opportunities for Magnus to range outside Reykjavík to solve his cases.
There are drugs in Iceland: cocaine, amphetamines, ecstasy and marijuana. Lithuanians are often blamed, as are the Dutch and Hell’s Angels. The first bank robbery in Iceland didn’t occur until 1985; apparently, it’s difficult to rob banks where everyone knows everyone else.
There have been no serial killers, and Icelanders believe their streets are safe; babies are left in pushchairs outside cafés, and young women roam around Reykjavík all night alone. Sadly, a murder in 2017 made some Icelanders rethink this. A twenty-year-old woman named Birna went out for a night on the town one Saturday in January and didn’t come home. She was last seen at 5 am on the streets of Reykjavík.
The whole country went looking for her; after a few days someone found her shoes in the lava field near Hafnarfjördur — disturbingly, the same lava field which Pétur had suggested to me many years before would be a good place to hide a body.
Eventually, her body was found washed up on the shore on the south coast of the Reykjanes Peninsula. The police identified two suspects: fishermen from a Greenlandic trawler that had docked in Hafnarfjördur. They sent a helicopter out to the boat to pick them up.
The nation was shocked. It was one of those tragic times when an innocent place becomes that little bit less innocent.
Guns are really important to American policemen. The bad guys are heavily armed: the police need guns to protect themselves and their colleagues. To research my crime series I read a fascinating book called Into the Kill Zone by David Klinger, which is a thorough analysis of what happens when American police officers shoot civilians.
We have seen in the news examples of this that are unjustified. But many times, police use their weapons in legitimate acts of self-defence. In tough areas they are aware that they might come under fire at any moment, or that someone might make a grab for their gun. There is genuine danger, and genuine bravery. Magnus was a homicide detective in the rougher parts of Boston, and so the absence of guns in Iceland would strike him.
Clearly there is a need for the police to have some access to firearms, and so the Icelanders have a specialized unit, a kind of SWAT team called the Special Unit of the National Police Commissioner. They used to be known as ‘The Viking Squad’, a wonderful name, and in my books they still are. Rural police stations have their own firearms locked in safes; from what I can tell, these are never used on people, just polar bears.
Iceland has much of the technical support that is available to advanced police forces. Many of its senior officers have studied abroad. There is a forensics unit based in Reykjavík who will dash off anywhere in the country to a murder scene. They have a computer forensics department, something that is ever more important as phones and laptops contain so much of people’s lives. DNA must be sent for analysis in Norway or Sweden, which can take weeks.
There is an increasing number of CCTV cameras throughout Iceland. A camera I spotted on a trip north intrigues me. About 50 kilometres north of Reykjavík on the Ring Road that circumnavigates the country, is a tunnel beneath Hvalfjördur (Whale Fjord). As you emerge, a little camera snaps your license plate. This is about the only route to get from Reykjavík to the north, so it should be possible for the police to check every car that makes that trip. Useful when checking up on suspects.
At first, I was careful to note down the various departments within the Reykjavík Metropolitan Police, but they have been reorganized at least twice, and often the names don’t translate well into English. Many Icelandic crime writers and their translators use 'CID', and that’s probably the best bet, although I use the now-defunct title ‘Violent Crimes Unit’. The man in charge of the whole country’s police service is The National Police Commissioner, which is a good title.
Rural police organization changes just as rapidly. I have visited a number of police stations around Iceland. At the biggest one in a region, there is normally a chief superintendent, but he or she may have only a dozen officers whose job it is to police a large region encompassing several small towns. If there is a homicide, then they will often call in specialist support from Reykjavík (ie Magnus). There is therefore a lot of driving involved, but also opportunities for Magnus to range outside Reykjavík to solve his cases.
There are drugs in Iceland: cocaine, amphetamines, ecstasy and marijuana. Lithuanians are often blamed, as are the Dutch and Hell’s Angels. The first bank robbery in Iceland didn’t occur until 1985; apparently, it’s difficult to rob banks where everyone knows everyone else.
There have been no serial killers, and Icelanders believe their streets are safe; babies are left in pushchairs outside cafés, and young women roam around Reykjavík all night alone. Sadly, a murder in 2017 made some Icelanders rethink this. A twenty-year-old woman named Birna went out for a night on the town one Saturday in January and didn’t come home. She was last seen at 5 am on the streets of Reykjavík.
The whole country went looking for her; after a few days someone found her shoes in the lava field near Hafnarfjördur — disturbingly, the same lava field which Pétur had suggested to me many years before would be a good place to hide a body.
Eventually, her body was found washed up on the shore on the south coast of the Reykjanes Peninsula. The police identified two suspects: fishermen from a Greenlandic trawler that had docked in Hafnarfjördur. They sent a helicopter out to the boat to pick them up.
The nation was shocked. It was one of those tragic times when an innocent place becomes that little bit less innocent.
June 15, 2021
Time for Crime
By far my most important appointment on that first research trip to Reykjavík was with my police contact, Páll. Some very successful crime writers get by without worrying at all about police procedure — Agatha Christie springs to mind, but there are many other more modern examples. Others are obsessive, like Peter James. I had always aimed to get the details right in my financial thrillers, and I wanted to do the same in these Magnus mysteries if only to create as vivid a portrait as I could of Iceland.
I am not a total slave to police procedure. Here are two examples that I have been happy to ignore or at least downplay in my books.
Modern major investigations in Britain don’t really involve a brilliant detective and his trusty sidekick interviewing everyone and then confronting the suspect in a lonely house somewhere. There are massive teams, coordinated by a computer, with patient analysis of forensic data, countless pointless interviews, endless watching nothing happen on CCTV footage, and keyword analysis of the inane chatter on the phones and computers of everyone involved.
In the U.S., many detectives don’t even interview their chief suspects until they have conclusive proof of their guilt, and even then they might not go for a confession. Confessions just give opportunities for defence lawyers to attack evidence. No tense confrontations and dramatic admissions. Most suspects don’t say anything anyway; their lawyers have told them not to. These inconvenient modern methods make crime investigations much less dramatic, which is why I usually ignore them. But if I find an authentic and little known detail of police methods, I will happily slip it in.
It’s always useful to have a police contact wherever you are, but you can manage without in the U.S. and Britain, where there are plenty of books that describe police procedures: my favourite is the 1,296-page Practical Homicide Investigation by Vernon J. Geberth.
Unsurprisingly, there are none in Iceland, although a close reading of detective novels gives a few clues. I knew I needed a police contact; he had to be helpful, I had to ask the right questions and to note down the answers.
Being an Icelander, Páll wouldn’t commit himself to a meeting following the email I had sent him two weeks before. This wouldn’t bother me now, but it caused me no end of worry at the time. To my great relief on the Sunday morning of my trip, he agreed to meet me at police headquarters the next day.
Reykjavík’s Metropolitan Police Headquarters is a dull grey box of a building opposite the Hlemmur bus station at the eastern end of Hverfisgata. There is not much remarkable about it: there was still a smell of urine and vomit lying beneath disinfectant about the cells a day after the weekend rush hour.
A Harley Davidson motorbike perched proudly on the landing on the first floor, and a lovely full-size snooker table took centre stage in the recreation room, a gift to the police by the British Army when it left Iceland during the war. One side of the building looks out over the bus station, the other on Mount Esja and the bay, at least from the top floors. Otherwise, this is a typical police station with computers, telephones, photocopiers, box files, public-safety posters, coffee machines and bland interview rooms.
Páll was a softly spoken man about my age, tall and balding. He seemed intelligent and empathetic. He went to high school with a boy who was to become Iceland’s top crime writer, then to university, and after a spell in the police, he studied for a masters in America in criminology. He was a perfect source of information for me and extremely helpful. He looked like a school teacher, more of the modern slightly left-wing variety than the old-fashioned authoritarian: not a stereotype of a policeman at all. I suspect he is very good at his job.
There is an obvious difficulty in writing a murder mystery set in Iceland: there is not much murder. Between 1980 and 2015, there were 56 murders in Iceland, which works out at 1.6 per year or 0.5 per 100,000 people per year. That’s low, but not ultra-low. The UK currently averages 1.2 per 100,000; the US is much higher at 5.4.
But two murders a year is not many. And, according to Páll, most murders are not that difficult to solve. Gunni is blind drunk and angry in a bar. He breaks a bottle and swings it at Siggi, cutting and killing him. When the police arrive, Gunni yells ‘Keep away or I’ll kill you too.’ Not really one for Hercule Poirot, or even Magnus.
Was it even realistic to set a crime series in Iceland? I dithered. But then I considered Oxford and Inspector Morse. Oxford has about half the population as Iceland, which assuming the same murder rate as the rest of the UK, implies 1 or 2 murders per year. Colin Dexter has written dozens of novels set in the city, and Morse and his sidekick Lewis have appeared in at least sixty TV episodes, each including two or three unlikely murders. Colin Dexter and ITV got away with it, so I think Magnus and I can too.
I have decided to pull together these blog posts into a book, which will be published at the beginning of July.
Like this blog, the title is Writing in Ice: A Crime Writer's Guide to Iceland. The book includes the posts I have published here and more that I have already written. You can pre-order the ebook or paperback from Amazon. If you would like a signed copy, or one not sold by Amazon, you can order one from my local bookshop, Lutyens and Rubinstein in Notting Hill, London.
I am not a total slave to police procedure. Here are two examples that I have been happy to ignore or at least downplay in my books.
Modern major investigations in Britain don’t really involve a brilliant detective and his trusty sidekick interviewing everyone and then confronting the suspect in a lonely house somewhere. There are massive teams, coordinated by a computer, with patient analysis of forensic data, countless pointless interviews, endless watching nothing happen on CCTV footage, and keyword analysis of the inane chatter on the phones and computers of everyone involved.
In the U.S., many detectives don’t even interview their chief suspects until they have conclusive proof of their guilt, and even then they might not go for a confession. Confessions just give opportunities for defence lawyers to attack evidence. No tense confrontations and dramatic admissions. Most suspects don’t say anything anyway; their lawyers have told them not to. These inconvenient modern methods make crime investigations much less dramatic, which is why I usually ignore them. But if I find an authentic and little known detail of police methods, I will happily slip it in.
It’s always useful to have a police contact wherever you are, but you can manage without in the U.S. and Britain, where there are plenty of books that describe police procedures: my favourite is the 1,296-page Practical Homicide Investigation by Vernon J. Geberth.
Unsurprisingly, there are none in Iceland, although a close reading of detective novels gives a few clues. I knew I needed a police contact; he had to be helpful, I had to ask the right questions and to note down the answers.
Being an Icelander, Páll wouldn’t commit himself to a meeting following the email I had sent him two weeks before. This wouldn’t bother me now, but it caused me no end of worry at the time. To my great relief on the Sunday morning of my trip, he agreed to meet me at police headquarters the next day.
Reykjavík’s Metropolitan Police Headquarters is a dull grey box of a building opposite the Hlemmur bus station at the eastern end of Hverfisgata. There is not much remarkable about it: there was still a smell of urine and vomit lying beneath disinfectant about the cells a day after the weekend rush hour.
A Harley Davidson motorbike perched proudly on the landing on the first floor, and a lovely full-size snooker table took centre stage in the recreation room, a gift to the police by the British Army when it left Iceland during the war. One side of the building looks out over the bus station, the other on Mount Esja and the bay, at least from the top floors. Otherwise, this is a typical police station with computers, telephones, photocopiers, box files, public-safety posters, coffee machines and bland interview rooms.
Páll was a softly spoken man about my age, tall and balding. He seemed intelligent and empathetic. He went to high school with a boy who was to become Iceland’s top crime writer, then to university, and after a spell in the police, he studied for a masters in America in criminology. He was a perfect source of information for me and extremely helpful. He looked like a school teacher, more of the modern slightly left-wing variety than the old-fashioned authoritarian: not a stereotype of a policeman at all. I suspect he is very good at his job.
There is an obvious difficulty in writing a murder mystery set in Iceland: there is not much murder. Between 1980 and 2015, there were 56 murders in Iceland, which works out at 1.6 per year or 0.5 per 100,000 people per year. That’s low, but not ultra-low. The UK currently averages 1.2 per 100,000; the US is much higher at 5.4.
But two murders a year is not many. And, according to Páll, most murders are not that difficult to solve. Gunni is blind drunk and angry in a bar. He breaks a bottle and swings it at Siggi, cutting and killing him. When the police arrive, Gunni yells ‘Keep away or I’ll kill you too.’ Not really one for Hercule Poirot, or even Magnus.
Was it even realistic to set a crime series in Iceland? I dithered. But then I considered Oxford and Inspector Morse. Oxford has about half the population as Iceland, which assuming the same murder rate as the rest of the UK, implies 1 or 2 murders per year. Colin Dexter has written dozens of novels set in the city, and Morse and his sidekick Lewis have appeared in at least sixty TV episodes, each including two or three unlikely murders. Colin Dexter and ITV got away with it, so I think Magnus and I can too.
I have decided to pull together these blog posts into a book, which will be published at the beginning of July.
Like this blog, the title is Writing in Ice: A Crime Writer's Guide to Iceland. The book includes the posts I have published here and more that I have already written. You can pre-order the ebook or paperback from Amazon. If you would like a signed copy, or one not sold by Amazon, you can order one from my local bookshop, Lutyens and Rubinstein in Notting Hill, London.
June 1, 2021
Favourite Places - Grótta
Time for another of my favourite places in Iceland: Grótta.
What you think of Grótta depends on the intersection of your mood and the weather.
If you are feeling tired or impatient and the wind is blowing and it's cold and raining and you can’t see for more than a hundred metres, then Grótta can be a bust. But when it is calm and still, and it is warm enough to sit and stare, and the sun is taking its sweet time to duck below the horizon, it is a special place.
The name Grótta refers to a tiny island at the tip of Seltjarnarnes, on which a lighthouse stands.
On the west side of this tip is a beach of black stones. At sunset, the sea shimmers in silver, gold, yellow, orange and even green as the sun creates a path heading westwards to the Atlantic and beyond.
On a clear day, the snowy cone of Snaefellsjökull shimmers far away to the north. Sleek black cormorants slip in and out of the water and multicoloured ducks paddle about their business.
Terns wheel and dive, letting out their distinctive cry of ‘kria’, which is their name in Icelandic. During nesting season, they can become quite aggressive; they will dive-bomb you if they decide you are in the wrong place.
Grótta can be dramatic, when the wind whips up the sea and waves crash on the rocks and the lighthouse, and sinister, when white fingers of fog caress the black volcanic stone.
There are many more dramatic and desolate beaches in Iceland, but the beauty of Grótta is it is so close to the centre of Reykjavík and yet so peaceful.
A place to put down your notebook and tape recorder, and let your mind drift.
What you think of Grótta depends on the intersection of your mood and the weather.
If you are feeling tired or impatient and the wind is blowing and it's cold and raining and you can’t see for more than a hundred metres, then Grótta can be a bust. But when it is calm and still, and it is warm enough to sit and stare, and the sun is taking its sweet time to duck below the horizon, it is a special place.
The name Grótta refers to a tiny island at the tip of Seltjarnarnes, on which a lighthouse stands.
On the west side of this tip is a beach of black stones. At sunset, the sea shimmers in silver, gold, yellow, orange and even green as the sun creates a path heading westwards to the Atlantic and beyond.
On a clear day, the snowy cone of Snaefellsjökull shimmers far away to the north. Sleek black cormorants slip in and out of the water and multicoloured ducks paddle about their business.
Terns wheel and dive, letting out their distinctive cry of ‘kria’, which is their name in Icelandic. During nesting season, they can become quite aggressive; they will dive-bomb you if they decide you are in the wrong place.
Grótta can be dramatic, when the wind whips up the sea and waves crash on the rocks and the lighthouse, and sinister, when white fingers of fog caress the black volcanic stone.
There are many more dramatic and desolate beaches in Iceland, but the beauty of Grótta is it is so close to the centre of Reykjavík and yet so peaceful.
A place to put down your notebook and tape recorder, and let your mind drift.
May 19, 2021
Reykjavik and the burbs
My Reykjavík researches continued along Laugavegur, which is Reykjavík’s smartest shopping street. Laug means ‘hot spring’, so this was the road from Ingólfur’s original Norse settlement to the geothermal spring, which is now a swimming pool with hot tubs near Borgartún.
It became the route women took to do their washing, and presumably a crowded thoroughfare on Saturday, or laugardagur, when everyone went off for a bath. It’s still a hot place on Saturday night, after my bedtime, since most of the trendy clubs and bars are on this street.
The trendiest of these is Kaffibarinn. This is a small metal town house, painted bright red, a few yards up Bergstadastraeti from Laugavegur. It is easily identifiable by the London Underground sign hung above the door. It has an awesome reputation: the place to go on a weekend night for music and violent dancing. It’s supposed to be or have been part-owned by Damon Albarn of Blur, but it’s hard to pin that factoid down: maybe he had a drink there once. Iceland’s most famous film director, Baltasar Kormákur, met Hallgrímur Helgason at the bar there, and decided to make a film of his book, 101 Reykjavík.
The bar itself is a very pleasant place to go during the day, or an early weekday evening. Warm, cosy, wooden, old, with trendily dressed and laid-back bar staff. By night, things change, as I found out several years later.
I went to dinner at my publisher Pétur’s house one Saturday. I told him and his guests I planned to go to some clubs afterwards for research purposes. Dinner was wonderful, but it dragged on, and we all drank quite a bit. I assumed everyone had forgotten about my plan. Finally, at 2.30 a.m., an author there announced it was time to go to Kaffibarinn.
It was a bewildering experience. The music was loud, the beat insistent — fair enough. The room at the back was heaving with a mass of bodies, mostly Icelandic, all drunk or high, swaying and writhing. It was summer — at 3 a.m. it was dawn or dusk or something — and the dim daylight seemed to give everyone an illicit energy.
Inside elbows and feet were jabbing. Outside, there was much shouting, swearing, baring of stomachs and chests, and vomiting. We left after an hour or so, because one of our group was embarrassed at jostling into her students from the university.
I found it extremely interesting, but it would be wrong to say I enjoyed it. I’m way too old.
But I do like a scruffy pub, and I thought Magnus would like one too. Two Icelanders in London had recommended I try the Grand Rokk, which lurked off Hverfisgata between Laugavegur and the bay. Sadly, this place is no longer open. To get in you went through a white picket gate in a white picket fence past a small outside tent for smokers.
Inside, the bar was wood-panelled, cosy and smelled strongly of spilled beer. A row of steady drinkers lined the bar: two old guys with grey hair and flat caps, a red-faced man with a bushy beard, a chubby American girl with short blonde hair and a chubby Icelandic friend, a Filipina and a shaven-headed Swedish guy in leathers. They all seemed to know each other, and the conversation was general and amiable in a mix of Icelandic and English.
The older guys had shot glasses of spirits to chase their beers. A few feet away from the bar two men were playing chess. A particularly ruddy drinker suddenly started singing ‘In the Summer Time’ from Porgy and Bess in a rich, sensuously slurred baritone. Everyone ignored him.
A good bolthole for Magnus.
Sadly the Grand Rokk went bankrupt and is closed now.
A city isn’t just its centre. I needed to get outside to the suburbs; that is after all where most of the people live and much of the crime is committed. So I spent a couple of days on buses. The Reykjavík bus system isn’t too difficult to figure out, and the drivers are helpful. It’s great for people-watching: it seemed to me that many ordinary Icelanders looked a lot like ordinary Britons, or to be more accurate, ordinary Scots. I was reminded of all that British and Irish DNA in the Icelandic genome.
The centre of Reykjavík has character, the outskirts don’t. The town has grown rapidly in the last fifty years, swallowing up the farms that surrounded it in uniform housing estates. There is an inner ring of housing built in the fifties and sixties, which now has a kind of grey pebbledash East German retro charm. Some of the fancier houses in the suburbs show signs of architectural imagination, but frankly, not many.
Oddly, there are some stunning modern churches, for example at Mjódd and Grafarholt. But the suburbs are also infested with dual carriageways, car dealerships, DIY stores, IKEA, small squat office blocks and billboards.
Some of the developments were under construction, some more had been abandoned half-built. The crash was coming. The only difference between Reykjavík’s dull suburbs and those of its American or European equivalents are the stunning views: of Faxaflói Bay and its islands, of Mount Esja, of the heath and mountains to the south, and of the dramatic black lavascape stretching towards Keflavík to the west.
If there is a tough suburb of Reykjavík, it is Breidholt. This is where rich men say they grew up in rags-to-riches stories, it’s where drug dealers live in novels and where people are interviewed about poverty in magazine articles. It all looked quite pleasant to me. It’s a reminder that high-crime areas in Iceland don’t resemble Baltimore, or Chicago’s South Side, or the Moss Side in Manchester or Harlesden in London. Frankly, the East Anglian town of King’s Lynn is scarier, and King’s Lynn is not very scary.
Breidholt has its gangsta rappers. One of them, Móri, describes life in Reykjavík’s grittiest streets:
‘I’ve been around. I’ve seen the darker side of life. I lived in Breidholt for a while. There is a drug dealer in every house there. There was also a gunfight there last year. But now I live in a nice area with my girlfriend and my pet turtle. I used to have two pet turtles but one of them died after the police raided my house and forgot to feed it. They didn’t even have a warrant.’
At the other end of the social scale is Seltjarnarnes, a neighbourhood just to the north-west of Reykjavík, sitting on a peninsula (a nes) jutting out into the bay. It’s flat and windswept, but there are some wealthy roads here, many of the houses on which were bought by ‘quota kings’, fishermen who made a killing by selling their fishing quotas.
Some of the new breed of entrepreneurs live here too. One of these wealthy streets is named Bakkavör, which is also the name of a large food company now headquartered in London and founded by two Icelandic brothers.
The houses themselves are modern and nicely designed, but not large. They look nowhere near as impressive as similar rich neighbourhoods in other capital cities, but that is in itself impressive. At least to me.
At the tip of Seltjarnarnes is the lighthouse and beach of Grótta. More about that next time.
It became the route women took to do their washing, and presumably a crowded thoroughfare on Saturday, or laugardagur, when everyone went off for a bath. It’s still a hot place on Saturday night, after my bedtime, since most of the trendy clubs and bars are on this street.
The trendiest of these is Kaffibarinn. This is a small metal town house, painted bright red, a few yards up Bergstadastraeti from Laugavegur. It is easily identifiable by the London Underground sign hung above the door. It has an awesome reputation: the place to go on a weekend night for music and violent dancing. It’s supposed to be or have been part-owned by Damon Albarn of Blur, but it’s hard to pin that factoid down: maybe he had a drink there once. Iceland’s most famous film director, Baltasar Kormákur, met Hallgrímur Helgason at the bar there, and decided to make a film of his book, 101 Reykjavík.
The bar itself is a very pleasant place to go during the day, or an early weekday evening. Warm, cosy, wooden, old, with trendily dressed and laid-back bar staff. By night, things change, as I found out several years later.
I went to dinner at my publisher Pétur’s house one Saturday. I told him and his guests I planned to go to some clubs afterwards for research purposes. Dinner was wonderful, but it dragged on, and we all drank quite a bit. I assumed everyone had forgotten about my plan. Finally, at 2.30 a.m., an author there announced it was time to go to Kaffibarinn.
It was a bewildering experience. The music was loud, the beat insistent — fair enough. The room at the back was heaving with a mass of bodies, mostly Icelandic, all drunk or high, swaying and writhing. It was summer — at 3 a.m. it was dawn or dusk or something — and the dim daylight seemed to give everyone an illicit energy.
Inside elbows and feet were jabbing. Outside, there was much shouting, swearing, baring of stomachs and chests, and vomiting. We left after an hour or so, because one of our group was embarrassed at jostling into her students from the university.
I found it extremely interesting, but it would be wrong to say I enjoyed it. I’m way too old.
But I do like a scruffy pub, and I thought Magnus would like one too. Two Icelanders in London had recommended I try the Grand Rokk, which lurked off Hverfisgata between Laugavegur and the bay. Sadly, this place is no longer open. To get in you went through a white picket gate in a white picket fence past a small outside tent for smokers.
Inside, the bar was wood-panelled, cosy and smelled strongly of spilled beer. A row of steady drinkers lined the bar: two old guys with grey hair and flat caps, a red-faced man with a bushy beard, a chubby American girl with short blonde hair and a chubby Icelandic friend, a Filipina and a shaven-headed Swedish guy in leathers. They all seemed to know each other, and the conversation was general and amiable in a mix of Icelandic and English.
The older guys had shot glasses of spirits to chase their beers. A few feet away from the bar two men were playing chess. A particularly ruddy drinker suddenly started singing ‘In the Summer Time’ from Porgy and Bess in a rich, sensuously slurred baritone. Everyone ignored him.
A good bolthole for Magnus.
Sadly the Grand Rokk went bankrupt and is closed now.
A city isn’t just its centre. I needed to get outside to the suburbs; that is after all where most of the people live and much of the crime is committed. So I spent a couple of days on buses. The Reykjavík bus system isn’t too difficult to figure out, and the drivers are helpful. It’s great for people-watching: it seemed to me that many ordinary Icelanders looked a lot like ordinary Britons, or to be more accurate, ordinary Scots. I was reminded of all that British and Irish DNA in the Icelandic genome.
The centre of Reykjavík has character, the outskirts don’t. The town has grown rapidly in the last fifty years, swallowing up the farms that surrounded it in uniform housing estates. There is an inner ring of housing built in the fifties and sixties, which now has a kind of grey pebbledash East German retro charm. Some of the fancier houses in the suburbs show signs of architectural imagination, but frankly, not many.
Oddly, there are some stunning modern churches, for example at Mjódd and Grafarholt. But the suburbs are also infested with dual carriageways, car dealerships, DIY stores, IKEA, small squat office blocks and billboards.
Some of the developments were under construction, some more had been abandoned half-built. The crash was coming. The only difference between Reykjavík’s dull suburbs and those of its American or European equivalents are the stunning views: of Faxaflói Bay and its islands, of Mount Esja, of the heath and mountains to the south, and of the dramatic black lavascape stretching towards Keflavík to the west.
If there is a tough suburb of Reykjavík, it is Breidholt. This is where rich men say they grew up in rags-to-riches stories, it’s where drug dealers live in novels and where people are interviewed about poverty in magazine articles. It all looked quite pleasant to me. It’s a reminder that high-crime areas in Iceland don’t resemble Baltimore, or Chicago’s South Side, or the Moss Side in Manchester or Harlesden in London. Frankly, the East Anglian town of King’s Lynn is scarier, and King’s Lynn is not very scary.
Breidholt has its gangsta rappers. One of them, Móri, describes life in Reykjavík’s grittiest streets:
‘I’ve been around. I’ve seen the darker side of life. I lived in Breidholt for a while. There is a drug dealer in every house there. There was also a gunfight there last year. But now I live in a nice area with my girlfriend and my pet turtle. I used to have two pet turtles but one of them died after the police raided my house and forgot to feed it. They didn’t even have a warrant.’
At the other end of the social scale is Seltjarnarnes, a neighbourhood just to the north-west of Reykjavík, sitting on a peninsula (a nes) jutting out into the bay. It’s flat and windswept, but there are some wealthy roads here, many of the houses on which were bought by ‘quota kings’, fishermen who made a killing by selling their fishing quotas.
Some of the new breed of entrepreneurs live here too. One of these wealthy streets is named Bakkavör, which is also the name of a large food company now headquartered in London and founded by two Icelandic brothers.
The houses themselves are modern and nicely designed, but not large. They look nowhere near as impressive as similar rich neighbourhoods in other capital cities, but that is in itself impressive. At least to me.
At the tip of Seltjarnarnes is the lighthouse and beach of Grótta. More about that next time.
May 4, 2021
Checking out Reykjavík: walking where my characters walk
I checked out Reykjavík. I was looking for places people might live, places people might meet, and the odd place someone might get stabbed or shot. It’s a bit morbid, but it’s my job.
I was to revisit all the spots I saw on this first trip many times over the following ten years. In May 2008, the global financial crash was just beginning its downward lurch. It was to hit Iceland particularly hard over the following twelve months.
I started where Ingólfur Arnarson started, in Austurvöllur Square, which is a couple of hundred yards south of the bay and in the middle of what is now known as ‘Downtown’.
Austurvöllur is a bit of a mouthful, so let’s call it the Parliament Square, since Parliament is on one side. If you think Reykjavík is small for a capital city now, this is where you realize how seriously small it used to be a hundred years ago.
The square is a patch of green with a statue of a politician in the middle, some scrappy grass and daffodils and a few benches. The parliament building itself looks like the town hall of a small Yorkshire town, complete with blackened stone. And, of course, a hundred years ago Reykjavík was the same size as a small Yorkshire town.
The square has seen some action. A year after I visited for the first time it was the site of the ‘pots-and-pans’ revolution, when five per cent of the country’s population would crowd into the square and bang crockery to demand change. It worked: the government toppled and fell.
On the side of the square is the Hótel Borg, which was for a long time Reykjavík’s only posh hotel. It was built by a famous Icelandic strongman in the 1930s — when they say that I assume they mean he financed it, but maybe he used his own hands. It’s grand in an understated art deco way, and a perfect place for my wealthy Tolkien-besotted American character to stay while he is visiting Reykjavík.
On a third side of the square is the Café Paris, which is a place to see Iceland’s great and good, and an excellent place for lunch and a coffee. Politicians are frequent patrons, although, given the scandal I mentioned in a previous post, you may want to avoid listening in too closely to their conversations.
Just to the south of the parliament square is the Tjörnin, a large pond about a kilometre in length, access to which presumably attracted Ingólfur to this spot. (By the way, although I call it “the Tjörnin”, I really shouldn’t, since the “-in” at the end of “Tjörnin” already means “the”, so I am calling it “the the Tjörn”. It’s just one of those little things I like to do to annoy Icelanders).
This is not a man-made municipal water feature, but an important natural international transport hub. There is Keflavík International Airport, there is the City Airport in the middle of Reykjavík, and then there is the Tjörnin. It is the westernmost body of freshwater in Iceland, and hence a popular stopping-off point for birds on their migration. Swans, geese, ducks, terns, seagulls and a host of complicated species known only to twitchers paddle and fuss, refuelling for the next leg of their journey.
The modern Reykjavík town hall leans out over the lake. It’s worth a quick visit, especially on your return from a trip around the countryside, which you can trace on a massive model of a relief map of Iceland inside.
To the north-west of the parliament square is the Old Harbour, which used to be the only harbour until they built a new one for freight further east, but is still used by fishing boats. Reykjavík is still a serious fishing port and there is always a lot going on.
Tucked away near the water, in a patch of land which has been under intermittent construction for the last ten years, is Baejarins Beztu Pylsur, a red hot-dog stand with a picture of Bill Clinton stuffing his face outside it. It is just a hot-dog stand in a car park, but there is usually a queue, and although I think it’s a bit overblown to claim that the hot dogs are the best per-capita hot dogs in the world, they do taste good. One way or another, whenever I go to Iceland I seem to stop there. For the truly authentic Reykjavík experience it should be drizzling lightly.
The stand had a narrow escape recently. A nearby crane fell, just missed the stand, but destroyed a bench nearby a few seconds after two girls had just finished their hot dogs and left it.
As I walked along the edge of the bay eastwards, I passed a massive construction site. This was a planned concert hall, which cost a huge amount of money and was nearly cancelled during the financial crisis, but fortunately wasn’t.
It’s now finished, it’s called Harpa, and it’s beautiful. It’s like a large cubic jewel, gleaming and glimmering in greens, yellows, blues and purples. The façade was designed by the Icelandic artist Ólafur Eliasson, and is made out of glass bricks that reflect and refract sunlight so that the interior is always changing during the day, and at night is stunningly illuminated. Go inside and gawp.
The bay itself is known as Faxaflói and faces north. To the north-east loom the flanks of Esja. Far to the north, and I mean a hundred kilometres away, is Snaefellsnes, a peninsula that juts out to the west of Iceland. At the very end of this stands the volcano Snaefellsjökull, a perfect cone topped with an ice-cream glacier. On a clear day, you can see it from Reykjavík, hovering above the water in the distance.
Along the edge of the bay stand a row of tall apartment blocks. In 2008 they were only half-built, and construction stopped for a few years during the crash. The area is known as the ‘Shadow District’, and I decided it was an ideal place for a yuppy banker in my second novel to live. And there were some deserted narrow streets running between the buildings which would be great places for him to be attacked. Very useful.
The police station is close to the bay, and in fact, there is a good view from Magnus’s desk over to Snaefellsnes. The National Police Commissioner’s office is right on the bay too. But the area around the police station, known as Hlemmur, was a bit scruffy: bus station, tattoo parlours, dodgy shops, needles in back alleys.
During the crash, there were squats around here, and if you were to meet a strung-out junky in central Reykjavík, it would probably be around Hlemmur. It would be inaccurate to suggest it feels unsafe; all city centres have their scruffier parts, and this is, or was, Reykjavík’s.
Walking further east along the bay, I came to the Höfdi House. This is a white mansion standing in its own lawn by the side of the water. Icelanders don’t really do mansions, even rich people’s houses are small by international mansion standards, as indeed is the Höfdi House.
It was the smartest house in town in the first half of the century, and was nabbed by the British government for their consulate. The house had a ghost, named Sóley, who drove the British out and they sold the place in 1952.
Thirty years later it became the site of the famous disarmament talks between Reagan and Gorbachev. Apparently, the Russian delegates enjoyed watching Tom and Jerry cartoons in the basement: Russians didn’t get Tom and Jerry in Moscow in those days. It is now owned by the city, and is used for official functions.
Seemed to me a good spot for my characters to choose to meet.
Further on to the east, I came to Iceland’s equivalent of Wall Street, Borgartún. This is a straight road running parallel to the bay, lined with modern office buildings of glass and red and black stone a few stories high. Vanity Fair describes the style as ‘Asshole Capitalist’, but I think that’s a little harsh. Every capital city needs somewhere to put its banks, and with its views of Mount Esja and Faxaflói Bay and its manageably sized buildings, I suspect this would be a pretty good place to work. And for Magnus to meet a hotshot lawyer.
I was to revisit all the spots I saw on this first trip many times over the following ten years. In May 2008, the global financial crash was just beginning its downward lurch. It was to hit Iceland particularly hard over the following twelve months.
I started where Ingólfur Arnarson started, in Austurvöllur Square, which is a couple of hundred yards south of the bay and in the middle of what is now known as ‘Downtown’.
Austurvöllur is a bit of a mouthful, so let’s call it the Parliament Square, since Parliament is on one side. If you think Reykjavík is small for a capital city now, this is where you realize how seriously small it used to be a hundred years ago.
The square is a patch of green with a statue of a politician in the middle, some scrappy grass and daffodils and a few benches. The parliament building itself looks like the town hall of a small Yorkshire town, complete with blackened stone. And, of course, a hundred years ago Reykjavík was the same size as a small Yorkshire town.
The square has seen some action. A year after I visited for the first time it was the site of the ‘pots-and-pans’ revolution, when five per cent of the country’s population would crowd into the square and bang crockery to demand change. It worked: the government toppled and fell.
On the side of the square is the Hótel Borg, which was for a long time Reykjavík’s only posh hotel. It was built by a famous Icelandic strongman in the 1930s — when they say that I assume they mean he financed it, but maybe he used his own hands. It’s grand in an understated art deco way, and a perfect place for my wealthy Tolkien-besotted American character to stay while he is visiting Reykjavík.
On a third side of the square is the Café Paris, which is a place to see Iceland’s great and good, and an excellent place for lunch and a coffee. Politicians are frequent patrons, although, given the scandal I mentioned in a previous post, you may want to avoid listening in too closely to their conversations.
Just to the south of the parliament square is the Tjörnin, a large pond about a kilometre in length, access to which presumably attracted Ingólfur to this spot. (By the way, although I call it “the Tjörnin”, I really shouldn’t, since the “-in” at the end of “Tjörnin” already means “the”, so I am calling it “the the Tjörn”. It’s just one of those little things I like to do to annoy Icelanders).
This is not a man-made municipal water feature, but an important natural international transport hub. There is Keflavík International Airport, there is the City Airport in the middle of Reykjavík, and then there is the Tjörnin. It is the westernmost body of freshwater in Iceland, and hence a popular stopping-off point for birds on their migration. Swans, geese, ducks, terns, seagulls and a host of complicated species known only to twitchers paddle and fuss, refuelling for the next leg of their journey.
The modern Reykjavík town hall leans out over the lake. It’s worth a quick visit, especially on your return from a trip around the countryside, which you can trace on a massive model of a relief map of Iceland inside.
To the north-west of the parliament square is the Old Harbour, which used to be the only harbour until they built a new one for freight further east, but is still used by fishing boats. Reykjavík is still a serious fishing port and there is always a lot going on.
Tucked away near the water, in a patch of land which has been under intermittent construction for the last ten years, is Baejarins Beztu Pylsur, a red hot-dog stand with a picture of Bill Clinton stuffing his face outside it. It is just a hot-dog stand in a car park, but there is usually a queue, and although I think it’s a bit overblown to claim that the hot dogs are the best per-capita hot dogs in the world, they do taste good. One way or another, whenever I go to Iceland I seem to stop there. For the truly authentic Reykjavík experience it should be drizzling lightly.
The stand had a narrow escape recently. A nearby crane fell, just missed the stand, but destroyed a bench nearby a few seconds after two girls had just finished their hot dogs and left it.
As I walked along the edge of the bay eastwards, I passed a massive construction site. This was a planned concert hall, which cost a huge amount of money and was nearly cancelled during the financial crisis, but fortunately wasn’t.
It’s now finished, it’s called Harpa, and it’s beautiful. It’s like a large cubic jewel, gleaming and glimmering in greens, yellows, blues and purples. The façade was designed by the Icelandic artist Ólafur Eliasson, and is made out of glass bricks that reflect and refract sunlight so that the interior is always changing during the day, and at night is stunningly illuminated. Go inside and gawp.
The bay itself is known as Faxaflói and faces north. To the north-east loom the flanks of Esja. Far to the north, and I mean a hundred kilometres away, is Snaefellsnes, a peninsula that juts out to the west of Iceland. At the very end of this stands the volcano Snaefellsjökull, a perfect cone topped with an ice-cream glacier. On a clear day, you can see it from Reykjavík, hovering above the water in the distance.
Along the edge of the bay stand a row of tall apartment blocks. In 2008 they were only half-built, and construction stopped for a few years during the crash. The area is known as the ‘Shadow District’, and I decided it was an ideal place for a yuppy banker in my second novel to live. And there were some deserted narrow streets running between the buildings which would be great places for him to be attacked. Very useful.
The police station is close to the bay, and in fact, there is a good view from Magnus’s desk over to Snaefellsnes. The National Police Commissioner’s office is right on the bay too. But the area around the police station, known as Hlemmur, was a bit scruffy: bus station, tattoo parlours, dodgy shops, needles in back alleys.
During the crash, there were squats around here, and if you were to meet a strung-out junky in central Reykjavík, it would probably be around Hlemmur. It would be inaccurate to suggest it feels unsafe; all city centres have their scruffier parts, and this is, or was, Reykjavík’s.
Walking further east along the bay, I came to the Höfdi House. This is a white mansion standing in its own lawn by the side of the water. Icelanders don’t really do mansions, even rich people’s houses are small by international mansion standards, as indeed is the Höfdi House.
It was the smartest house in town in the first half of the century, and was nabbed by the British government for their consulate. The house had a ghost, named Sóley, who drove the British out and they sold the place in 1952.
Thirty years later it became the site of the famous disarmament talks between Reagan and Gorbachev. Apparently, the Russian delegates enjoyed watching Tom and Jerry cartoons in the basement: Russians didn’t get Tom and Jerry in Moscow in those days. It is now owned by the city, and is used for official functions.
Seemed to me a good spot for my characters to choose to meet.
Further on to the east, I came to Iceland’s equivalent of Wall Street, Borgartún. This is a straight road running parallel to the bay, lined with modern office buildings of glass and red and black stone a few stories high. Vanity Fair describes the style as ‘Asshole Capitalist’, but I think that’s a little harsh. Every capital city needs somewhere to put its banks, and with its views of Mount Esja and Faxaflói Bay and its manageably sized buildings, I suspect this would be a pretty good place to work. And for Magnus to meet a hotshot lawyer.
April 20, 2021
Favourite Places: Thingholt
By ‘Thingholt’, I mean the bloody great hill in the middle of Reykjavík with a church on top. I assume that in Viking times, they held one of those ‘thingi’ things here, meaning an assembly.
It’s bordered by the Tjörnin pond on the west, Laugavegur to the north, the National Hospital to the east and the City airport to the south. It’s a residential area bang in the middle of town, full of small houses with brightly painted corrugated iron roofs — predominantly red, but also green and blue. The walls are either concrete or corrugated iron, and many are brightly painted too.
Most of the houses with corrugated metal walls were built between 1880 and 1925. The rain in Reykjavík frequently falls horizontally, so wooden walls tended to rot. Wood was also expensive, since it all had to be imported, and it burns: much of Reykjavík burned down in 1915. Corrugated iron was all the rage until the Icelanders discovered concrete in the 1920s.
The dwellings are small, with little gables and tiny gardens behind picket fences. The place is delightfully, domestically, quiet: the roads are too narrow for Reykjavík’s traffic to make much headway. There are primary schools and playgrounds, corner shops and bicycles.
The western slope, rising up from the Tjörnin, seems to have the oldest houses, built by Reykjavík merchants in the nineteenth century. Old in Thingholt means quaint, rather than grand. The houses to the south are a little grander; this is where the Reykjavík bigwigs live, and you might spot the odd security camera. The slope to the north above Laugavegur is hipper and quirkier, and to the east it is a bit scruffier. This is where Magnus lives. I was told that Thingholt would be a little too Bohemian for a policeman, so I had him lodge with one of his colleagues’ punkish sister. Their house is a lovely little building with grey painted corrugated iron walls and a red door on Njálsgata — I know exactly which one.
No one can agree exactly where Thingolt's borders run; according to the more pedantic residents, Njálsgata may lie just outside its limits. Which sounds about right for Magnus.
When Julian Assange and his colleagues from Wikileaks came to Iceland to edit the video of an American operation in Iraq, which had been leaked to them, they stayed in a house in Thingholt. My third Magnus novel, Meltwater, features a similar outfit who also holed up in a little house on the hill.
I have mentioned the terrific view from the top of the Hallgrímskirkja, but the views snatched strolling around the hill are perhaps better because more unexpected. Between a child’s swing and a rowan tree, you suddenly catch a glimpse of Mount Esja, or the Tjörnin, or the Pearl — the water tower to the south of town, or much closer, the swooping spire of the church itself.
Skólavördustígur is a road that heads straight uphill to the Hallgrímskirkja from the bottom of Laugavegur. The name is a mouthful, an effort to read, let alone pronounce, so think of it as the Skola Street. This is where you catch the best view of the church, always shifting with the time of day and the weather.
The street itself is lined with galleries, some unashamedly touristy, but some selling pieces that are fascinating, quirky, stunning or all three. The various rocks, metals and glass spewed up by Iceland’s volcanoes are popular materials, as is fish-skin leather.
The Handknitting Association of Iceland, up the hill on the left, contains an extraordinary collection of wool garments, including the famous lopapeysa sweaters. These are made of wool from Icelandic sheep that have two layers, a wet-resistant outer layer and an insulating inner layer. The sweaters are warm and weatherproof, but sell for the kind of price that prompts you to consider selling your first-born in order to clothe your second-born, or vice versa.
It’s bordered by the Tjörnin pond on the west, Laugavegur to the north, the National Hospital to the east and the City airport to the south. It’s a residential area bang in the middle of town, full of small houses with brightly painted corrugated iron roofs — predominantly red, but also green and blue. The walls are either concrete or corrugated iron, and many are brightly painted too.
Most of the houses with corrugated metal walls were built between 1880 and 1925. The rain in Reykjavík frequently falls horizontally, so wooden walls tended to rot. Wood was also expensive, since it all had to be imported, and it burns: much of Reykjavík burned down in 1915. Corrugated iron was all the rage until the Icelanders discovered concrete in the 1920s.
The dwellings are small, with little gables and tiny gardens behind picket fences. The place is delightfully, domestically, quiet: the roads are too narrow for Reykjavík’s traffic to make much headway. There are primary schools and playgrounds, corner shops and bicycles.
The western slope, rising up from the Tjörnin, seems to have the oldest houses, built by Reykjavík merchants in the nineteenth century. Old in Thingholt means quaint, rather than grand. The houses to the south are a little grander; this is where the Reykjavík bigwigs live, and you might spot the odd security camera. The slope to the north above Laugavegur is hipper and quirkier, and to the east it is a bit scruffier. This is where Magnus lives. I was told that Thingholt would be a little too Bohemian for a policeman, so I had him lodge with one of his colleagues’ punkish sister. Their house is a lovely little building with grey painted corrugated iron walls and a red door on Njálsgata — I know exactly which one.
No one can agree exactly where Thingolt's borders run; according to the more pedantic residents, Njálsgata may lie just outside its limits. Which sounds about right for Magnus.
When Julian Assange and his colleagues from Wikileaks came to Iceland to edit the video of an American operation in Iraq, which had been leaked to them, they stayed in a house in Thingholt. My third Magnus novel, Meltwater, features a similar outfit who also holed up in a little house on the hill.
I have mentioned the terrific view from the top of the Hallgrímskirkja, but the views snatched strolling around the hill are perhaps better because more unexpected. Between a child’s swing and a rowan tree, you suddenly catch a glimpse of Mount Esja, or the Tjörnin, or the Pearl — the water tower to the south of town, or much closer, the swooping spire of the church itself.
Skólavördustígur is a road that heads straight uphill to the Hallgrímskirkja from the bottom of Laugavegur. The name is a mouthful, an effort to read, let alone pronounce, so think of it as the Skola Street. This is where you catch the best view of the church, always shifting with the time of day and the weather.
The street itself is lined with galleries, some unashamedly touristy, but some selling pieces that are fascinating, quirky, stunning or all three. The various rocks, metals and glass spewed up by Iceland’s volcanoes are popular materials, as is fish-skin leather.
The Handknitting Association of Iceland, up the hill on the left, contains an extraordinary collection of wool garments, including the famous lopapeysa sweaters. These are made of wool from Icelandic sheep that have two layers, a wet-resistant outer layer and an insulating inner layer. The sweaters are warm and weatherproof, but sell for the kind of price that prompts you to consider selling your first-born in order to clothe your second-born, or vice versa.
April 6, 2021
Time to Go: Researching Reykjavik
In my last post, I described my arduous research trips to places like Rio and South Africa. But now, for better or worse, I had decided to write several books in a city with appalling weather: Reykjavík. I have looked back at my notes on this trip in May of 2008, and these were my rather disjointed first impressions.
First Impressions
"It’s small and northern. Despite the cloud, there is a feeling of lightness about the place. Most of Reykjavík is in shades of grey, many of them light grey, brightened by a number of small houses with brightly coloured metal roofs.
It’s a hip, fashion-conscious city, yet innocent at the same time, clean, easy to walk around. Although many streets are narrow, you can usually see some distance to the sea and mountains, so it doesn’t feel cramped. It’s friendly in rather a repressed way.
The air is fresh and cool, with an occasional hint of sulphur. There is not much smell of traffic. The main sounds are the hum, not the roar, of traffic, the laugh or yelp of a human, the muffled bass line coming out of a car or bar, the clank of construction equipment and the occasional cry of a seabird.
The sky changes constantly as clouds mix and merge with the sun, performing a kind of bridal dance; you catch glimpses of lighter grey and sometimes bright blue. It rains and then it stops. The few trees are short, unhappy and just budding. A few stubby daffodils are still blooming in May. The temperature is cool: eight degrees, and at this time of year it doesn’t get dark until 10.30pm.
Movement and details.
Steam rising from a road junction — perhaps a leak in the underground geothermal heating system? A bright yellow Mustang convertible. A girl wobbling on a bike wearing a lime green top, a leopard-skin skirt and a tail. A man pushing a baby round and round the city — I saw him several times. Two doughty tourists walking through the main shopping street in hiking gear. A class of kids in the Parliament Square, all with blonde hair apart from one East Asian girl."
What are the smells of Reykjavík? There is an impression of cleanliness, although I’m told the pollution from cars is worse than a visitor might assume. When the wind is from the harbour, you can smell fish. And when the wind is from the south-east, you can smell sulphur, leaking out from the centre of the earth at the geothermal power station thirty kilometres away.
Symbols
I needed symbols of Reykjavík, and there were two obvious candidates, both of which have recurred frequently in my novels.
The first is Mount Esja. This is a large, long, muscular ridge of crenellated rock and snow that lies to the north of Reykjavík, on the other side of a smooth grey fjord dotted with islands. You can see glimpses of it from many places in town. It changes constantly, with the seasons, the weather and even the time of day.
It can glow pink, glisten yellow, gleam white and brood black. On some days its grey wrinkles can be clearly made out in the sunshine under a blue sky. Tiny clouds can hover just above the flat summit, larger cumulus plunge and soar above it, or heavy grey blankets of moisture bear down, leaving only the foothills showing. It can look beautiful or ominous, or sometimes both at once. It has become an old friend, a friend with ever-changing moods.
The second is the Hallgrímskirkja, or Hallgrímur’s church. A hill rises above the centre of Reykjavík, and on top of this hill stands the Hallgrímskirkja, the largest church in Iceland. Despite its size, it’s not a cathedral: that is an older, much smaller building near the parliament square. Inside, it’s very warm, unlike any English church I have ever been to.
From the top of its spire you get a marvellous view over Reykjavík, the sea that surrounds the city on three sides, and beyond that, the mountains. But it's not the view from it that is important, it’s the view of it.
The church was designed in the 1930s and built between 1945 and 1986. It is constructed out of smooth concrete. The spire, supported by swept-back wings, swoops upwards to dominate the town. You see it from afar as you approach Reykjavík, and you see it as you walk the streets downtown. It can glow soft and yellow in low evening light, or loom grey and brutal in the drizzle. It has a kind of smooth grace to it, but it's also austere, depending on how you are feeling. Some of my characters think it looks like an intercontinental ballistic missile. Some of them think it looks like a space rocket. One of them thinks it looks like a penis.
People
I identified a number of distinct ‘types’ among the people I saw on that first trip. I wouldn’t say that this is a definitive taxonomy of Icelanders at all, merely a snapshot of some of those I saw in 2008, and I fear some of my descriptions are not very kind.
"Old guys who think of themselves as cool: long greying curly hair, bushy beard or raffish moustaches, leather jacket, broad-rimmed hat and a scarf tied just so. Big guys, square shoulders, blonde, with stubble on their cheeks and stubble on their scalps, wearing black leather jackets. Thin guys with straggly red hair and thin straggly facial hair, woolly hats and jeans that sag and straggle. Big, broad, pasty-faced men, with thin fair hair, acne, a paunch and a couple of breasts. Little neat bird-like men with thick silver hair brushed back Soviet-style, weather-beaten faces and bright blue twinkling eyes. Young men wearing T-shirts under expensive sweaters, jeans, leather shoes, thick fair hair brushed back and oiled, neat designer stubble and thin metal glasses.
Tall, long-limbed women with blonde hair, fair complexion, blue eyes, white smile, striding with an air of confidence but not unapproachable. Thin small women with pale skin, blue eyes and black hair. What look like farm girls: hefty, broad pasty-face, bad skin, upturned piggy nose, looking unsophisticated and innocent. Middle-aged women with black hair, bright lipstick, mascara and leather trousers. Thin middle-aged woman with red collar-length hair, glasses, pale slightly freckled skin and blue intelligent eyes."
A failed night on the town
After a full afternoon of muttering into my tape recorder, I headed to my hotel. The Leifur Eiríksson is situated at the top of the hill right opposite the Hallgrímskirkja. Between the hotel and the church stands a fine statue of Leifur Eiríksson, the son of Erik the Red of Greenland fame, who sailed from Greenland to discover America. He is clutching a battleaxe and striding westwards across the city beneath him towards Canada.
My room had a fine view of Leif. I diligently wrote up my notes of the day’s sightings and then set out for a night on the town. Reykjavík is famous for its raucous nightlife, it was Saturday, and I needed to do my research. I found a bar, ordered a burger, and drank a beer. Quickly. I ordered another one.
The bar was barely a quarter full. It was eight-thirty. I had another beer. It had been a large burger. The beer was yellow and gassy. My stomach was full and I was tired. And the bar was still three-quarters empty.
Sometimes I really enjoy a long slow pint in a bar by myself. Sometimes I just get impatient. This was one of those impatient evenings. At nine-thirty I concluded that the stuff about Reykjavík nightlife I had read was overblown hype. At nine-forty-five I left the bar and looked for somewhere else more lively. The streets were more or less empty, although there was a parade of fancy cars on the main shopping street, Laugavegur.
I gave up and went to bed.
The curtains were thin, and it was not yet dark, so it took me a while to go to sleep. I was woken at about midnight by laughter and shouting. For the next three or four hours the clamour rose, until it sounded as if there was a riot going on not far from my hotel. I knew I should have got up and checked it all out. But I was feeling tired, foolish and a little middle-aged. I read a book for half an hour and eventually went back to sleep.
First Impressions
"It’s small and northern. Despite the cloud, there is a feeling of lightness about the place. Most of Reykjavík is in shades of grey, many of them light grey, brightened by a number of small houses with brightly coloured metal roofs.
It’s a hip, fashion-conscious city, yet innocent at the same time, clean, easy to walk around. Although many streets are narrow, you can usually see some distance to the sea and mountains, so it doesn’t feel cramped. It’s friendly in rather a repressed way.
The air is fresh and cool, with an occasional hint of sulphur. There is not much smell of traffic. The main sounds are the hum, not the roar, of traffic, the laugh or yelp of a human, the muffled bass line coming out of a car or bar, the clank of construction equipment and the occasional cry of a seabird.
The sky changes constantly as clouds mix and merge with the sun, performing a kind of bridal dance; you catch glimpses of lighter grey and sometimes bright blue. It rains and then it stops. The few trees are short, unhappy and just budding. A few stubby daffodils are still blooming in May. The temperature is cool: eight degrees, and at this time of year it doesn’t get dark until 10.30pm.
Movement and details.
Steam rising from a road junction — perhaps a leak in the underground geothermal heating system? A bright yellow Mustang convertible. A girl wobbling on a bike wearing a lime green top, a leopard-skin skirt and a tail. A man pushing a baby round and round the city — I saw him several times. Two doughty tourists walking through the main shopping street in hiking gear. A class of kids in the Parliament Square, all with blonde hair apart from one East Asian girl."
What are the smells of Reykjavík? There is an impression of cleanliness, although I’m told the pollution from cars is worse than a visitor might assume. When the wind is from the harbour, you can smell fish. And when the wind is from the south-east, you can smell sulphur, leaking out from the centre of the earth at the geothermal power station thirty kilometres away.
Symbols
I needed symbols of Reykjavík, and there were two obvious candidates, both of which have recurred frequently in my novels.
The first is Mount Esja. This is a large, long, muscular ridge of crenellated rock and snow that lies to the north of Reykjavík, on the other side of a smooth grey fjord dotted with islands. You can see glimpses of it from many places in town. It changes constantly, with the seasons, the weather and even the time of day.
It can glow pink, glisten yellow, gleam white and brood black. On some days its grey wrinkles can be clearly made out in the sunshine under a blue sky. Tiny clouds can hover just above the flat summit, larger cumulus plunge and soar above it, or heavy grey blankets of moisture bear down, leaving only the foothills showing. It can look beautiful or ominous, or sometimes both at once. It has become an old friend, a friend with ever-changing moods.
The second is the Hallgrímskirkja, or Hallgrímur’s church. A hill rises above the centre of Reykjavík, and on top of this hill stands the Hallgrímskirkja, the largest church in Iceland. Despite its size, it’s not a cathedral: that is an older, much smaller building near the parliament square. Inside, it’s very warm, unlike any English church I have ever been to.
From the top of its spire you get a marvellous view over Reykjavík, the sea that surrounds the city on three sides, and beyond that, the mountains. But it's not the view from it that is important, it’s the view of it.
The church was designed in the 1930s and built between 1945 and 1986. It is constructed out of smooth concrete. The spire, supported by swept-back wings, swoops upwards to dominate the town. You see it from afar as you approach Reykjavík, and you see it as you walk the streets downtown. It can glow soft and yellow in low evening light, or loom grey and brutal in the drizzle. It has a kind of smooth grace to it, but it's also austere, depending on how you are feeling. Some of my characters think it looks like an intercontinental ballistic missile. Some of them think it looks like a space rocket. One of them thinks it looks like a penis.
People
I identified a number of distinct ‘types’ among the people I saw on that first trip. I wouldn’t say that this is a definitive taxonomy of Icelanders at all, merely a snapshot of some of those I saw in 2008, and I fear some of my descriptions are not very kind.
"Old guys who think of themselves as cool: long greying curly hair, bushy beard or raffish moustaches, leather jacket, broad-rimmed hat and a scarf tied just so. Big guys, square shoulders, blonde, with stubble on their cheeks and stubble on their scalps, wearing black leather jackets. Thin guys with straggly red hair and thin straggly facial hair, woolly hats and jeans that sag and straggle. Big, broad, pasty-faced men, with thin fair hair, acne, a paunch and a couple of breasts. Little neat bird-like men with thick silver hair brushed back Soviet-style, weather-beaten faces and bright blue twinkling eyes. Young men wearing T-shirts under expensive sweaters, jeans, leather shoes, thick fair hair brushed back and oiled, neat designer stubble and thin metal glasses.
Tall, long-limbed women with blonde hair, fair complexion, blue eyes, white smile, striding with an air of confidence but not unapproachable. Thin small women with pale skin, blue eyes and black hair. What look like farm girls: hefty, broad pasty-face, bad skin, upturned piggy nose, looking unsophisticated and innocent. Middle-aged women with black hair, bright lipstick, mascara and leather trousers. Thin middle-aged woman with red collar-length hair, glasses, pale slightly freckled skin and blue intelligent eyes."
A failed night on the town
After a full afternoon of muttering into my tape recorder, I headed to my hotel. The Leifur Eiríksson is situated at the top of the hill right opposite the Hallgrímskirkja. Between the hotel and the church stands a fine statue of Leifur Eiríksson, the son of Erik the Red of Greenland fame, who sailed from Greenland to discover America. He is clutching a battleaxe and striding westwards across the city beneath him towards Canada.
My room had a fine view of Leif. I diligently wrote up my notes of the day’s sightings and then set out for a night on the town. Reykjavík is famous for its raucous nightlife, it was Saturday, and I needed to do my research. I found a bar, ordered a burger, and drank a beer. Quickly. I ordered another one.
The bar was barely a quarter full. It was eight-thirty. I had another beer. It had been a large burger. The beer was yellow and gassy. My stomach was full and I was tired. And the bar was still three-quarters empty.
Sometimes I really enjoy a long slow pint in a bar by myself. Sometimes I just get impatient. This was one of those impatient evenings. At nine-thirty I concluded that the stuff about Reykjavík nightlife I had read was overblown hype. At nine-forty-five I left the bar and looked for somewhere else more lively. The streets were more or less empty, although there was a parade of fancy cars on the main shopping street, Laugavegur.
I gave up and went to bed.
The curtains were thin, and it was not yet dark, so it took me a while to go to sleep. I was woken at about midnight by laughter and shouting. For the next three or four hours the clamour rose, until it sounded as if there was a riot going on not far from my hotel. I knew I should have got up and checked it all out. But I was feeling tired, foolish and a little middle-aged. I read a book for half an hour and eventually went back to sleep.
