I’m about two-thirds of the way through the seven-hour drive from Reykjavík to Ísafjörður and the term “Nordic blue” is starting to make sense. Through lashing rain, the narrow road twists and turns around the coastline of Iceland’s Westfjords. Waterfalls hurtle down hillsides as the storm rages and snippets of Icelandic conversation float solemnly from the radio. At a rare hotel along the way, I have to be towed by kind strangers with a forklift truck after getting stuck in a car park. By the time I emerge from the six-mile-long Westfjords tunnel – a dimly lit, low-ceilinged single lane through a mountain – and see the lights of the town up ahead, I feel as if my state of mind has fundamentally altered.
Like much of Ísafjörður – which is surrounded by mountains and lies on a fjord across the Denmark Strait from Greenland – the tunnel is immediately recognisable from the pages of Satu Rämö’s Hildur series, a wildly successful publishing phenomenon that has put the genre of “Nordic blue” on Europe’s literary map.
“I’m always frightened when I have to enter the tunnel,” says Rämö over breakfast at her home by the sea the next morning, the storm having finally subsided. “What if something happens in here? And then I started thinking” – there’s a sharp intake of breath – “what is the worst thing that could happen in this tunnel? I wouldn’t get out. I would just get lost in here. The walls would suck me in.”
Awe-inspiring landscapes, unpredictable weather events and a persistent feeling of everyday unease are typical of the series, which is named after protagonist Hildur Rúnarsdóttir. The emotions and thoughts of its characters play alongside the dramatic backdrop – sometimes in unison, sometimes wildly at odds.
In Finland alone, Rämö has sold nearly 600,000 books in the last two years, the equivalent of more than one for every 10 people in a country with a population of 5.6 million. Two of her books were the most borrowed in the Nordic country’s libraries last year. The series has also become a bestseller in Germany, and was adapted into an Icelandic-German TV series and a forthcoming play. The first book, called The Clues in the Fjord in English, is about to be published in the UK.
The term Nordic blue didn’t appear on Rämö’s radar until after she had started writing the series. The author was at an industry event in London when a German TV producer used the phrase to describe her work. “It’s like Nordic noir but more human,” she says. “Not like cosy crime or romantic crime, but more like how people are dealing with each other in life in general. There is a social-psychological aspect to it.”
This comes in multiple forms: unspoken feelings, isolated lives, family trauma, social breakdown, finding solace in sex with a neighbour. The number of characters is few, which can lead to a comforting feeling of intimacy or an overwhelming feeling of claustrophobia, depending on their inner states.
There are still murders to be solved, though: a corpse in a fish farm; a man found in an avalanche with his throat cut; a businessman shot dead on a ski trail. But the investigation serves to further explore the characters’ mindsets – such as how Hildur really feels about the neighbour she is sleeping with – rather than bring forward a juicy reveal or revel in a dose of violence.
In a potential occupational hazard for a crime writer, Rämö is squeamish. “I do like to watch violent movies or read violent books,” she says, “but I always maintain the right to close my eyes.” In her own writing, the drama comes out of the internal traumas, the landscapes and human relationships. “Sisterhood, parenthood, friendships that don’t work out, or love stories that crash or don’t crash. That comes instead of graphic violence and I think that’s Nordic blue.”
Still, few fictional detectives worth their salt come without a dark side, and in Nordic noir the abyss within is usually deeper than elsewhere. In Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallander, Swedish crime fiction gave us an investigator who was gloomier and grumpier than anything seen before. And with Stieg Larsson’s Lisbeth Salander and The Bridge’s Saga Norén, it gave us female detectives who defied gender stereotypes through a lack of social skills. (The implication was that both were somewhere on the autism spectrum, though this was never explicitly stated.)
Hildur also breaks new ground. The distinguishing quality of Rämö’s detective is her fluidity. After her two sisters, Rósa and Björk, vanish mysteriously in that sinister tunnel outside Ísafjörður, she nurses a trauma that she self-medicates with exercise and by surfing alone in the ocean. She is self-contained, independent and romantically unattached, but also empathetic, sensitive and kind. Her sidekick is a handsome Finn called Jakob, who rarely stops knitting.
Like Jakob, Rämö is a Finnish expat living in the small island state on the mid-Atlantic ridge between North America and Europe, and her outsider’s perspective on Iceland is the key to the series’ success. On opposite ends of the Nordic region, separated by more than 1,000 miles, Finland and Iceland are culturally distinct. While their languages sound similar (“like a calm hum,” Rämö says), they don’t come from the same linguistic families and they share few words. Icelandic evolved from Old Norse while Finnish is more closely related to Hungarian, Sami and Estonian.
Rämö, who first spent time in Reykjavík as a business studies student on a year abroad in her 20s and moved there for good in 2008, speaks both languages fluently but still writes in Finnish. As a newcomer, crime writers including Arnaldur Indriðason and Lilja Sigurðardóttir became her guides to unlocking the secrets underneath the fabric of Icelandic society: a certain stubbornness of character, an uneasy relationship between tradition and modernity, the way successful women build protective barriers around themselves to stop others from stealing their achievements.
She chose the name Hildur, which derives from Old Norse for “battle”, because it refers to the Valkyries who are said to have guided slain warriors to a blissful afterlife in Valhalla.
Hildur was in part created out of the loneliness Rämö experienced during Covid in Ísafjörður, where she eventually moved to from the capital with her family, initially working as a tourist guide. “Everything closed down,” she says, sitting at a candlelit table laid out with pastries, coffee and a Moomin ceramic jug of rhubarb cordial. “And I’m like, ‘OK, I don’t have anything to do now. What the fuck? What am I doing next?’”
After spending some time thinking about the character of Hildur – her passions, characteristics, favourite pizza toppings – it was the arrival of her daughter’s friend’s parent on her doorstep that made her realise her “imaginary friend” had to be a police officer. From this chance encounter, an entire story evolved and soon she was in the toilet sending a whispered WhatsApp voice message to her publisher. “I told her, ‘I have this idea of a police officer. Her name is Hildur and she’s working here, in my home village, and then there are these crimes, and I’ve been planning these three stories in my head. What do you think? Does it sound really weird?’”
Her publisher asked her to send the first 30 pages, which she wrote in just two weeks. This became the opening two chapters of the first book. Four years on, Rämö is just finishing the fourth book of what was originally intended as a trilogy, with possibly more to come. In the third book, the Icelandic detective heads to Finnish Lapland to help Jakob prepare for a custody battle with his ex-wife. Laughing, Rämö describes the enjoyment of matching Hildur with Finnish men. “It was so interesting because I got to explore new sides of her.”
The first book, meanwhile, has only just come out in Iceland. She was nervous about how it would be received but so far the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive – apart from a minor correction from an enthusiastic reader inside Ísafjörður police station about the coffee cups used by officers (Rämö had described an assortment of cups bearing the names of political parties and unions, when in reality they are marked with the police officers’ names).
“I’ve lived here for 20 years,” Rämö says. “I have an Icelandic passport. I vote here and I know what’s going on in the holidays. I read the papers and I’m part of society. Even then, I’m still an outsider and I’m always an outsider.” But in writing, adds the author, this is something that can be turned to your advantage. From the outside, she says, “you can see more”.