Icelandic crime writers fill the safest country with fictional murders

“This Nordic country of nearly 400,000 people is so safe that news was made when eight people were murdered there in 2024,” writes Amelia Nierenberg, a journalist for The New York Times, in an article reported by mbl.is.

Nierenberg puts the figure in context for American readers, noting that a homicide is committed in the United States every 30.5 minutes on average, according to the FBI’s Crime Clock. Iceland’s homicide rate, meanwhile, was two killings a year until 2020 before doubling to approximately four.

“Iceland is, according to several surveys, the safest country in the world,” Nierenberg writes. Her article, however, is not about crime in Iceland but about a literary genre that brings considerable enjoyment to many Icelanders, including at Christmas.

“Murders are everywhere, at least on the shelves,” she writes.

Part of a northern noir tradition

Nierenberg profiles several leading Icelandic crime writers, beginning with Katrín Jakobsdóttir.

“More fictional murders are committed in Iceland every year than real ones,” Katrín says, adding that she considers this a positive fact.

Nierenberg describes Icelandic crime fiction as part of the northern noir tradition. Noir, she notes, simply means black in French, and the style also appears in films such as Blade Runner and Angel Heart. Her focus, however, is on Icelandic books.

“The thinking is that you know everyone because you live in a small country,” Katrín says, responding to Nierenberg’s observation that few people in rural Iceland lock their cars. In reality, Katrín adds, that is far from the truth.

According to Nierenberg, this presents a challenge for Icelandic crime writers, who must construct their plots from suppressed resentment and frightening hidden secrets in the fjords and Icelandic fog. “How else could they kill their characters convincingly?” she asks.

Iceland’s rich literary heritage also remains an important cultural foundation for modern crime fiction, Nierenberg writes. She presents Nordic blood feuds and thorny love triangles as a link between the 13th and 14th centuries and the fatal conflicts found on the pages of 21st-century authors.

“Students read the Icelandic sagas at school, and many people share names with several of their main characters,” Nierenberg writes. She adds that the connection is so deep that author Ólafur Ólafsson called the sagas “another Bible of Icelanders” in a New York Times literary guide to Reykjavík.

Crime novelist Ragnar Jónasson tells Nierenberg over breakfast that many of the Icelandic sagas are “proper thrillers”. Others, he says, are straightforward legal dramas. “They are about outlaws and justice and revenge,” he says.