Jo Nesbø

Presenter0:00

Hello, I'm Lauren Laverne and this is the Desert Island Discs podcast from BBC Radio 4. Every week I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, book and luxury, that they'd want to take with them if they were cast away to a desert island. For rights reasons, the music's shorter than on the original broadcast, but you can find a version with longer music tracks on BBC Sounds. Listeners will also get access to episodes 28 days earlier than everyone else. I hope you enjoy listening.

Presenter0:46

My castaway this week is the writer Joe Nesbo. Known as the king of Nordic Noir, its internationally best-selling crime thrillers, following the exploits of renegade detective Harry Hula, have been translated into 50 languages, sold over 60 million copies, and been adapted for film and TV, with Netflix the latest production company to snap up the rights to his stories, making him the most commercially successful author Norway has ever produced. Yet writing wasn't his burning ambition or even his first career. He grew up determined to become a pro-footballer, a dream he achieved at 17 when he was signed by his hometown's football club, Malda FK. After an injury put paid to that, he joined the army, became a successful stockbroker, and then a rock star. By 36, he was wondering what was next, so he took a break and booked a flight to Australia. By the time he landed, he had Harry Huller and the outline of his first adventure, The Bat. As well as 13 stories about Harry, he's written short story collections, numerous standalone novels, and five children's books. According to their author, Dr. Proctor's Fart Powder series shares a certain dark humour with his famous detective. He says, It's a very strange job, what I do. You're lying in bed in the morning, still half asleep, and you come up with a crazy way to kill someone. Then you get up a happy man and get right down to work. Joe Nesbo, welcome to Desert Island Discs.

Jo Nesbø2:10

Thank you so much.

Presenter2:11

So that's quite a dark way to wake up, Joe. I mean, you you take your readers to the dark side. Is that really your happy place?

Jo Nesbø2:17

I don't know if it's my happy place. It's not the dark side as such. It's just knowing that you come up with a story worthy of telling your two best friends for whom I have always been writing. From the start it was, I imagine, those two friends with whom I share taste in popular culture. And if I can make them interested, I've succeeded.

Presenter2:43

This character's been with you for a long time, not just when you were writing. Wasn't it your your grandmother who used to threaten you with him when you were a kid, when you were growing up?

Jo Nesbø2:45

Not

Jo Nesbø2:52

When I invented Harry, that was on a plane from Oslo to Sydney in 96, the first thing I did was come up with a name. So, okay, I went with Harry as his first name, since that was the first name of my favorite football player when I grew up. And Hule then was the name of the local police officer in the village where my grandmother lived and where we would spend summer holidays. And I had never seen him. But because my grandmother said that if you're not home and in bed by eight o'clock, then Hule will come get you. I always imagined this scary, tall, blonde guy with cold blue eyes.

Jo Nesbø3:36

And actually, some years ago, I went to the village and I was sitting there doing a reading, and this really old man comes up to me. And yeah, he is tall and he is white hair, and he has this, he must be in his 90s or something, and he had this bony hand that he gave me and said, Hello, I'm Hul. And I remember even then, my first thought was, you know, but it's not eight o'clock yet.

Presenter4:07

Don't send me over just yet. I'm sorry.

Jo Nesbø4:08

Yeah.

Presenter4:10

Oh, now listen, we're going to get into the music, Joe, because I know that's a big part of your life, as we'll hear in the programme today. You still play as part of your band. Is it similar to writing for you, making music?

Jo Nesbø4:21

Yes, it is. I think I started out writing lyrics for my friends' bands and that was like my writer's goal was to tell a story in three verses and a refrain. So I didn't pick up the guitar until I was 20 actually and then we started a band first when I was a student and later on with my brother and some friends. They were like real musicians.

Jo Nesbø4:48

I could play the guitar, but I was more the songwriter and still am. So I definitely see that connection that in three ver versus and refrain, you have to rely so much

Jo Nesbø5:00

on the listener to fill out the story, um just point them in a direction and uh leave it up to their own imagination and and intelligence. And I realized

Jo Nesbø5:14

When I started writing novels that it's exactly the same.

Presenter5:17

Well, let's get started. Tell us about your first disc today. What's your first choice?

Jo Nesbø5:22

Yeah, my first choice is Lloyd Cole and the Commotions, Perfect Skin. I heard that when I was a student. I really like the song. I like the fact that it's so simple. But perhaps because I was writing lyrics myself, I love the idea that he seemed to have too much to say, too much for a short song like that. He's rushing through his lyrics. And it feels like he's really passionate about what he has to say. So passionate that at the end of the song, the song is over. But he is still, you know, throwing words and lyrics at you. So there's too much lyrics and really minimalistic playing, even the guitar solo. I mean, you have this great guitarist in your band. And he seemed to think that, I think for this song, I'll play more or less one note. I just bend the string a little differently. And that'll be my solo. And I just love that.

Speaker 46:19

Yeah.

Speaker 46:24

When she smiles my way

Speaker 46:28

My eyes go out in vain

Speaker 46:32

She's got perfect skin

Speaker 46:37

Shame on you, got no sense of grace, shame on me Just in case I might come to a conclusion other than that which is absolutely necessary

Speaker 46:50

And that's perfect skin.

Presenter6:53

Lloyd Cole and the Commotions Perfect Skin. So let's go back to the beginning, Joe Nesbo. You were born in Oslo in 1960, the second of three sons to Perr and Kirsten. I think your dad was brought up in Brooklyn, New York, though. How come?

Jo Nesbø7:08

My grandmother, Selma, she went with her sister to the United States when she was 16 years old. Then she came back to Norway to this little small village on the west coast when she was 38. She must have been an early cougar because she then hook up with my grandfather who was 23. They had my father.

Presenter7:32

Yeah.

Jo Nesbø7:33

Yeah, they had my father and then they went back to Brooklyn, New York.

Presenter7:36

Was that common for many Norwegians at the time?

Jo Nesbø7:38

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. And this was in the 20s, when it was really hard times in Norway.

Presenter7:44

You say you come from a family of readers and storytellers. Tell me more about that. What qualified as a good story at your family table?

Jo Nesbø7:52

Could be any story, really. It was more about the storytelling than the story itself. And sometimes I didn't even get the point of the story. There was a punchline in there because I can remember at the end the grown-ups would all laugh. But I was more into

Jo Nesbø8:09

the way they went about it, all the details throughout the story, all the efficient way of painting a picture of a character. And it was like a storytelling competition.

Presenter8:24

Your mother, meanwhile, she was a librarian, so also a lover of stories. Did she encourage a love of reading in you and your brothers?

Jo Nesbø8:31

Definitely. She would work sometimes late and I would at least go to the library and wait for her and sit in the room just reading. Maybe because my father grew up in the United States, I was more into Mark Twain and Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer and Finnish Moore Cooper, American literature more than Osri Lindren and Pipe Longstocking and those stories.

Presenter8:39

Mm-hmm.

Speaker 18:39

Yeah.

Presenter8:56

Mm.

Presenter9:00

So, when you were 13, you were asked to write a story at school, which turned out to be quite a prescient piece for you. It was called A Walk in the Woods. Yeah. Tell me about it.

Jo Nesbø9:10

I guess you have the same thing here that the teacher will give you the title of the story and then you have to write two pages. And I wrote 12 pages and it was a nice day in the woods only in my story. Nobody came back alive.

Presenter9:24

So

Jo Nesbø9:25

You know it was.

Presenter9:26

So the clues were there from the beginning.

Jo Nesbø9:28

Yeah, well, my mother, I don't know if this is true, but my mother claimed that the teacher phoned her, you know, was worried about her son.

Presenter9:38

So this kind of, you know, appetite, the the i an interest in the darker side of life, was that with you then in terms of, you know, what you were consuming, what you were reading, what you were your sense of humor, all of that?

Jo Nesbø9:49

I was drawn to the dark side, but on the other hand I was also really I was afraid of the dark. And I was fascinated, I guess, with my own imagination that uh i it would just go off the rails.

Presenter10:03

Joe, it's time to go to the music. Your second choice today. What are we going to hear and why?

Jo Nesbø10:08

This is The Beatles and it could be actually any Beatles song. My older brother Perry was five years older than me. So I grew up with the singles of The Beatles being released. And it was always a celebration when there was a new The Beatles single. I've chosen Ticket to Write just because it's a great song.

Speaker 410:35

I think I'm gonna be sad, I think it's today

Speaker 410:42

The girl that's driving me my head is going away

Speaker 410:50

She's got a ticket to ride

Speaker 410:54

She's got a ticket to ride She's got a ticket to ride And she don't care

Presenter11:04

The Beatles and Ticket to Ride. So Joe Nesboy, I want to ask you a bit more about your dad because he served in the Second World War. What was his role and how did you find out what he had done?

Jo Nesbø11:17

I was 15 years old and Norway was occupied in 1940 and stayed occupied throughout the war and the royal family fled here to London and it was like the quintessential evil person was the person with the German helmet. And what I didn't know at the age of 15 was that when my father and my grandparents moved back to Norway being Americans strongly anti-communist, they saw Stalin and Russia, a country with which Norway has a border, they saw that more as a threat than Germany and Hitler. And at the time, they saw that the European democracies like England and France, they were more or less bankrupt. So they saw this as an area where you had to go with one of the strongmen of Europe. So my father decided he wanted to fight for Norway against Russia, meaning joining the Germans on the Eastern Front. And he volunteered to do that at the age of 19. And when he told me this at the age of 15, I mean, after the war, he had to spend three years in jail for treason. That was like the punishment all of them got. And it was a total shock to me because my father was my hero and I really respected him in so many ways. And he said that, okay, your older brother already know this, but now I'm telling you, now you're old enough and to make up your mind about it. And if you don't want to talk about it, we don't have to talk about it, but if you want to talk about it...

Speaker 112:39

Mm.

Jo Nesbø13:02

I'll answer any question.

Presenter13:04

And did you have questions?

Jo Nesbø13:05

I had many questions. Of course I had. Did you know about Holocaust? For example, that was more or less the first question, of course.

Presenter13:12

What did he say?

Jo Nesbø13:13

He explained to me about the Fog of War. He said that we heard about it, but we didn't believe it. And this turned out to be true, and I couldn't believe it. So it was, I mean, he had grown up with Jewish friends in New York. So to him, it was just a total shock. But then I asked him about, didn't you think that you let Norway down, you know, being an occupied nation? And he didn't make any excuses. He said that actually, in hindsight, being as wrong as it was, he thought it was a fair punishment to spend three years in jail. Actually, they let him out after a year and a half or something like that. But he didn't make any excuses. And I think that was the reason why this was the start of a lifelong conversation with my father.

Speaker 113:45

Uh

Speaker 113:59

Mm-hmm.

Jo Nesbø14:00

about choices, about judging the choices based on what we know now compared to what you knew then.

Presenter14:09

Well, it's interesting that Joe, because I know that's something you say about your characters in in the books that you write, that you you're not providing answers, you're asking questions, you're watching them make choices and you're not judging them. You're not judging the choices that they make.

Jo Nesbø14:20

You're not

Jo Nesbø14:22

I think that was what I learned from that long conversation with my father. If you have the tolerance to talk to somebody about stuff that you totally disagree with, that will get you to interesting places to gain insight. It doesn't mean that you start agreeing with them, but that you understand and you also start maybe understanding that your own points of view comes from the culture in which you were raised. It's not like you have this morality built into you and that you are born with that morality. It's a development and formed by circumstances.

Presenter15:00

Your book The Red Breast is dedicated to your father's story. How many of his experiences and the stories that he told you after you started that conversation feature in it?

Jo Nesbø15:10

Most of them. It's the story of the soldier who joined the Germans in that novel is more or less my father's story, including the love story, including the New Year's Eve where he's sitting with a Norwegian friend of his, also a volunteer, and they're talking about how it is at home, how they are eating dinner at home now because they are hungry all the time. And in the middle of that conversation, there's a gunshot and my father's friend's head explodes inside his helmet. And it's 20 degrees below zero. So for the rest of that New Year's Eve, he has to pick out the pieces of brain on the machine gun to make it function again. And I was asking what an experience like that, what that do to you? And here is that.

Jo Nesbø16:06

I thought I would get crazy. Some of my friends did.

Jo Nesbø16:11

PTSD

Jo Nesbø16:12

And he never did. He told me that it was a friend of him that

Jo Nesbø16:17

One evening phoned him from another city and committed suicide there and there in the phone booth because he couldn't take it any longer, the the nightmares. But my father said he was always waiting for the nightmares, but they they never came. So he was just we're just lucky, I guess.

Presenter16:33

And and interestingly, your mother's family had a very different story. So they were in the Norwegian resistance. How did she feel about your father's history? And how did her family react to his story?

Jo Nesbø16:46

My mother's family, I think because they were in the resistance movement, they were.

Jo Nesbø16:52

you know uh strangely enough

Jo Nesbø16:55

Some of the few people that understood my father because they had made a choice too, the opposite choice, but still they had risked something during World War II.

Speaker 116:59

Yeah.

Presenter16:59

That

Jo Nesbø17:06

It was not a problem.

Presenter17:08

Your dad died in in nineteen ninety four, so he didn't get to see you become a writer in that phase of your life. What do you think he would have made of seeing his story in print, becoming a bestseller around the world?

Jo Nesbø17:19

He would have loved it. The Red Breast is kind of a tribute to my father, not because I'm proud of the choice he made, but in the end I'm proud of the man he was, with all his flaws and his bad decision making.

Presenter17:36

Mm.

Jo Nesbø17:36

Yeah.

Presenter17:38

Joe Nesbo, let's go to the music. It's your third choice today. What are we going to hear, and why?

Jo Nesbø17:43

This is Steve Hawley and Cockney Rebel. The song is Make Me Smile and my older brother Per, he had a record collection. So me and my younger brother Knut, we sort of just had to listen to what he listened to.

Speaker 418:01

Blue eyes, blue eyes How can you tell so many lies?

Speaker 418:12

Come on and see me, make me speak.

Speaker 418:18

I'll do what you want.

Speaker 418:20

Right in my

Presenter18:26

Steve Harley and Cockney Revel and Make Me Smile. Joe Nesbo, I know that school took a second place to your love of football when you were growing up. What was your dream back then?

Jo Nesbø18:37

I wouldn't even call it a dream, it was a plan that seemed like a realistic plan at the time, and that was to play forward for Tottenham Hotspur. My illusion was that I had talent enough, and you don't need anything more than that, just talent will get you all the way to London and Whiteheart Lane.

Presenter18:56

We didn't do too badly. I mean, you and Kunuti, your younger brother, both ended up playing professionally.

Jo Nesbø19:02

We played for Molde, which was one of the top teams, and I had my debut when I was 17. So yeah, we had some talent. Then I broke the ligaments in both knees when I was 19, and so I had to come up with a plan B for my life. But at that age, you refocus quite quickly, and maybe I wasn't meant to be a soccer player after all. Looking back, I could see that I had the talent. I'm not sure I had the

Jo Nesbø19:32

The talent for having a talent. Meaning I don't know if I would have, you know, I would skip the training when we were running or, you know, things I didn't like. I would show up only when we were, you know, there were fun trainings. So I knew the trainer's program for the different days. So I wouldn't have the discipline really to be a top player, I think.

Presenter19:54

You also said that you were in it for the kind of social aspect of it. I know that football was a bonding thing for you and your brothers, but music was an important connection for you too. And you and Knut were in a band together later. Tell me about that. What did you play and what kind of music were you making at the beginning, the two of you?

Jo Nesbø20:13

I started playing the guitar quite late in life. I was 20. At that time I had written lyrics for my friends' bands, but I didn't really play or I wasn't in the band myself. I learned to play the guitar while I was in the army. And then when I started studying, one day a guy walked into the cantina and he shouted out, you know, is there anyone here who plays the guitar? And I raised my hand and he said, okay, how many chords do you know? And I said, three. Actually, at the time, I only knew two chords. And he said, okay, that's enough. So we started playing in that band. And later on, when I moved to Oslo after college, my brother was there and he had played in the band since he was 15 years old. He played the guitar. It was a bassist there. He was a professional musician and he liked my songs. So he said, okay, let's start a band.

Presenter21:06

And how were the dynamics between you and your brother? I mean, you know, there are a lot of siblings in rock and roll history, aren't there? And sometimes it can be quite a kind of tempestuous, combustible relationship. What was it like for you and

Jo Nesbø21:12

Sometimes

Jo Nesbø21:18

No, yeah, we weren't like the Davis brothers or the Gallagher brothers. We were on friendly terms.

Presenter21:23

Because there's only a year between the two of you, isn't it?

Jo Nesbø21:25

Yeah, yeah. We weren't planning to go anywhere, we just wanted to have fun. So it was sort of a surprise when uh actually two record companies showed up and uh on one our gigs and offered us um a record deal.

Presenter21:41

Joe, I think we'd better go back to the music before we hear what happened next. It's your fourth choice today. What are you taking to your island next and why?

Jo Nesbø21:49

It was the first concert I went to was a Maddie Waters concert. I was, I think, nine or ten years old. It was because Moldova, my small hometown, population 20,000, they had this famous international jazz festival, and so Maddie Waters was coming there with his band. And I remember sitting there in the cinema listening to this great band, and it was just being mesmerized. And the title of the song is I Can't Be Satisfied.

Speaker 422:26

Well I'm going away to leave

Speaker 422:29

Wobby back no more.

Speaker 422:32

Going back down so child, don't you woah?

Speaker 422:36

More than I'm troubled.

Speaker 422:38

Happy all night.

Speaker 422:44

Babe, I just can't be satisfied and I just can't be far

Presenter22:53

Muddy waters and I can't be satisfied.

Presenter22:58

So, Joe Nesbo, your 1990s was a decade of very much two halves. You were in a successful band and working as a stockbroker. And to find out how you got there, we sort of have to go back to you taking on military service. So, this is after your football injury. You decided to sign up and you stayed for three years, which is longer than the required year. You were posted to the north of Norway. In what way was that a formative experience for you?

Jo Nesbø23:25

I got time to think about my life. I think up until then I had been just riding the waves that came along. If it was football, I had some talent, I played football. If it was hanging out with friends writing lyrics for their songs, I do that. I really didn't have a plan. And I, first thing,

Jo Nesbø23:47

I did was I went to officer school and I was two and a half, three years in the Air Force and after that I still didn't know what to do and what do you do when you don't know what you want to do? You study economics but in order to get into the school that I wanted to get into I had to improve my grades so I also when I was doing service in the Air Force I took to high school from the ground up and got good grades, which meant that I could actually start studying at the school my my father wanted to study in when he was young. He didn't have the money at the time. He was just out of jail after the war. So he went to evening school.

Presenter24:37

Oh yeah, night classes, yeah.

Jo Nesbø24:39

Yeah, and studied economics there while while working. So it was me kind of not being that interested in economics. So I guess my looking back, the reason why I went there may have been that I was fulfilling my my my dad's dream in a way, that he

Jo Nesbø24:56

I could do what he couldn't.

Presenter24:58

So you spent the nineties living quite a double life, really. You would be a stockbroker by day and then a rock star by night. Why did you decide to keep the day job?

Jo Nesbø25:08

I didn't want music to pay the rent. When I looked around I saw so many bands that were cool at the time and Norway not being a big market for musicians, you have to compromise sooner or later. And I didn't want that. So I decided that, okay, let's do something else that can pay the rent so I can do exactly what I want as a musician.

Presenter25:31

What did the rest of the band make of that and what did your co-workers at the office think?

Jo Nesbø25:36

My co-workers, they, well, up until our break, they didn't know I played music at all. And after that, they thought it was just very strange that I kept on working there. The other guys in the band, they were full-time musicians then at the time. And the routine was that I would work until the stock exchange closed. Then I would... run out in the street, grab a taxi, go to the airport and go to wherever my band was at the time, probably not in time for the sound check. I would play the gig and the rest of the band would go off to a party with beautiful girls and I would go back to the hotel to grab some hours of sleep to get on the first plane back in time for when the stock exchange opened. I did that for a full year. I was more or less burnt out at the end of that year. And that was when I said, told my band and my boss at the brokerage firm that I need some time off. And so I went to Australia.

Speaker 125:45

Working there.

Speaker 126:23

Uh

Presenter26:23

Yeah.

Presenter26:32

Well, I want to find out what happened next, but first I would love to hear your fifth choice today. What's it going to be, Joe?

Jo Nesbø26:39

Lucinda Williams, Bus to Baton Rouge, which is just one of my favorite artists and one of my favorite songs. It's just this really sad, sad song about her singing about where she grew up, which was not a happy place. But for me, it's a song about going back, trying to go back and realizing there's no going back.

Jo Nesbø27:03

Time and people moves on. It's lost.

Presenter27:07

Do you relate to that in your own life?

Jo Nesbø27:09

Yadu, it's this bittersweet feeling.

Jo Nesbø27:12

When you have had a good time somewhere and you go back and you can see that other people have taken over the place, it's not yours any longer and there's not even a trace of what has happened and you're thinking but the same thing will happen again. These people who look so happy now and are happy here, I'm happy for them. But they will experience the same thing. In 10 years they will go back here and it's not theirs any longer.

Speaker 427:38

I took a bus to bad move I took a bus

Presenter28:08

Lucinda Williams and Bus to Baton Rouge. Joe Nesbo, in nineteen ninety six you took a sabbatical from music and finance. You went to Australia with only a laptop. Harry Huller was born on that thirty hour flight. Did he arrive with you fully formed?

Jo Nesbø28:24

No, he was a combination of some characters I knew from real life and some characters from fiction. Frank Miller's Batman played a big role. I just started reading graphic novels and also Frank Miller's Sin City in which he sort of takes the cliché of the hard-boiled detective and really embrace those clichés and sort of build them out, make them even bigger than they were before. I just love that. And so I guess my hurry, he was this idea of a typical Norwegian male and Batman.

Jo Nesbø29:07

And I wanted him to be vulnerable. I wanted him to be a cynic romantic, which is sort of the recipe for the American hard boiled detective. But after all, that was the kind of detective I loved.

Jo Nesbø29:20

And so when I sat down after we had landed, I checked into the hotel, I didn't know where he was going. The only thing I knew was that he had just landed in Sydney and I checked into the same hotel I was staying in. My plan was to travel all over Australia. I mostly stayed in the red light district in Sydney.

Jo Nesbø29:41

And what about Hiri?

Presenter29:42

What about Harry? So you and Harry, your your progress kind of developed together. Yes. Your story evolved together.

Jo Nesbø29:46

Yeah.

Speaker 129:47

Uh

Presenter29:48

Okay. So your first novel, Harry Holler novel, The Bat, won the Glass Key Award. That's a big award for Nordic crime writers. What was your reaction? I mean, what had your expectations been? Did you think, oh my god, this is easy?

Jo Nesbø30:02

Yeah, that was exactly my reaction. You know, either they have misunderstood the novel or it is this easy. It wasn't a big commercial success. Critics liked it, but it wasn't like I sold enough to make a living. But I had then quit my job before I knew I was going to get published. When I came back from Australia, I was so hooked on writing, so I knew that this is what I have to do. And I had calculated and found out that because you make a lot of money as a stockbroker. So I had money enough for five years. I didn't have to work for five years. So my plan was, okay, I'll write for five years. If I can make a living writing, I'll do something else. And then, much to my surprise, the script that I had sent in on the book I've written in Australia, was published.

Jo Nesbø30:53

And then I started writing a second novel and it didn't sell much more. And Harry still wasn't fully formed. I wasn't sure I was going to use him in the second novel. Then the third novel, The Redbreast, that was when it all came together, sort of. And it still is one of the novels I'm most happy with.

Presenter31:09

Yeah.

Presenter31:14

There have been thirteen Harry Hola outings so far. You've said that Harry's a metaphor for what was going on in your own life. What was he a metaphor for in those early days?

Jo Nesbø31:26

I don't know if it was a

Jo Nesbø31:28

metaphor for anything, at least not something that I'm conscious about. He was a tool I could use to ask myself questions, questions about morality, given moral dilemmas that I wondered about myself. If somebody killed your loved one, would you claim revenge? Would a prison sentence be enough? Or would you need an eye for an eye? Basic questions like that. I would put them forward to Harian, not always sure what it would do, so it was like inspecting my own values, going back to my father and the choices he made, of course, which meant I wanted the hero that sometimes made the wrong choice, that you could see as the wrong choice. Not making excuses for those choices, but making them understand them as a human being.

Presenter32:21

Let's go to the music Joe Nasbo, it's your sixth choice today.

Jo Nesbø32:24

I've been listening to Nick Cave since I was young and I've been a fan and I think it's the kind of music that grows on you.

Presenter32:33

They've actually worked on the new Harry Hola show for Netflix.

Jo Nesbø32:37

Carnage is one of the reasons why I and Eustein put Nick Cavan and Warren Ellis on top of our wish list for people to write a score for the Harry Hool series. And of course we didn't believe that they would be willing to do that for a small Norwegian show. So we were like really surprised, pleasant is surprised when they said yes right away. I came over here to London to Nick's studio working with him and Warren here and we were like starstruck for five minutes but then we got down to work and they were you know so lovely and so accommodating and so professional it was just great working with them.

Speaker 433:26

And a god coming from the sky

Speaker 433:33

Hand a god coming from the sky

Speaker 433:37

Gonna swim to the middle and stay out there a while

Speaker 433:43

Come without low

Speaker 433:46

Weigh down low, let the river cast its

Presenter33:52

Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, Hand of God.

Presenter33:55

Joe, your father died before he could see your writing success. What did your librarian mum make of your books?

Jo Nesbø34:03

My aunt had read the books and she told my mother that there's sex in the book. Your son has written about sex. And she said, then I will not read it. I can't read my son writing about sex. And so whenever I had a book published, I would send it to her and she would proudly put it in her shelf.

Jo Nesbø34:25

But she would never read it.

Jo Nesbø34:27

She would read other stuff. I I had the column in the newspaper and she really enjoyed that. But no, the Harry Hole Hoole stories, no.

Presenter34:31

Mm-hmm.

Presenter34:36

And what about your brother, Canute? Was he a reader of yours?

Jo Nesbø34:39

He would read me from time to time, but it seems the people around me they they they don't read me much. My my daughter uh too, she has never read any other

Presenter34:47

Yeah.

Jo Nesbø34:47

Uh Harry Huller novels.

Presenter34:49

I know that Knut died in in twenty thirteen. He was just fifty one. We've heard how close you were and obviously you're still in the band together. How did you cope during that time? I think he tried to keep how serious his illness was from you, to shield you from it.

Jo Nesbø35:03

Yeah.

Jo Nesbø35:05

Yeah, that's how we sadly do it in our family. We don't tell anyone before it's too late. But it was a shock to me. I remember I was climbing in the island of Kalimnos, which is the most happy place in the world and I'm so happy there. Then he phoned me and told me about his cancer and how it looked and it didn't look good. And I started crying. And I still, it's the one place in Kalymnus where I was standing. Whenever I see that spot again, remembering that moment, it brings tears to my eyes.

Presenter35:43

Did losing him change your perspective? Did it change how you saw life, writing, any of that?

Jo Nesbø35:49

I don't think it changed anything. I think the presence of death.

Jo Nesbø35:54

It's something that I

Jo Nesbø35:57

I'm quite calm about that and I think I'm

Jo Nesbø36:01

Quite analytic about that. When my father was dying, who had become, you know.

Jo Nesbø36:07

one of my best friends at the end of his life. We talked about death and life and I asked him, you know, just straight out, you are dying now. What do you think of about your life? Did you accomplish things you wanted? Did you get to do the things you wanted? And he just summed up his life without much sentimentality. So we would talk about death in a very sober way. And to me that was

Jo Nesbø36:36

In a way, comforting because it makes you face the fact that you are going to die yourself at one point, and that someone you are so close to can sum up his life like that and not panic and be happy about some things. Actually, my brother did the same thing. We talked about his life. And I asked my father once I was 13 years old, and it was Saturday, and it was the gloomiest time of day in Norway in the winter. It was after you had seen

Speaker 136:54

Hmm.

Jo Nesbø37:14

Premier League matches in the 70s, like Sunderland and Northwest, on the muddy ground, really grey and black and white on TV. And just before that and before the evening entertainment on TV started, and my parents would be sleeping, taking the afternoon nap, and it was so quiet in the house, and I started thinking about death.

Speaker 137:21

In black and white

Jo Nesbø37:41

And I kind of panicked a little bit, thinking about, you know, what if we wake up in a casket, you know, when you're underground, stuff like that. And and so I ran into my father and I woke him up and I said, Dad, Dad,

Jo Nesbø37:57

And he was like, Yeah, yeah.

Jo Nesbø37:59

What happens when we die? And he looked at me and realized I was serious and he said, Son, I don't know. And I said, I know you don't know, but what do you think?

Jo Nesbø38:12

And he like looked at me to see if I was ready for this.

Jo Nesbø38:17

And then he concluded I was and he said, I think it all goes black.

Jo Nesbø38:23

That was like a relief to me. It wasn't like I think that my father knew anything about death, but at least I knew that he had been on the Eastern Front and seen death up close. He had seen his friends dying. And I asked him once, when you saw in your eyes of your friends dying from shot wounds, did you see anything? And he said, no, I didn't see anything. I didn't learn anything from that. There was no secret was revealed to me. And so I kind of stuck with my father's view on that. I think it all goes black.

Presenter39:01

Joe Nesbo, let's have some more music. Your seventh choice, please. What is it?

Jo Nesbø39:06

Talking Heads Swamp. I would listen to Talking Heads when I was a student and it was a sort of smart people's band. It was kind of punk rock but the members in the band they were like art students. And I started listening to the old Talking Heads albums and I realized that they sounded even better now than they did then.

Jo Nesbø39:31

And then I picked up Stop Making Sense, the movie that I'd seen back then, and I remember it was good. I saw it now, and it's fantastic. I mean, if you haven't seen Stop Making Sense for a while, listen to it now. It sounds like it was made yesterday, and they're so good musicians. I saw David Byrne as a, you know, okay musician. If you see him playing the acoustic guitar on the opening track, Psycho Killer, he is just fantastic. Talking heads swarm.

Speaker 440:20

One time

Speaker 440:23

Too many.

Speaker 440:25

Funko.

Speaker 440:30

I come to take you

Presenter40:34

Talking Heads and Swamp.

Presenter40:37

Joe Nesbo, of all the many adventures that we've covered in this programme so far, we haven't mentioned the fact that you are an elite rock climber, grade eight A. You didn't start till you were fifty, and you're scared of heights, apparently. So what made you take it up?

Jo Nesbø40:52

I think it was the fact that I am scared of heights which made it a uh

Jo Nesbø40:58

personal challenge for me. Physically

Jo Nesbø41:02

I was capable of becoming a strong rock climber.

Jo Nesbø41:08

Technically, I was mediocre and mentally I was a disaster. I would freak out, you know, as soon as I was three or four meters above the ground, my feet would start shaking. So I decided that this is something that I really want to investigate. So I think it was more, I was curious about my own, I wouldn't call them panic attacks, but

Speaker 141:34

Yeah.

Jo Nesbø41:35

The fact that I would be so afraid because in other uh

Jo Nesbø41:40

In other situations in life I'm not normally that scared.

Presenter41:44

Yeah. And and to what extent is it physical versus mental climbing? Because I would have thought it's the opposite of writing. It it's entirely physical, you're in your body. But it sounds like it's it's almost a bigger mental challenge for you.

Jo Nesbø41:57

If you have a fear of heights, it's overcoming, not overcoming, but dealing with and handling that fear because it doesn't go away. It's just that you have to... It's a fight between the part of your brain that panics and the part of your brain that tells that, okay, you're in a rope. If you fall, the rope is going to catch you. Even if you fall 10 or 15 meters, eventually, hopefully, the rope will catch you.

Presenter42:22

Will you be able to put your climbing skills to good use on your desert island? We are, of course, about to cast you away.

Presenter42:29

Could you imagine that it will have mountains for you to climb?

Jo Nesbø42:32

I hope so. When I have time off, I do go to not a desert island, but an island with limestone all over the place and I go there for climbing.

Presenter42:44

So lime limestone's the best for climbing, is it?

Jo Nesbø42:46

Gridstone in UK is al also good, but uh limestone is even better.

Presenter42:50

Crossing our fingers for the right geology on your island. When we send you there, what will you miss most about your life at home?

Jo Nesbø42:58

The people. That's easy. My loved ones.

Presenter43:01

Do you have any practical skills that might come in useful?

Jo Nesbø43:04

Nope.

Presenter43:07

No survival skills that you've picked up from all these years of writing about people in extreme circumstances, Harry getting himself out of danger, all the training.

Jo Nesbø43:17

Okay, here's a tip. If there's no fresh water on the island, but you have a sandy beach, what you can do is dig down deep.

Jo Nesbø43:31

I mean like two meters down.

Jo Nesbø43:34

After the salt water will have been filtered through the sand, so then it's fresh water down there.

Presenter43:41

Well, look, that's number one survival tip. That's fantastic. Uh I know that you go into a bubble when you write, so I'm imagining that you might handle the isolation quite well. Obviously, you've missed your your loved ones, but are you happy in your own company mostly?

Jo Nesbø43:56

I am, definitely. I mean I need time alone. So many ways I would probably welcome the desert island. I was in Egypt some years back. I went there for writing. So I just more or less stayed in a hotel room and I would write. And after two weeks I was going back to Norway. I was on the bus to the air.

Jo Nesbø44:19

um airport and uh there was a woman leaving who had left her um bag in the in the seat. So uh I said, Oh, excuse me, you've forgotten your bag and giving her the bag, I realized it was the first time in two weeks that I had spoken to another person and and I was happy with that. So, you know, I

Presenter44:38

You feel right. All right, Joe, well, we'll let you have one more disc before we cast you away to the island. It's your final choice today. What have you got for us?

Jo Nesbø44:45

What if

Jo Nesbø44:46

It's Bruce Springsteen Independence Day, which just is a it's a great song. I actually directed a short movie based on that song many years ago, me and a friend of mine. So it's no it's just one of those three chords song that is just just great.

Speaker 445:08

So say goodbye, it's Independence Day It's Independence Day all down the line

Speaker 445:20

Just say goodbye, it's a different day, it's a libert's day this time.

Speaker 445:32

Now I don't know what it always was for the

Presenter45:37

Bruce Springsteen and Independence Day. So, Joe Nesbo, the time has come. I'm going to cast you away to your desert island. I'll give you some books to take with you, the Bible, the complete works of Shakespeare, and one more of your choice. What are you going for?

Jo Nesbø45:51

I had to think about this for a long time and I ended up with Charles Prokofsky Ham on Rye because that is definitely three chords and the truth. It's simple and complicated. It's hilarious and it's painful and it's a book that I thought when I read it when I was quite young in my late teens or early 20s, I thought it was a young man's book. And I gave it to my father and he couldn't stop laughing. He thought it was so hilarious. So he took the black humor and it's a great book. I mean, he's one of the writers that when I go back, much to my surprise going back and reading Ernst Hemingway, I was slightly disappointed. It felt...

Jo Nesbø46:37

Much to my surprise, as I said, dated reading Choltaukovsky was just great all over again, and maybe even greater when I

Presenter46:48

Mm-hmm.

Jo Nesbø46:48

than when I read it the first time.

Presenter46:51

You can also have a luxury item, what will that be?

Jo Nesbø46:55

I decided on a shoe horn.

Presenter46:57

Ah, Shoehorn.

Jo Nesbø46:58

A shoe horn.

Presenter46:58

How come?

Jo Nesbø46:59

One of the few things that uh

Jo Nesbø47:03

Makes your life easier?

Jo Nesbø47:06

without the world having to produce more stuff because it saves the shoes also. I I I find it my shoes last longer now that I started using shoehorns.

Presenter47:18

I don't know how much use you'll have for it on a desert island, but from an aesthetic perspective I respect that so much. It's absolutely yours. And finally, which one track of the eight that you shared with us to day would you save from the waves first, Joe

Jo Nesbø47:33

You know what? Since I didn't say that much about Independence Day, I think I want to go with that because it's a beautiful song about son and father relationship, which is something we've been talking so much about here. And I've been writing so much about Father-son relationships in my writing career, which is kind of strange that I've written about the complicated relationship and not the loving, caring, friendly relationship with your father that I had. But it's maybe because I so much appreciated that relationship to my father that I find it so heartbreaking not having that relationship to your father, and that is perhaps why this song always brings a tear to my eye.

Presenter48:20

Joe Nesbo, thank you very much for letting us hear your Desert Island Discs.

Jo Nesbø48:25

Thank you.

Presenter48:38

Hello, it was lovely to chat to Joe Nesbo and I hope he's very happy on his island with his shoehorn. Who wouldn't be? There are more than 2,000 programmes in our archive that you can listen to. We've cast away many other writers, including Lee Child, Stephen King and Linda LaPlante. You can hear their programmes if you search through BBC Sounds or on our own Desert Island Disc's website. The studio managers for today's programme were Sarah Hockley and Jackie Marjoram. The executive production coordinator was Susie Roylands. The assistant producer was Christine Pavlovsky. The content editor was Mugabe Turia and the producer was Sarah Taylor. Join me next time when I'll be casting away the musician and DJ Norman Cook.

Speaker 149:44

Zandi, happy anniversary. What are you talking about? Have I missed something? Yes, Zandi, you have. We are over a year into making What's Up Docs. You didn't even get me a card.

Speaker 149:54

Is it really over a year? It is. Think of all the episodes we've done: how to look after our feet, our shoulders, our hips, our teeth. We've explored snoring, cholesterol, the immune system, endometriosis. All with the help of expert guests. I think it's fair to say we have plundered the world of health and well-being, equipping ourselves and our listeners with the best information out there on how to look after our minds, our bodies, our souls, even. And we're not stopping, are we, Chris? We're most certainly not, Sand. We have a lot of new topics coming up: from tinnitus to acne, crying, male fertility. We are holding steadfast in our mission to sort facts from fiction, debunking wellness myths along the way. And you can find all of our previous episodes of What's Up Docs in the feed on BBC Sounds. And don't forget to subscribe on BBC Sounds and turn on the notifications so you don't miss any of these upcoming episodes.

Jo Nesbø49:56

Thank you.