‘I want to embrace all my characters’

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For Jussi Adler-Olsen, the celebrated Danish crime fiction writer, writing about a character, any character, is like embracing, inhabiting him/her. He may write murder mysteries, delving into the world of detectives hard pressed to find clues to seemingly unsolvable crimes, but what Adler-Olsen, in all his page-turning thrillers, essentially does best is to empathise.

“You want to be close to your characters. You want to embrace your characters,” he says, down the phone from London. In Adler-Olsen’s scheme of things, an act of imagining becomes an act of empathy. Therefore, when you read his novels, you are most likely to get the sense that you actually travel with his characters, partaking of their fears and pain, concerns and challenges.
If you are an unabashed admirer of Scandinavian crime fiction, you would know the reigning writers who have thrilled you, and thrilled you some more: From the Millennium man Stieg Larsson to the chronicler of suspense Henning Mankell. Among the other Swedes, you would know your Hakan Nesser from Liza Marklund, and, among the Norwegians, you can tell Jo Nesbo from Anne Holt. Adding to the illustrious tradition of Scandinavian delights is Denmark. And Adler-Olsen is, undoubtedly, the best import from the country so far.
Adler-Olsen’s Mercy, originally published in Denmark as Kvinden i buret (The Woman in the Cage), is the first volume in the Department Q series. In Mercy, Adler-Olsen takes us on a Danish odyssey, featuring Marcus Jacobsen, head of the Homicide Division, the eminently affable detective Carl Mørck, his strangely peculiar, but empathetic and introspective assistant Assad, a Syrian political refugee. The case: Merete Lynggaard, a vivacious young politician, has vanished. Everyone thinks she is dead. Not Carl Mørck, our detective who is promoted to head a new division, Department Q, set up to investigate cases “that have been shelved, but are of particular interest to the public welfare”, cases that deserve “special scrutiny”. And since Mørck is a special man, he has to prove that he is right. Prove the popular assumption about Lynggaard wrong. Prove that she is still alive, imprisoned, tortured and humiliated.
There is evil inside all of us. Reading Adler-Olsen, you get to know some of the most horrific ways through which the evil inside some individuals leads them to unleash gory and grotesque stuff on others. What strikes you most is Adler-Olsen cast of characters: Mercy is not just a work of detective fiction about a detective, but a mirror of the human condition. Embedded in the larger narrative are the different strands that capture the good, the bad and the ugly of a society that is a teeming mix of the deranged, the psychopaths and the outsiders with different ways of living that often invite derision from the rest.
Adler-Olsen’s achievement lies in the many ways he creates psychological interactions between his different characters. For example, Mørck is a man who views his quirky assistant Asad with ambivalence, but, at the same, trusts the latter, has faith in his abilities to deliver. The author laces the story with a great deal of humour and humanity that makes Mercy different from a mere thriller.
To be able to tell stories, says Adler-Olsen, you must experience life first. He says he has experienced it enough to tell all kinds of stories: stories of both good and evil. “I have led both lives,” says the author, son of the well-known sexologist Henry Olsen, who spent his childhood with his family in several mental hospitals across Denmark. In his late teens, he played in several pop groups as lead guitarist. Later, he went on to study medicine, sociology and filmmaking, and work in various areas of publishing and journalism. His previous avatars taught him “what not to do” . He says: “My readers are much more clever than I expect them to be. I know that I must fight on every page.” And fight he does. A fight that makes his works all the more compelling.
An admirer of Arundhati Roy and Vikram Seth, Adler-Olsen also listens to Indian music and says he learns a lot from good music and good books. “We’re dreamers in the Scandinavian countries,” he says at some point of the interview.
Mercy, at many levels, reflects Adler-Olsen’s own approach towards what is being labelled as the “immigrant problem”. He says: “I’m very respectful to them. I learn a lot from them. Our population has always been a mixture of all cultures. We learn a lot from other countries.” As for the psycopaths and the deranged, Adler-Olsen says that while society could be very harsh to them, he was, since childhood, allowed to be with them, reach out to them.
When Adler-Olsen was young, his father told him: “I’ve no ambitions on your behalf. You’re a lucky person. Make of your life what you want to.” That struck young Adler-Olsen. “He set me free,” says the author of his father. Adler-Olsen’s freedom proved to be crime fiction’s gain.
It has been a long journey for Adler-Olsen. Having embarked on a literary career with two books about Groucho Marx (1984-1985), he tasted success with Alfabethuset (The Alphabet House, 1997), about two British pilots on a secret mission who are shot down in Germany during World War II, which has also been made into a film. His first novels in the Department Q series, Kvinden i buret (The Woman in the Cage, 2007) and Fasandræberne (The Pheasant Killers, 2008) were followed by Flaskepost fra P (Message in a Bottle, 2009) and Journal 64, 2010. Throughout this long journey what has defined the relationship of the author, who is currently working on a novel titled Disgrace, “a story about a black lady,” is the urge to “embrace” his characters, to make them his own.