Off The Beaten Track: The Northernmost Town in Iceland

Photo by Omar Oskarsson

Our guest this week, Ragnar Jónasson, is an Icelandic writer of crime novels set in and around the northernmost town of Iceland, Siglufjordur. The series is published in Iceland and Germany, and the TV rights to the series were recently sold, with scriptwriting set to commence this year. The books are not yet available in English, but Ragnar’s short story “Death of a Sunflower” will be published in the September/October 2013 issue of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. See more at Ragnar’s website: www.ragnarjonasson.com.

Yes, I’ve heard of Cabot Cove; I was in fact a big fan of the Jessica Fletcher series when I was around 12 years old and doing my first bit of crime writing (handwritten, in a notebook only shown to my family). And we all know that Cabot Cove had suspiciously many murders for such a small town. So why would I select a very small town—with only about 1,200 inhabitants—as the setting for my Icelandic crime novel Snjóblinda? (The title literally means Snow blindness; the 2011 German edition is called Schneebraut, meaning Snowbride).

Photo by Jonas Ragnarsson

The town is called Siglufjörður and is the northernmost town in Iceland. Iceland is pretty far up north, so you can imagine that this place can be rather cold, dark, and snowy in wintertime—which is one of the reasons why I picked it. The novel is mainly set in January, when it usually snows quite a lot and the sun is hidden away, behind the mountains. Actually the town has no sunlight from November 15th until January 28th. So, I already had some ingredients for a crime novel in terms of the dark and mysterious setting.

Despite its relatively small population, Siglufjörður is also one of the best known towns in Iceland. It used to be the center of herring fishing in Iceland in the twentieth century, and during that era the population rose dramatically. Then the herring more or less disappeared from Icelandic waters in the late 1960s, but recently things have picked up again, in part due to a considerable increase in tourism.

Photo by Jonas Ragnarsson

OK, so it’s a dark place (in wintertime), with quite a history—but it is also very secluded. Until 1967, it was only accessible by sea or by a mountain road, which was closed during most of the year. In 1967 a mountain tunnel was opened, making the town accessible (nearly) all year round and a few years ago, a second tunnel was opened. So I thought that I could hardly pick a better place to set a crime story than a small town surrounded by mountains and the cold sea….

On a more personal note, this town was home to my grandparents—and the place where my father grew up. After his retirement, in his eighties, my grandfather (and my namesake) wrote a series of books on the history of Siglufjörður—and so I liked the idea of writing about the same place, although with a very different approach. I have visited Siglufjörður so many times that I’ve long ago lost count, but there is something very charming about staying there. Total peace and quiet, the fresh mountain air combined with the salty smell of the sea.

Photo by Jonas Ragnarsson

As I said, it’s very dark there in the wintertime, but being so far up north, the sun almost never sets during high summer! And to make a long story short, I have stuck with the place for two more books in the series, one of them set during those long and bright days of summer.

However, being wary of the Cabot Cove issue, I’ve made sure that only one murder is actually committed in Siglufjörður in all three books—and that happened in the first one. In the next two novels, the murders have taken place in the vicinity of Siglufjörður, keeping my fictional local policeman busy without having to murder too many people in this lovely town.

Photo by Jonas Ragnarsson

Photo by Jonas Ragnarsson