Cold bleak scenes might grace all seven of his Harry Hole crime thrillers, but Norwegian author Jo Nesbo prefers to avoid winters in his home country.
"January, February and part of March are perfect months for travelling far away from Norway," the writer, having just visited Australia, enthuses via phone from a fancy Auckland hotel a couple of days before a scheduled speaking engagement in Wanaka earlier this week.
In New Zealand to promote his new book Phantom, as well as a forthcoming film based on 2008 stand-alone (i.e. non-Harry Hole) crime novel Headhunters, Nesbo travels a lot these days.
It's one of the benefits of enjoying sales of more than 11 million books in 40 countries, allowing him time to plan his next move or plot his latest novel.
One thing Nesbo (real name Kim Erik Lokker) doesn't worry about though is his readers.
"I honestly never try to please my readers ... Writing and telling stores is not about accommodating the readers; it's about inviting people to your own home.
"It doesn't matter if I had a thousand readers or, like now, a million; I would have done the same thing. It's a strange job: you communicate with millions but you stay in a little room with your typewriter and hack down the stories," he says.
"In that room, the readers don't really exist, although I do have two imaginary readers, who share the same tastes as I do. But those guys are also very hard to please."
A look through what constitutes Nesbo's curriculum vitae reveals a person who sets some pretty high standards.
By the age of 17 he was playing football for a Norwegian premier league club and had hopes of progressing to an English club before a serious injury cut short that career; he then did three years of military service, during which time he completed a previously ignored high school diploma that led to him graduating from a well-regarded Norwegian business school with a degree in economics; while working in a finance house he formed a band, Di Derre; such was the group's success at home, it prompted him to adopt a pseudonym to separate his identity as well-known singer from that of then-fledgling author.
"I just do the things I like to do," says Nesbo, who turns 52 at the end of this month. "I like to conquer things I am bad at."
This habit now extends to rock-climbing ("I have a fear of heights. I started out not being very good and that is what made me enthusiastic about it").
It is put to Nesbo that bumbling rock climbers are probably few and far between. After all, it's not only ambition that can be dashed.
"Ah, yes. You could put it that way. But I'm fascinated with the way the human body and brain is able to learn. I'm a curious guy. When I was young I spent all my money travelling and reading stuff I didn't understand. Now I'm doing sports I'm almost incapable of doing."
The self-improvement extends to Nesbo's writing.
Though he ignores "very good reviews or the really bad ones", he will devour lukewarm critiques. They are the ones he can learn from, he claims. "So I'm always looking for lukewarm reviews."
In Phantom, Nesbo maintains a thread consistent to all his of Harry Hole (pronounced Holer) books - an inexorable physical and, sometimes, moral decline.
"That's what the series has been about from the start - the deconstruction of Harry. The last two books, Phantom and The Leopard, have also been about relationships between father and son. In The Leopard it was Harry as the son, while in Phantom it is Harry as father figure and how he copes with that responsibility."
In the tradition of crime novels, Hole is depicted as having a personal life as dysfunctional as those he is seeking to bring to justice. Over the series, which Nesbo began in 1997 with The Bat Man, the detective becomes more similar to the criminals he is chasing.
"I think in crime novels it is not so much about whether the case is solved or not; it is about the main character. In some, the murderer is the main character; in mine, it is Harry," Nesbo says.
"It is about the moral choices he makes. As the protagonist he is expected to make the right moral choices, but he doesn't always make the right choice. I think that's what makes the readers interested."
In contrast, Headhunters has less ambiguity. Written in 2008, as Nesbo took a welcome break from Hole between 2007's The Snowman and 2009's The Leopard, it offers a protagonist with very few redeeming qualities.
Fast-paced, Headhunters follows the actions of Roger Brown, whose job it is to interview executives for prospective high-level positions. The twist is, Brown leads a criminal double life as an art thief. However, his plans unravel ...
"It was just one of those ideas that, when it came to me, it was already written," Nesbo says.
"Normally, I'll spend a year working on the plot and synopsis for a story. In this case I think I wrote the synopsis in four or five days.
"The story was all there. I was sceptical. I thought it must be a book I've read, but I haven't found which book that might be.
"It was effortless. I don't know if that's a good or bad thing. I do know I sometimes need a break from Harry."
On first seeing his story on the big screen, Nesbo wasn't sure if he liked it or not. He was too busy focusing on the technical details.
"I was asked by a Norwegian journalist at the premiere whether I liked the movie. I have no idea if I liked the film because I was analysing the choices the director made. I saw it for a second time in Perth recently and was pleasantly surprised; I was able to connect to the story."
Read it, see it
Phantom ($37.99, Harvill Secker) is out now. Headhunters was originally published in 2008; a film adaptation of the book is currently screening at Rialto Cinemas in Dunedin.
