Rämö assessed the role of landscape in storytelling and how losing her job during the pandemic led her to create one of Iceland's most recognizable fictional detectives.

Rämö described what might seem to some like an unusual path from Finland to Iceland, even as both countries are Nordic. She was also making a return to Tallinn, which she often frequently visited, since she relocated to Iceland in her 20s.

The author initially spent several years working as a journalist and tour guide before turning to fiction. The shift was necessitated by the Covid pandemic, when foreign tourism dried up and her work with it. So she started concocting stories instead of reporting facts, in the process creating Hildur, a police investigator living in Westfjords, a large, remote peninsula in northwest of the country where Rämö herself resides. This background gave her an intimate knowledge of Iceland's geography, history and communities, not to mention hard-to-pronounce proper names, allowing her to build crime novels around places familiar to her in the day-to-day.

Writing in Finnish while creating thoroughly Icelandic stories – there is one solitary Finn in her stories, a policeman called Jakob who like the author relocated to Iceland – Rämö says she initially feared that her inside knowledge of the island would turn her novels into travel guides. But her editor back in Finland thought she had gone too far, asking "where is Iceland" in the writing, and encouraging her to bring back the landscapes and atmosphere she had removed. For Rämö, location is not simply a backdrop but part of the story itself. The mountains, changeable weather, winters, darkness and isolation help shape the characters and create situations which would never emerge elsewhere in the world.

Nordic crime fiction, often known as Nordic noir, is an established genre, so where does Iceland fit into this? Rämö argues that Icelandic crime fiction stands out thanks to the country's combination of a tiny population and its extreme natural environment, even compared with the Scandinavian mainland. In a place where settlements may have only a few hundred, or even a few dozen, residents, mysteries naturally take on the form of small-community stories, while the surrounding wilderness adds another layer of danger. People disappearing into glaciers, into the mountains or into a storm is not a mere fictional device or metaphor, she says, but a reflection of real conditions in a landscape where nature can be beautiful and deadly all at the same time.

The writer also places Icelandic crime fiction within the context of broader social traditions. Reading Icelandic crime novels helped her understand the country's divisions and hidden tensions, from differences between rural and urban life to issues such as inequality and poverty. Home-grown authors such as Arnaldur Indriðason and Yrsa Sigurðardóttir, Rämö says, reveal different sides of Iceland: realistic social observation on one hand, and folklore, ghosts and darker traditions on the other.

For Rämö, successful crime writing starts not with the criminal act in and of itself, but with people. She spends weeks thinking before penning a single sentence, deciding who the characters are, what they want and what will befall them. The motive behind the crime comes ahead of the identity of the victim or culprit. The mystery then springs out of emotions, psychology and human choices, with the setting added afterwards.

Yet Iceland always returns to the epicenter of things: Rämö says the country's unique mixture of volcanoes, glaciers, earthquakes and violent weather gives writers material that few other places can offer. Nature can delay investigations, isolate communities and become an active force in the plot. Iceland's landscape, she says, already contains drama — so it only needs to be written down.

The 17th edition of the HeadRead festival took place in Tallinn on the last weekend of May, and ERR's "Kirjanduse aeg" series, including both renowned foreign authors and domestic talent, is being aired in 13 installments, July 6-17.

Click on the video player at the top to watch the entire conversation in English with Satu Rämö.

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