Crimeculture is delighted to publish two new interviews by Professor Charles Rzepka, with K. O. Dahl and J. A. Jance.
Riding the new wave of interest in Scandanavian crime fiction that began to build momentum in the early 1990s, K. O. Dahl is known to fans of Nordic Noir for his irascible and grotesque Oslo police detective, Gunnarstranda (like Colin Dexter’s Morse, he seems to have no first name) and Gunnarstranda’s younger, more hip, and more emotionally susceptible sidekick, Frank Frolich. Together the two have appeared in five books in English translation since 1993, when Dahl published Lethal Investments, the first in his seven-book series. He has also written five other novels as well as short stories and nonfiction, including a guide to Venice. This interview took place on June 4, 2015. Read Professor Rzepka’s interview with K. O. Dahl.
Judith A. Jance is the best-selling author of fifty-five crime novels comprising four separate series as of the date of the following interview, which took place at her home in the Bridle Paths section of Bellevue, Washington on the morning of June 4, 2017. Her series of books set in Seattle features the SPD homicide detective J. P. Beaumont, who was the main focus of our discussion. Read Professor Rzepka’s interview with J. A. Jance.
Professor Rzepka, who teaches English at Boston University, is the author of Detective Fiction (Polity, 2005) and the co-editor (with Lee Horsley) of the Blackwell Companion to Crime Fiction (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010). He completed his superb study of Elmore Leonard, Being Cool (Johns Hopkins University Press) in 2013, and his extensive interviews with Elmore Leonard are available on Crimeculture. He has a forthcoming article on the part-Choctaw interwar detective writer, Todd Downing: “Red and White and Pink All Over: Vacilada, Indian Identity, and Todd Downing’s Queer Response to Modernity,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 59.3 (Fall 2017), 353-384.