I’m not jumping on the bandwagon, honestly – I had the idea to write a thriller set in Scandinavia ages ago. Now, finally, I’ve done it. Despite the title, my latest novel, The Moscow Option, is largely set in Åland, an archipelago of around 6,500 small islands between Sweden and Finland.
I first visited the place a decade ago, with my then-girlfriend, now-wife, who is from there. We arrived in winter, and I was immediately enchanted. The tarmac used for the roads is mixed with a local reddish-pink granite, making for a dramatic landscape of pink ribbons snaking through fields of snow. I slept like a baby in a cabin on a tiny island, drank beer in a wood-fired sauna and ate copious amounts of freshly smoked fish. It was idyllic. One evening, my father-in-law-to-be told me that the water between the archipelago and the mainland sometimes froze over and you could drive across, with makeshift roads marked out along the ice.
I hadn’t yet written my first novel, but my immediate thought on hearing this was ‘car chase’. What could be more exciting than a car chase across frozen ice? Then I thought: why would it be taking place? Who would be involved? I stored it at the back of my mind. Unfortunately, I didn’t do anything with it, and about a year later the James Bond film Die Another Day featured just such a scene, set in Iceland, so I discarded the thought.
A few years after that, I moved with my wife and kids to Stockholm, and discovered that every other person in the country was reading a trilogy of crime novels by someone called Stieg Larsson. By now I had written my first novel, a spy thriller about a double agent in Nigeria during the Biafran War, and was planning a follow-up to it set in Italy. Making notes on the ferry to Åland one morning I looked out of the window at the passing islets, most of them uninhabited, and thought ‘Paul Dark has to come here’. The car chase idea was out, but there was something both beautiful and lonely about the scene, and I realized that the place offered a perfect opportunity to recreate the kind of book I loved reading when I was growing up. Alistair Maclean, Desmond Bagley, Jack Higgins, Ken Follett and others wrote thrillers set on remote islands, sometimes in Scandinavia. I also knew from reading the local papers that the wrecks of submarines from the Second World War were sometimes discovered around the archipelago. And what could be more thrillerish than a sunken U-boat? I trawled through newspaper archives to find out more, and one case in particular caught my attention: in 1945, the corpse of a young U-boat captain had been washed ashore. With the help of my father-in-law, I visited the island where his body had been found and interviewed several people, including the son of the local police constable at the time. He remembered the events vividly: then in his teens, his father had even given him the U-boat captain’s pen as a keepsake. Further research uncovered the police report on the incident. Strangely, there was no record of his death in the church where he had been buried.
I started digging deeper into the history of the place, and even persuaded the coastguard to take me to an island containing one of their abandoned stations, where I was delighted to find a sauna that had been built in 1961, and which provided the inspiration for a key scene in the book. With assistance from my parents-in-law and other locals, I eventually managed to construct a plot that fitted into established history, but which, I hoped, also recreated the excitement I had felt in the fleeting thoughts that had led me on the journey. No hackers, no grumpy detectives, no druggie underworld and no car chase across ice, either … but nearly a decade after that first glint of an idea I finally finished writing my own Scandinavian thriller. I’m happy to be able to join the club.
Jeremy Duns brilliant Cold War thriller The Moscow Option is out now.
