No matter how revolting the murder was, I couldn’t ignore that I had a level of involvement. Someone wanted to get rid of Mona and had used my method, possibly in order to point the finger at me. It could be a boyfriend with a temper; she might have told one of her boorish fishermen about our relationship, bragged about it, possibly. Through her work, she might have got hold of a copy of In the Red Zone and waved it in front of the killer like a red rag.
This was my theory after a whole night of speculation, piles of notes and ever bigger glasses of whisky. I was convinced this was how everything connected. There were no other options. The more I thought about it, the clearer I could visualize the scene, and I had an overwhelming feeling that I could have found the killer by looking in the telephone directory or walking down Gilleleje High Street. A huge wave of relief washed over me and I looked forward to meeting Verner and telling him how it had all happened – I would be Sherlock Holmes to his Inspector Lestrade.
I was positively looking forward to going to Copenhagen.
5
BECOMING A WRITER was never a conscious decision. It’s as if I was given no choice; all I can remember is writing, even before I actually knew how to. As a boy, I never drew cars or houses like the other children, but copied letters from newspapers and books. And I’d be convinced I had written a story, even if I had only copied a shopping list. Afterwards I would ‘read’ the story aloud to my parents, who listened willingly and were always encouraging.
Once I learned to write, it became my favourite occupation. Again, I would write when everyone else was drawing. I would imagine the drawing I could have made, but draw it with words. ‘The Red Indian on his horse sets fire to the fort with a burning arrow’ was one of my earliest works. I had a clear picture of the scene and could visualize it down to the last detail when I read my text. It frustrated my teachers and worried my parents so from time to time I would draw the occasional picture, mainly to reassure them. However, the alphabet always crept in: the elephant was an ‘a’, the house was an ‘H’ and birds ‘m’s against the blue-shaded sky.
After the first few years at school we stopped drawing pictures and my parents could heave a sigh of relief and start delighting in the top marks their son got in Danish. I wrote articles for the school newsletter and published my own stories, which I painstakingly transferred to blueprint paper, printed and handed out in the lunch break. It attracted a fair amount of attention, mainly because I did it all by myself.
At high school, I continued with my writing. I became the editor of the school’s weekly newsletter, Posten, in my first year and my sarcastic reporting style and acerbic editorials quickly made me one of the popular students. My appearance changed. I dyed my hair black, dressed in black and listened to The Cure. On special occasions I would wear black nail polish and eyeliner. I took up smoking, favouring obscure east European brands without filter, and my choice of alcohol was cheap whisky, usually J&B or King George.
To my great surprise I discovered that an inspired pen was extremely effective when it came to the opposite sex and I proved, on several occasions, that you could write the pants off a girl. Afterwards I would write up the conquest rather successfully as pornography and sell it. I always made sure that I obscured my ‘victim’s’ identity, but most of them worked it out anyway and some even felt honoured to be included in my library. It all enhanced my popularity and I attracted a small group of disciples. In best Cyrano de Bergerac style, we helped bashful students out of their painful state of virginity by writing love letters for them, or we forged letters from parents, in return for payment, obviously. There was nothing we couldn’t achieve with a great script or a poem, and this gave us the idea of forming a writers’ commune – a creative utopia where we would do nothing but read and write. We would devote ourselves to the written word with an earnestness and reverence worthy of monks. Our combination of pomposity and naivety makes me smile when I think about it now.
My parents assumed I would become a journalist. I had the talent and the grades for it and since I had shown an interest in the profession by writing school newsletters, their ambitions on my behalf were understandable. But it held no attraction for me. Journalism was too restrictive. I didn’t want to end up writing for Ekstra Bladet or some other tabloid. Control of the story and the word was crucial to us, and our view of literature as the finest medium of all left little room for compromise.
To my parents’ dismay, I and two of my writing buddies realized our dream of setting up our commune, the Scriptorium, as we named it, in a six-room luxury flat on Nørrebro near the Lakes in Copenhagen. This was before the area was renovated so the rent was still manageable even though the size and the location were at the top end.
My mother especially worried a great deal, but I think my father was so confident I would regret my decision and find my way into journalism eventually that he talked my mother into indulging my ‘fad’. The compromise we reached was that I would start a degree in literature, primarily to become eligible for a modest state-funded student grant. However, it didn’t quite cover our expenses, so my flatmates and I had to take whatever casual jobs we could get in order to pay the rent. In this respect we weren’t picky at all and we delivered letters, worked in shops and washed bottles at Carlsberg Brewery.
Much of our income was spent on cigarettes and whisky, which we believed fuelled our creativity. We often drank ourselves senseless during writing sessions lasting well into the early hours of the morning.
My two partners in crime were Bjarne and Morten. Bjarne was a huge, even-tempered bear of a man who wrote poems about nature and more spiritual subjects. He was impossible to provoke and often acted as a lightning conductor for the other two of us, whose tempers were more volatile. Bjarne and I had plenty of nicknames, but Morten was only ever known as Mortis because he was tall and pale and the subject of his writing was inevitably death in some form or other. His writing style was uncompromising and he was very sensitive to criticism. If we said anything negative about his work, he might not speak to us for days.
For my part, I experimented with different types of writing, but most of my output had strong sexual undertones. In this way we had, in our own opinion, covered the three most important subjects: life, sex and death.
When we weren’t writing, working or pretending to be studying, we partied.
Our parties were always popular and five or ten new faces would show up every time. This was quite all right with us, as long as they behaved themselves and brought a crate of beer, a bottle of spirits or something stronger. I don’t think our neighbours liked us all that much, but they never complained.
The most memorable party, for many reasons, was the Angle party, which we held three years after moving in. We had all tried to get our work published, but apart from Bjarne, who had managed to get a selection of his poetry published in an underground literature magazine – for no payment, of course – our efforts had been in vain. I had had ‘pretentious and lacking in structure’ thrown in my face after my first attempt at a novel, and Mortis was told that his texts were banal, naive and riddled with linguistic errors and clichés. It didn’t worry us or, more accurately, we refused to show our disappointment, and we reassured one another that we would never compromise our integrity.
The turning point for me came with In the Dead Angle, a genre study of a crime novel, in which I describe a murder from every possible angle, hence the title. Even though it was fairly flimsy and experimental, the publishing house, ZeitSign, liked it and offered to publish it. To this day I can’t imagine what the editor, Finn Gelf, saw in it, and I gather he was rather isolated in his view that it was any good, but at the time I was bursting with pride and delirious with success. I had cut a notch in the pistol handle of art, knocked my dent in the bonnet of literature and I felt close to immortal.