Nordic Noir crime writer Quentin Bates interviewed by CloseUp PR for new Icelandic murder mystery novel "Cold Steal"

British-born crime writer Quentin Bates, acclaimed for his series of Iceland-set Nordic noir crime novels featuring small town police officer and single mother, Gunnhildur Gísladóttir, sees the publication of his latest thrilling installment, Cold Steal on 1st May 2014 via C&R Crime exclusively on Kindle.

Quentin Bates escaped from English suburbia as a teenager in flared jeans during the late 1970s, when he was offered a gap year working in Iceland. The gap year turned into a gap decade as he acquired a new language, a new profession as a ship’s officer and an Icelandic family.
Bringing his family to England, Bates worked as a trawlerman, teacher and truck driver, and finally fell into journalism with a specialist nautical trade paper. The move into fiction was a gradual process, eventually resulting in the creation of Gunnhildur Gísladóttir in his first crime thriller Frozen Out.
“When the financial crash hit Iceland so dramatically in 2008, there was just too much material not to use so I re-wrote part of the book to reflect the huge changes that were still taking place in Iceland” explains Bates.

Literary agent Peter Buckman at the Ampersand Agency liked the manuscript for Frozen Out enough to want to represent it. The book was quickly snapped up by London publisher Constable & Robinson and it also went on to be published in the US, Holland, Germany, Poland and Finland.

Cold Steal is the fifth outing for lead character Gunnhildur Gísladóttir, following Frozen Out (2011), Cold Comfort (2012), Winterlude (2012, e-novella) and Chilled to the Bone (2013).

As Cold Steal opens, Reykjavík is plagued by an unusually skilled burglar who is so discreet, his victims often don’t spot that their valuables are missing for weeks. However, Sergeant Gunnhildur Gísladóttir of the Reykjavík police finds herself with more pressing things to think about when a businessman is gunned down at his holiday retreat in a killing that looks disturbingly professional for peaceful Iceland.

Her investigation into the dead man’s background reveals a network of underhanded deals, a host of enemies and the disappearance of a business partner. Then one night the Reykjavik burglar picks the lock of a smart new house and finds he’s facing much more than he had bargained for. The stakes are raised and he is forced to use his skills working for people far more ruthless than he could have imagined. Gunnhildur and her team are faced with the task of unravelling a network of lies and violence that finally bring together the dead man’s killer, the hapless burglar and the vanished man’s scheming wife.

To coincide with the publication of Cold Steal, Quentin Bates will attend CrimeFest 2014 (Bristol, 15-18 May), appearing on a panel with fellow authors, Yrsa Sigurðardóttir, Ragnar Jónasson and Michael Ridpath in an all-Icelandic session moderated by Barry Forshaw.  Bates will make his debut as a moderator at CrimeFest the following day. He will also appear alongside Yrsa Sigurðardóttir and Ragnar Jónasson at a crime fiction event in Newcastle (2-3 May) arranged by Dr Jacky Collins of the University of Northumbria.

November 2014 sees the next Iceland Noir which he co-founded (with Yrsa Sigurðardóttir and Ragnar Jónasson) as Iceland’s first festival of crime fiction, and this follows the success of the first Iceland Noir in 2013.

In between his busy festival schedule, Bates also has further projects for later in 2014:  “Gunnhildur is back in a novella called Summerchill later this year, and I’m working on another full-length novel, but it’s far too early to say too much about that yet, although it features many of the same characters.”

With a growing army of Nordic noir fans, he is keen to share a further insight into what inspired the name of his popular website and blog, Gráskeggur:
“It means ‘Greybeard’ in English. My wife’s grandmother, the redoubtable Guðrún Magnúsdóttir from Bálkastaðir is a tough lady in her nineties who is still collecting the occasional speeding ticket. She’s always had trouble with my strange foreign name, not least because the letter ‘Q’ doesn’t appear in Icelandic at all and doesn’t even have a place in the alphabet. One day she greeted me with; ’Ah, it’s you, Greybeard.’ The name stuck and I’m happy with it. It seemed the obvious choice for the website.”