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Daylight is No Shield:  Katja Ivar Interview in PW--December 2022

In Trouble, Ivar’s third outing for Hella Mauzer, set in the early 1950s, the Finnish PI seeks the truth about some deaths in her family’s past. 

What about Cold War Finland intrigued you? The era is fascinating, because that’s when our contemporary world took shape, really. And Finland was such an interesting place, because it had a very long border with the Soviet Union that’s very hard to monitor. I wanted the tension from that geopolitical context, which plays a big role. 

When the authorities in Paris, where I live with my French husband and three children, first mentioned the lockdown, I naively thought that here was an opportunity to finally tackle Proust or re-read Tolstoy, because I'd have the time for that sort of reading now, right? Wrong. Not only my days are busier than ever,  starting a thousand-page novel somehow seemed to imply that the lockdown would go on... forever? So I've read the autobiography of John Le Carre, The Pigeon Tunnel, instead. I am in awe of Le Carre's writing, and in a sense, my favourite author has kept me company in these troubled times, offering new perspectives and lessons from his extraordinary life.