Hillman Hunter

The first book about Elmer Henriksen.

A year after the national ego boost of the 1994 Winter Olympics at Lillehammer, Henriksen, a radio host and free-lance writer, stumbles over the scoop of his life: Norwegian speed-skating ace Knut Einar Hofmo tested positive on testosterone only a week before the games, and subsequently should have been barred from the competition. For some reason he was not.

As it turned out, Hofmo instead became a national hero, setting a world record and winning four gold medals in the games - and his pre-Olympic urine sample appear to have been ruined by a very local power shortage.

Henriksen manages to track down the bio-engineer who analysed Hofmo's positive sample, but on the eve of their scheduled meeting, the scientist falls out of a window at a fleabag hotel and breaks his neck.

The deeper Henriksen digs into the story, the higher up in society and politics he finds himself - and the less people seem to want to hear about it.

In a style of writing perhaps best described as par-boiled, Pedersen & Birkeland plays around with the traditional hard-boiled crime story, and comes up with an elegant satire of corruption in the capital of a small northern country with too much oil money and too little self respect, creating in the process a flawed but likeable anti-detective in Elmer Henriksen.

At its release in 2000 Hillman Hunter was very well received in the Norwegian press, Bergens Tidende branding it simply "Hysterically funny," and Dagbladet stating that the novel "grabs hold of the Norwegian national pride where it hurts the most."

Hillman Hunter is the first book about Elmer Henriksen. Dead Things is the second.

First published: 2000, Aschehoug Fiction
Egil Birkeland and Bjørnar Pedersen: Biography and bibliography