Anonymous letters. I’ve received a few…
It’s strange that a letter without a sender’s name can somehow feel more personal. As an investigator, I’ve received letters like these, not only directed at me and the cases I’ve worked on, but also filled with the most imaginative views of the world – also sent because I’m an author.
These letters – long and conspiratorial, full of loose threads, or short, terse messages – have an almost obsessive quality, and there’s something fascinating yet deeply unsettling about a sender who has a story to tell but doesn’t want to divulge their identity.
Receiving anonymous letters is like looking into a reflection of your own life, seen through an unfamiliar lens. You don’t know the angle from which the sender views you, or why they chose to write specifically to you. Each letter becomes a kind of riddle – one you can never quite solve because there are missing pieces that will never materialise. I’ve wondered if being an author makes me seem like a key figure in others’ dramas, someone they feel can provide answers to everything that eludes them.
One summer, a letter like this arrived every single week. Every one of them carried the same warning about a murderer being amongst us — and they suggested that this was something that I not only knew about, but had actively covered up. After months of these regular arrivals, they suddenly stopped, as if the sender had simply lost interest or their mission had been accomplished.
There was no threat in the letters, just an unsettling feeling of invasion, a kind of warning that someone was watching what I did. I never found out who was behind the letters, but I would have liked to ask a few questions – not least to understand what made this person spend so much time on me.
There’s something about these letters that goes beyond the message itself. They have a unique psychological effect – a tiny grain that burrows under your skin, a reminder that others are witnessing what you do, keeping an eye on you, watching. And it was precisely this anonymous invasion of privacy that laid the foundation for the fifth book about Alexander Blix and Emma Ramm.
The plot in Victim is based on the last case Blix was responsible for as a police investigator. It was a missing persons case, where single mother Elisabeth Eie disappeared. But the investigation was set aside when Blix himself was arrested for avenging his daughter’s murder in book four. Now his days mostly consist of quiet walks with his dog. Until he finds an anonymous letter with a photo in his mailbox – a photo of a murdered woman. Elisabeth Eie is no longer a missing person case; it’s murder…
Translated text from the letters
Jørn Lier Horst says: there is a murderer among the people
The demon created humanity.
The best crime novels shed light on current social issues.
Envelopes
