Writing Home: My Dark Dreams of Copenhagen 

By Heidi Amsinck

The past is a foreign country. Literally in my case. I left Denmark to become a London Correspondent mere days after graduating as a journalist and never moved back home. Over the course of my life, I have spent more time in London than I ever did in Copenhagen. Yet, the city of my birth, where my parents met as teenagers in the 1950s, triggers my imagination like no other place in the world. 

If I had stayed, I suspect things would have been very different. Little Danish idiosyncrasies – like putting babies outside to sleep in their prams or our fondness for candles and Danish flags – would have seemed unremarkable, ordinary, everyday. Worst of all, I would have felt obliged to be more accurate. The Copenhagen of my fiction is real and not real. Visitors, and friends who live there, see an open, welcoming, buzzing, sometimes wholesome, sometimes edgy Scandinavian city. For some reason, I see darkness, shadowy old apartment blocks, wood-panelled offices and characters living life on the periphery.

For years, I wrote Danish Noir short stories, produced by Sweet Talk for BBC Radio 4 and published in my collection Last Train to Helsingør (Muswell Press, 2018). Populated by ghosts and homicidal old Danish ladies (whom people make the repeated mistake of underestimating), they were my answer to Roald Dahl’s Tales of the Unexpected, which I devoured when I was young, sub-titled on Danish TV. The theme tune is still capable of sending chills down my spine.

When I began writing my debut crime novel My Name is Jensen – stuck in my London flat during the first lockdown – it felt natural that the main character would share my profession. Unlike me, she returns home, allowing me to imagine what that would be like. I wanted to share this experience with my British family and friends – to take them by the hand and lead them through Copenhagen by way of a plot. Perversely, I found not being able to travel there freed up my imagination. 

And language removed me further from the familiar: I spoke only Danish while I lived at home and wrote for years in Danish as a journalist, but when I write fiction, I write in English exclusively. I guess I like being an outsider, looking in. Writing in Danish would compel me to describe Copenhagen as an insider. That’s one of the reasons why I have chosen not to translate my novel into Danish myself when it is published in Denmark in 2022. In all seriousness, I don’t think I would be able to pull it off.

Why Jensen? Edged by Nielsen and trailed by Hansen, Jensen (son of Jens) is the most common surname in Denmark, shared by about 5% of the population. By ‘My name is Jensen’ you might as well be saying ‘I am Danish’. My reporter sleuth Jensen, a woman, finds that people assume from her by-line in the newspaper Dagbladet that she is a man. I like the ambiguity, and that Jensen is virtually able to hide in plain sight.

With a name like Jensen, just Jensen, she is impossible to track online, and even harder to pin down. Jensen is tough emotional, brave, frightened, spiky, charming and annoying. I wanted her to be you or me or anyone. I wanted her to be our eyes as we travel through Copenhagen together. Like Colin Dexter’s Inspector Morse, she has no first name. Or rather she does but, given to her by her hippie mother, it is one she prefers not to use or share with the reader.

I have almost finished writing Book 2 in the series, another outing for Jensen, her teenage apprentice Gustav who has a habit of picking up vital clues completely by accident, and DI Henrik Jungersen, Jensen’s on-off married lover, whom she races to the truth. 

I can travel home to Copenhagen again now but have come to quite like exploring the city from afar. Whenever I miss it, which is very often, I head to the keyboard and hang out there.

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Heidi Amsinck was born in Copenhagen and has lived for many years in London where she was a correspondent for the Danish media. A graduate of the MA in Creative Writing at Birkbeck, University of London, she was previously shortlisted for the VS Pritchett Memorial Prize, and is a member of the UK’s Crime Writers’ Association. Last Train to Helsingør her first published collection of short stories, was published by Muswell Press in 2018.  The Daily Mail called it ‘a nice slice of creepy Scandi-noir’.

Praise for My Name is Jensen:

‘Compelling, atmospheric and beautifully written, Scandi Noir has a new star’ Louise Welsh

‘A brilliant debut from an author in full possession of the crime writing craft. Heidi Amsinck is hopefully here to stay’ Yrsa Sigurdardottir

‘Intriguing and hypnotically readable’ Andrew Taylor

MY NAME IS JENSEN

Guilty. One word on a beggar’s cardboard sign. And now he is dead, stabbed in a wintry Copenhagen street, the second homeless victim in as many weeks. 

Dagbladet reporter Jensen, stumbling across the body on her way to work, calls the only person she can think of – DI Henrik Jungersen, her married ex-lover.  

The front page is an open goal, but nothing feels right…When a third body turns up, it seems certain that a serial killer is on the loose. But why pick on the homeless? And is the link to an old murder case just a coincidence? With her teenage apprentice Gustav, Jensen soon finds herself putting everything on the line to discover exactly who is guilty … 

Twitter https://twitter.com/heidiamsinck1

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Category: On Writing