“When I grew up in Molde,” he said, referring to his hometown, “the friends I hung out with were all going to write novels. We would go into the cafe and wear long coats that we got from the Salvation Army; suck in our cheeks, so we would look like characters in a Dostoyevsky novel; and discuss literature, books that we had never read. We were all very pretentious.”

Back then, Mr. Nesbo read American detective writers like Chandler and Hammett. He is also a fan of Jim Thompson. But he said he had been influenced by Ibsen as much as by anyone.

“The way his stories are constructed, he’s a crime writer,” Mr. Nesbo said. “On the facade everything looks normal, but then something happens, not necessarily a murder, and the truth is revealed bit by bit. It’s all dark secrets, which have to do with relationships, the same as in crime stories.”

He added: “After I finished the first one, I wasn’t sure I would write another crime novel, but what I discovered was that in this form you have a dialogue with the reader that is special to the crime novel. It’s like being a magician onstage. You are supposed to manipulate your readers. You are supposed to make them look at your right hand while you are doing a trick with your left. That sort of contract makes for a more intimate way of storytelling.”

Unlike Mikael Blomkvist, Larsson’s protagonist, who is more or less well adjusted by the standards of Scandinavian crime fiction, Harry Hole belongs to the genre’s older, darker tradition, which probably owes something to American noir writing. In Norwegian Hole (pronounced HOOL-eh) is a common name with no connotations of emptiness, but all the same, Harry is a loner, an obsessive smoker and drinker, has trouble with authority and difficulty sustaining relationships.

From injuries sustained in earlier books he has a scar from his jaw to his ear and a titanium middle finger, and in “Phantom” he sustains a cut in the neck that seems unlikely to heal well, since he bandages it with duct tape.

In an e-mail Margaret Hayford O’Leary, a professor of Norwegian at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minn., wrote that Harry came from a long line of Scandinavian crime fiction exposing “the dark side of a seemingly ideal society.”