Interview with Ragnar Jónasson, Mystery Author and Erstwhile Agatha Christie Translator

All About Agatha Christie

Catherine Brobeck & Kemper Donovan

Tv & Film, Books, Film Reviews, Arts

4.7 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 13 December 2025

⏱️ 47 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

It's always a pleasure to commune with a legitimate Christie obsessive, and Ragnar is about as legit as they come. You may know him as one of the leading voices of contemporary noir, but he has also translated a number of Christie novels from English into his native Icelandic--starting at the tender age of seventeen, no less!

You can find out more about Ragnar and his work here, on his website. In particular, we discussed his most recent (and Golden Age-inflected) work, The Mysterious Case of the Missing Crime Writer.

You can now pre-order Sweet Spot, the third book in my Ghostwriter Mysteries series. (Coming out July 2026.)

To visit and subscribe to the podcast's Patreon page, click here.

Visit the podcast on Instagram, and me personally at my author website.

Loose Lips, the second book in my Ghostwriter Mysteries series, is currently available for purchase.

You can also buy The Busy Body, the first book in my Ghostwriter Mysteries series, in paperback at your bookseller of choice (make it an indie if you possibly can) in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia and New Zealand.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to All About Agatha, the podcast dedicated to reading and ranking every single mystery novel written by the Queen of Crime, Dame Agatha Christie.
0:14.4	I am Kemper Donovan, and I'm so excited about the interview that I'm about to bring you that I don't want to waste much time in a preamble. Here's a spoiler warning for you. Lord Edgware dies is spoiled over the course of this
0:25.9	conversation. And that's really it. Let's barrel forward to my fantastic conversation with a fantastic
0:32.9	mystery author. Here goes.
0:43.3	Ragnar Yonison is the award-winning Icelandic author of a whole bunch of mystery titles, including the internationally best-selling Holda series, the Dark Iceland series, and several stand-alone works.
0:51.3	At this point, he has sold five million copies of his work across 36
0:56.8	territories. One of his novels, The Darkness, was adapted into a six-episode television series
1:02.8	starring Lena Olin and directed by Lassa Haustrom. The Sunday Times has said of his work,
1:08.7	Is this the best crime writer in the world today?
1:11.4	Which is a pretty excellent question to be posed to an author, especially since I'm pretty sure that is meant to be taken rhetorically.
1:18.9	His books have been on bestseller lists across Europe and the USA, and he has won so many prizes.
1:25.4	Also, and I want to highlight this for all of you listeners, so take note here.
1:29.8	We will get back to this very shortly. Ragnar has translated 14 of Agatha Christie's novels into
1:35.9	Icelandic, which he started doing at the age of 17. If that is not a teenager devoted to the works
1:42.9	of Agatha Christie, I'm not sure what is.
1:45.8	He also has a law degree. He has taught copyright law at Reykjavik University, and he is the co-founder and co-chair of the literary festival Iceland Noir, which is held annually in Reykjavik, where he makes his home.
1:59.3	His latest novel, which we will be speaking about
2:01.4	today, is the mysterious case of the missing crime writer. And this is a sequel to death at the
2:07.1	sanatorium with at least one more book to go in this particular series. We have so much to discuss.
2:13.2	Welcome to the podcast, Ragnar. I'm really thrilled to have you. Thank you. So, so happy to be with you.
2:19.2	So the mysterious case of the missing crime writer is obviously such an Agatha Christie-ish title on at least two different levels.
2:26.9	And it's very different from the terse, more noir-flavored titles that you tend to favor, the darkness, the island, white out, snowblind,
	...

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