Helle’s Hound locations with Oskar Jensen

Submitted: 24th November 2024

Helle’s Hound locations with Oskar Jensen

I love a map. Helle & Death, my first book starring Danish detective Torben Helle, kicked off with a floorplan. But for its sequel, Helle’s Hound, I knew I needed something more … expansive. This was the result.

Locations in Helle’s Hound

Helle’s Hound Oskar Jensen

Locations in Helle’s Hound

London, eh? Hardly the most exotic or original of locations. Yet no two people know the same London. Everyone’s is their own. And two appear on my map. One is the world that Torben knows, the universities, libraries, pubs, restaurants. The five-a-side football pitches. The other is the world he is up against. The seats of power, institutions of finance and politics and culture. When I plotted the worlds on the map, the way each clusters, barely overlapping, became evident. But not surprising. Because Torben’s London is my London, centred on Bloomsbury. And it reflects a reality. That this ancient city is less a single whole, than a patchwork of knit-together neighbourhoods.

Helle's Hound Map (c) Oskar Jensen

Locations in Helle’s Hound

The map is geographically accurate. I thought about something more abstract, like the Tube Map. Of collapsing and stretching distances, of cartographical telescopy and microscopy. Then I gave it up as all too difficult. Instead I printed a google map, and traced it against my windowpane.

A typical house in Bloomsbury Square

Locations in Helle’s Hound

I also thought about providing a key. The map is littered with symbols, representing the scenes of the story. More fun, I realised, to make the map itself a mystery. To invite the reader to decode each little glyph as they go. Piece together the episodes in Torben and Leyla’s adventures.

Obvious to say, I know, but in the novel, London is itself a character. One that’s always intrigued me: I’ve written two works of London history, after all. One, The Ballad-Singer, is a very academic affair (but readable!), all about the city’s street-singers. The other, Vagabonds, is the story of life on these streets, in the cruel nineteenth century.

Helle and Death Oskar Jensen

Locations in Helle’s Hound

For Helle’s Hound, I wanted something different. An equally intimate take that was more fun, more escapist. That celebrated everything I’ve loved about living in London as a young writer and scholar. The irony is, Helle & Death – set in a remote part of Northumberland’s Tyne Valley – was written in the south-east. But I wrote my London novel, Helle’s Hound, in remote Northumberland. Intimate knowledge of a place is important. But to write about it, it turns out I need distance, whether that means two centuries or 300 miles.

Oskar Jensen

For Helle & Death, I invented a fictional slice of valley, backing on to the North Pennines. It’s somewhere west of Hexham, and south, not north. Bastle House is a fiction too: the ideal of the country house murder location. But it’s rooted in realism. In Helle’s Hound, almost every location is genuine save one. Again, it’s the house at the centre of things.

Northington Street/Little James Street

Locations in Helle’s Hound

Originally, Torben was going to live here. It’s the house where Dorothy L. Sayers lived, with blue plaque and everything. But it seemed a bit too on the nose. Instead, I turned the corner – and turned back time. Northington Street used to be called Little James Street, so I changed back the name. And I demolished a modern block of flats, in favour of a row of three Queen Anne-era townhouses. The actual house is based on the one I now live in, in remote Northumberland. So you’re not getting a picture of that. But again, it was written at a distance – an impatient one, whilst waiting to move in!

Honey & Co

Locations in Helle’s Hound

Little James Street aside, you could plan an excellent tour of locations in Helle’s Hound. You’d just have to go on a diet afterwards. Because in part, it’s a homage to some of my favourite places to eat and drink. Honey & Co and The Perseverance, both on Lamb’s Conduit Street. The Mikkeller Brewpub in Exmouth Market. The Wolseley, where my first agent, Christopher Little, took me to lunch to celebrate my first book. More virtuously, there’s the route of several protest marches I’ve been on, picked out in dashes on my map.

The Wolseley

Locations in Helle’s Hound

Depending on how angry, or how hungry, you’re feeling, this all adds up to one of two things. A paean to a thriving, thrilling city, full of nice things. Or a searing indictment of decadence and unequal consumption under late capitalism. Of course, it’s both. Because that’s London.