Why I Leave Meals Off the Page in My Crime Fiction
A plate of herring and boiled potatoes sits on a kitchen table in many Scandinavian novels. I have read thousands of those scenes, and I have written almost none of them. The choice is deliberate, and it shapes how my Thorkild Aske books land for readers in Oslo, in Berlin, and increasingly along the eastern seaboard of Australia, where a growing audience picks up foreign editions of the series in translation.
Australian crime readers, whether they buy a paperback in a Brisbane independent bookshop or download an e-book on a Sydney commute, tend to favour lean prose. Names like Peter Temple and Jane Harper have trained that appetite. When I draft a chapter, I think about that kind of reader, someone who wants the next plot turn before the second coffee gets cold at a Brunswick café or while waiting for a ferry at Circular Quay.
The question I hear most often at festivals and on social media is simple: why so little food? The answer has nothing to do with hunger and everything to do with what a scene is actually doing.
Pacing and the weight of a lunch scene
A lunch scene in fiction is rarely about lunch. It is about who pays, who refuses the second drink, and what a character looks at when they think no one is watching. When I write a paragraph of food description, I am using up the most valuable resource a crime novel has, which is momentum. A reader holding a book in a Qantas lounge or on a train from Perth to Kalgoorlie does not have patience for three sentences about the texture of a sauce.
In the Thorkild Aske books, the protagonist often skips meals. That omission tells the reader something. Hunger sharpens a character. It also signals a mind that is elsewhere, on a case, on a memory. When I do let a meal appear, it usually arrives in a single line, something like a sandwich eaten in a car, a black coffee in a polystyrene cup, a takeaway container balanced on a dashboard.
Sensory detail without the recipe
Some writers build atmosphere through menus, and the result can be beautiful. I admire the craft, but I lean on other senses. The smell of damp concrete in a Stavanger car park, the sound of a tram bell in Berlin, the weight of a wool coat in a Norwegian winter — these details do the work that a veal stew would do in another author's hand.
If a reader needs to know what Aske is eating, I would rather show the plate pushed aside, the napkin untouched, the glass still full. Behaviour at a table reveals a character more honestly than any list of ingredients. A reader in Adelaide or Hobart picks up those signals quickly, because Australian fiction has long trusted the reader to read between the lines.
What I allow into the frame
I do not ban food entirely. Some meals carry the plot, and ignoring them would feel false. A character who is being poisoned needs to be shown eating. A dinner that never happens can haunt a scene. A shared meal between two people who will never see each other again deserves a sentence, sometimes two.
The same restraint applies to drink. Coffee appears often, because coffee is a working tool in my books, not a luxury. A glass of whisky in Aske's hand usually means the case has gone somewhere dark. Beer, rarely. Wine, almost never on the page, because wine in a Norwegian setting tends to slow the scene into something the story does not need.
| Detailed food description | Implied or minimal food reference |
|---|---|
| Often takes 30-80 words per scene | Usually fits in 3-10 words |
| Anchors the scene in a specific place and season | Lets the setting breathe around the character |
| Can slow the reader at a key plot turn | Keeps the reader moving toward the next clue |
| Works well in literary or historical fiction | Works well in procedural crime and noir |
| Invites the reader to linger | Invites the reader to keep reading |
Translating restraint across borders
When a novel moves from Norwegian into English, German, or any other language, the food question becomes sharper. A translator working through a meal scene in a novel set in Sydney has local knowledge I lack. A translator handling a herring breakfast in Tromsø is doing a different kind of work. I prefer to leave them with less to translate, because what remains is closer to the emotional core of the scene. Australian readers who discover the series through its international editions often tell me the books feel brisk in a way they associate with local writers, which is a compliment I take seriously.
What readers and reviewers have noticed
Australian reviewers have been generous with the series, and the feedback on pacing is consistent. Readers describe the books as fast, lean, and hard to put down. None of them have written to ask why a character never orders dessert. The same pattern shows up in coverage of the wider Thorkild Aske world, including essays about the series' future, where the conversation is about where the character goes next, not what he has for breakfast on page forty.
Meals that earn their place in my drafts
- A poisoned dish in a scene built around betrayal
- A shared dinner that marks the end of a friendship
- A takeaway eaten in a moving car during a chase
- A final meal that closes a chapter or a book
When a line of food description still helps
- A coffee cup left untouched, signalling grief
- A sandwich ordered and never eaten
- A bottle of wine opened but not poured
- A plate cleared by a character who has stopped caring
If you pick up the next Thorkild Aske novel, try reading the first chapter with a pencil and marking every place a meal, a drink, or a plate is mentioned. You will likely find fewer than five references in a chapter of several thousand words. That is the pattern, and it is there on purpose. The same exercise in a book by an author who loves the kitchen will show a different approach. Both have a place in the genre. Mine is the quieter one.