Inspiration for Where Blood Runs Cold

If my own experience skiing in Norway fired my imagination, it was a famous story of survival in the Norwegian mountains that added fuel to this fire and inspired Where Blood Runs Cold. 

Operation Martin involved a team of expatriate Norwegian commandos who sailed from the Shetland Islands back into Nazi-occupied Norway in March 1943. Their aim to destroy a German airfield control tower at Bardufoss, and recruit for the Norwegian resistance movement. However, the men were betrayed and ambushed, their boat sunk by the Germans. Three were killed. One escaped. The one that got away was Jan Baalsrud. Soaking wet and missing a boot, he escaped and what followed has to be one of the most remarkable survival stories of all time. 

Over nine weeks, Jan Baalsrud would endure hardships almost beyond imagining. His feet would freeze solid, he would be buried up to his neck by an avalanche. Snowblind and frostbitten, he would wander lost in a snowstorm for three days, become entombed in snow for four days and be left abandoned for two weeks. To prevent the spread of gangrene, he used a knife to cut off several of his frostbitten toes. Eventually, he would lie tied to a stretcher, near death, as teams of Norwegian villagers dragged him up and down snow- covered mountains. Despite all this, he somehow endured. Jan Baalsrud survived what would surely have killed anyone else. The man simply refused to die. 

This story of survival captured my imagination, but it was becoming a father that really inspired me to find the beating heart of Where Blood Runs Cold. To delve into a parent’s fears for their children, to face up to their own mortality, and to provoke the reader to ask themselves the question, How far would I go?