Camilla Lackberg + Nordic Noir

Andrew Mun
3rd Sep 2014

At this year’s Sydney Writer’s Festival, she appeared. Tall and dark haired, in a tight black and pink faux suede dress and killer heels, Camilla Lackberg certainly had the sex appeal and charm to be a femme fatale, ala a 1950s Kathie Moffat. While confidently spoken, warm and funny, what lay beneath was an ominous imagination obsessed with the sinister side of humanity.

“I’ve always been a nerd when it comes to crime, so when other little girls were reading books and magazines on horses, I was reading about serial killers,” she confessed.

At only thirty-nine, a former economist, she is now an international bestselling author whose books have been translated into over thirty languages. Having just released her eighth book and currently finishing her ninth, the mother of three has also co-written a TV series and is a part-owner of a jewellery company. With all her work, it is a mystery how she has managed to find time to stop at this year’s festival to talk about how she came to be a crime writer and the relationships she has with her hometown and fictional characters.

After years of agonizing (and vocalizing!) over her dreams to become a writer, her friends and family got the clue and enrolled her in a creative writing course. This paved the way for her first novel, The Ice Princess.

“I actually started writing The Ice Princess during that course as an assignment, so whoever says that you cannot become a writer or learn how to write through a creative writing course is, in Swedish, bullshit,” she said.

Born and growing up in Fjallbacka, a idyllic seaside town in Sweden, Lackberg remembers it as strange place to grow up, because, while it was a bustling haven for tourists in summer, it was also an incredibly insular place for the remaining days of the year. It is this notion with which Lackberg thanks her hometown for informing the chilling soul of her books.

“Every one of you who actually comes from a small town, I think, can recognize the small town life of Fjallbacka and the importance of ‘What will people say?’ It’s so important, what the neighbor thinks of you, and that is a great quality when you’re writing a crime story…Nothing goes unnoticed.”

In such towns, the sinister weaves through the ordinary, the quiet and mundane. They are places where murders and crimes occur, not under rain-swept nights, but in the middle of the day, in kitchens and bedrooms. Often these settings and their histories become as important a narrative agent as the characters themselves.

“I include those historical, real events from the area into my books and imagine events around that,” she said.

It seems counter-intuitive to think of crime in a peaceful social milieu such as Sweden. However, to place criminality and violence, not in the most obvious places, as in the case of American noir city settings, but in the safest, most intimate of places bring feelings of danger closer to our everyday lives than we are more comfortable with.

“I think that is part of the success factor. Actually that is the concept, the contrast with the image that people have of Sweden,” she suggested.

Capitalizing on the success of Scandinavian crime writing, Lackberg’s books, although a favourite of many, are not groundbreaking. What makes her unique is her modern feminine sensibility. Erica, the main protagonist in her series of work, is a change from the standard hard-boiled detective hero. Lackberg claimed that she never intended to write herself into Erica, but came to realise that she wrote better when she drew from personal experience. This has allowed her work to authentically nurse domestic anxieties and indulge in feminine preoccupations.

“I do lend a lot of my own experiences when it comes to relationships and being a mother and having three children…. For example, with my first child, I got post-natal depression, so by book three I was in a place where I was gone out of it and could write about it, and I gave that to Erica.”

Lackberg’s recurring characters, Erica and Patrick, are not larger than life, but written as ordinary people. It is in the examination of how they deal with extraordinary events in realistic ways that many readers can empathize.

“I wanted to make them as normal a Swedish couple as possible. The compliment from readers is when readers say, ‘They really feel like friends. They feel like people we would love to have for dinner on Friday,’” Lackberg said.

Lackberg owes great literary debt to many other Swedish writers, because when you talk about Scandinavian fiction, you talk about Scandinavian crime writers where the blood runs deep, from the late Stieg Larsson to Henning Mankell. She credits this tradition as the main reason for the current global fascination with Scandinavian crime writing.

“Simply, very early on, we had some very good crime writers that really, really raised the bar, and made some very good writers wanting to become crime writers.”

In crime writing, what happens next, is often a function of past transgressions violently surfacing. However, unlike her professional colleagues, she confesses that she does not work with grand outlines that plot out her mysteries.

“I discover the story in the same way as you read it…I can’t jump back and forth because I don’t know. When I’m on page five, I don’t have a clue what happens on page eighty.”

Camilla Lackberg speaks to us, literally and in her works, with a charming and seductive force, because, although crime fiction does tend towards closed narratives and narrow human experiences, at heart, it does what good fiction does best. It gives readers the simple pleasure of an enveloping story; when the weary eyes race towards bottom of each page, faithfully passing the baton to the fingers that turn it as we gasp to satisfy the curious voice inside all readers which asks, ‘What happens next?’