Roslund & Thunberg about the successful Swedish crime novels on CBC Radio
According to Karin Wells’s documentary “The Swedish Motive” Swedes air their society’s problems in bestselling crime novels, and these days hardly a week goes by without a Swedish crime writer on the New York Times bestseller list. The international success is all the more impressive when you consider that these books are translated from a language spoken by just 8 million people.
“We have a past and we don’t want to talk about it”, says Stefan Thunberg, one of Sweden’s leading screenwriters.
“We had the first mass murder in modern history. And suddenly the crime novel was one of the instruments to explore (a social issue.) And that’s when this whole new era in crime writing started. He was called the laser man because he used a laser rifle. He continued for several years”, says crime writer Anders Roslund.