“Everything was top secret, top secret. They called me and put me in a dark room,” she recalls. David Lagercrantz Swedish writer, posthumous Stieg Larsson Norstedts publishing house commissioned him to continue. millennium series. “They offered me the job and I didn’t hesitate for a second. I faced the challenge with great passion. In fact, I think it was this passion that drove them to assign me this task.
Son of the prestigious Swedish publisher, literary critic and professor Olof Lagercrantz, David has had an extensive career as a crime journalist, novelist and biographer who has written biographies of characters including adventurer Göran Kropp and football player Zlatan Ibrahimović. She’s as charismatic as Lisbeth Salander.
“The key is to have a deep understanding of the characters. You have to read, think a lot and add something new to yourself because static and unchanging characters are not interesting. The dilemma is knowing how far you can go. To me, the limit is what the English call characterlessness, characterlessness. In the Millennium example, at one point I wrote a scene where Lisbeth was crying. Then I saw that it didn’t work because it was precisely this attitude that was out of character. I hope the author who will continue the saga goes further than me because in my case there was too much pressure and I didn’t dare go as far as I needed to go.
Three years after the release of Girl Who Lived Twice, the sixth game in the series created by Stieg Larsson, David Lagercrantz has arrived in Spain to present Obscuritas (Fate), the first episode of Rekke and Vargas’ adventures. It was created by researchers in the style of Holmes and Watson, a sophisticated psychology professor, and a young policewoman whose writings are surrounded by impressive security measures.
«After the millennium trilogy, I found myself completely free and with one question: What do you do when you can do anything? In my case, I decided to do what I really wanted to do because even though the pressure was still huge, it was much less than what I had experienced. At that time, we reached states of real hysteria, such as not being able to work on a computer connected to the Internet”, recalls Lagercrantz, who, despite all these security measures, was allowed to share his progress or discuss his doubts with them. In any case, and after cases of scripts or books being stolen from writers’ computers, this is a reality we have to get used to.Sometimes it’s pretty much like living as a spy, but good for a crime writer on the other hand.
Cupcakes and ethical dilemmas
Set in the city of Stockholm, Obscuritas tells the story of a murder case committed by a police force whose investigation is not very thorough, in a community populated by immigrants, where macho attitudes, prejudices and arrogance are common. Some mats that show that the detective novel is still the most appropriate way to critically analyze society.
“Unlike novels that are like donuts to be entertained for a while, detective novels that raise major ethical, social, and political issues grab the reader and don’t let go until the end. I think you can learn a lot from detective novels and even make the world a better place thanks to them,” says Lagercrantz, consistent with this approach, choosing a Chilean immigrant who came to Sweden after his family as the protagonist. leave.
“Society has changed and women have taken the leading role. In this sense, one of the writer’s duties is to free himself from clichés and stereotypes and to create something new. The stronger the female characters in the books, the better the literature, which does not mean that the character of the cowboy who solves cases with his fists should disappear, on the contrary: for genius to be perceived. , idiots have to exist,” says the Swedish writer.