At the end of the 90s, Now writer Swede Anders de la Motte (1971) was a young police officer. “One day,” he explains in an interview hours before joining the roundtable this Thursday. BCBlack-A classmate brought a cake for his birthday, and suddenly three doors that were always closed at the end of the corridor opened. Three cops came out, they smelled of menthol and tobacco, their eyes were red, and they didn’t say anything, just nodded politely. They bought a piece of cake and left again. We didn’t know what they were doing there and we never saw them. If you rarely pass them in the hallway, they never make eye contact. “They were broken cops who had their moment of glory and were cornered there for some reason while they were waiting for their retirement because they couldn’t be fired because they were civil servants.” “wandering souls”, defines them, was inspired to create Missing Case Unit The protagonist of the Malmö police Gorgeous inspector Leo Asker in the movie ‘Mountain Killer’ (Planet / Column), your letter of introduction in Spain.
De la Motte continues: “When you were on the night shift and there was a full moon, you got incredible calls. There were people saying they saw an alien or a zombie or that the king was spying on them. And you took notes. And someone said, ‘These police officers, they’re not working on anyone. He had to investigate ‘lost cases’ that he didn’t want.”
Leo finds himself pushed aside by a former boss and his ex-lover when a young woman from a good family disappears while doing business. urban exploration -‘urbex’-, a hobby that the author practices with a friend to explore abandoned places such as industrial buildings, hospitals, cold war bunkers or underground tunnels leading to the mountains… He has to direct a different cast in the new unit. related to marginalized police Who he needs to motivate finds clues in a huge railroad model left behind by a serial killer. “This is a representative figure. real evil. There’s some in this ‘The silence of the lambs’now wink at the butterfly Jodie Foster. It was easy for me to invent this, even though I don’t know what it says about me…”, he smiles.
With the pandemic and the war in Ukraine, paranoid people preparing for the end of the world have increased in shelters in Sweden.
The hero’s childhood is marked by a paranoid father, a ‘prepper’, a prepper. preparing for the end of the world in a bunker. “They maintain a love-hate relationship. He is a ‘Don Quixote’ against the mills, against the system. Today, There are a lot of people after the pandemic and the war in Ukraine. Sweden as well as companies that offer everything needed to survive in the event of a disaster, from drinking water tanks to non-electric cooking equipment. “They sold us that we were neutral and that we should not be afraid of wars, but we are almost a NATO country and Russia is there too.”
“What made me happy?”
De la Motte left after working as a police officer for 8 years. “I was impatient like Leo, I wanted to get results and act quickly. They told me I had to stay on patrol for two more years, so I moved to the private sector.” And while Security manager for a technology company in Europe, the Middle East and Africa He started writing. “Until I realized I couldn’t do both. I created an Excel showing the pros and cons of each. But my wife hit the nail on the head and said I had to answer the burning question: What makes me happy?” And today I have to. three million copies sold It consists of fifteen novels.
“When you were a police officer – he remembers – you were trained for dangerous situations. The uniform helped me because it made you feel like you were at work, and when you hung it in the closet, almost everything stayed there. Not everything, actually, but a combination of tragic or sad situations, duels or cases involving children.” You couldn’t help but take some of it home. “Fear lasts a few seconds, a few minutes, but pain and sadness last much longer.”.
social complaint
De la Motte admits that “like every Scandinavian crime novelist” he keeps in mind “the tradition of the great writers” Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö or Henning Mankell” and although it is based on the principle of “writing things that will please the reader” and does not see this as “a mission to build reputation or make social criticism”, it contains topics such as “racism, machismo…”.
HE sexism The hero’s suffering is based on his police experience. “It was in the ’90s, I hope it’s improved, but there’s still a lot of machismo. It’s a very male-dominated body, 70/30.” And racism-“It’s everywhere,” he complains-, says: ‘tyranny‘ He suffered from the protagonist’s black childhood friend, Martin Hill, who is now a famous ‘urbex’ expert. “I reverse the roles with them: He saves her,” he explains.