2024-04-14 03:01:00
Nothing better than starting by shaking up the existential board. The “Nordic Agatha Christie” knows the rules of the game. Sweden’s Minister of Justice, Niklas Stockenberg, receives a disturbing call: “You have fourteen days, one hour and twelve minutes left to live.” This is the promising beginning of He espectreism (Planet), the crime novel with which Camilla Läckberg closes the successful trilogy that began with The mentalistwritten in four hands with the media mentalist and illusionist Henrik Fexeus, also an expert in body language and communication.
Readers will meet again with an endearing cast of “geeks”, “strange people who have a problem fitting into society”, such as police inspector Mina Dabiri and mentalist Vincent Walder, who must deal with a new case. Adding to the initial threat is a mysterious-looking pile of bones, found on the disused tracks of the Stockholm subway, which would belong to an important financier.
First love is never forgotten. The girl she was, sheltered like a little spy in the eyes of the woman who will turn fifty this year, tells from Stockholm, where she currently resides, how at the age of seven she fell in love with Agatha Christie when she read Death on the Nile. She soon fantasized about unsolved crimes in Fjällbacka, a small fishing village where she was born in 1974, that place in the world on the border with Norway that actress Ingrid Bergman defined as “paradise on earth.”
Although she studied Economics, the dream of being a writer was hidden in the trunk of childhood fantasies. The desire to write came back to stay when her husband at the time, her mother and her brother gave her a creative writing course. A little over twenty years ago, in 2003, she published her first novel, The ice princess, set in Fjällbacka. Then she did not imagine that Patrik Hedström and Erica Falck – he a policeman, she a writer – would become the most famous couple of investigators in Sweden.
“We knew what the last scene was going to be when we started writing the first scene (of The mentalist); It was very clear that this was going to have a beginning and an end,” confirms Läckberg in a press conference with journalists from Spain and Latin America. “We are old enough to know that never say never. Maybe in two years Vincent and Mina will knock on our door and come to us with another story to tell. So who knows if they will appear in the future again.”
His friend, Fexeus, adds that there is a first draft of the last chapter of the book that was written before starting the first novel in the saga. “That draft, almost word for word, is what appears now,” acknowledges the co-author of The mirage-. I love things that have an ending; but the challenge was to convince the publisher: hey this ends”. The body language and communication expert smiles as if he were expressing the gestural translation of the saying “to a good understander, few words are enough.”
The mentalist -which continued with The sect and close now with The mirage– sold more than a million copies in the world, more than 100,000 in Spanish. Viaplay is adapting the trilogy to bring it to the screen in a series that will have three seasons and will be filmed in English. Läckberg explains why the saga works on a global scale. “There is something new about the crime novel genre and it is that we combine a traditional detective story with some He código Da Vincipuzzles, and geeky characters like Vincent and Mina, strange people who have a problem fitting into society. Since we are also quite geeks, we have been able to portray the love we feel for them,” reveals the writer, who is interested in exploring the dark side of humanity through crime novels. “the perfect genre to write in because we need to think about why people commit crimes.”
The Swedish writer summarizes the itinerary of the crime novel, with its twists and turns. “The history of the crime novel can have a little bump from time to time, but There is always passion and love from readers with crime stories. “There may be themes that become fashionable in a short period of time, such as vampires, but the crime novel always returns.” In a genre with a tradition in which men rule and a stigmatizing view towards women, Läckberg has tried to make a small contribution. “In crime novel stories, women were always the victims and the male characters solved the crime. “I have done my part to change the film.”
Despite the boom in Swedish crime novels, many readers in Latin America are still amazed that Läckberg depicts a Sweden that, far from the imaginary of “perfection,” is affected by violence and corruption. “The truth is that this idea of Sweden as a perfect country emerged in the 1950s, but the world has evolved. In Europe, in terms of street gang violence, we are number one. But beyond that, Sweden is still a nice country, although it is not the wonderful country you have in mind. It is not perfect,” the writer demystifies that society plagued by various problems, such as drugs, alcoholism and abuse.
A ghost haunts the world: the ghost of Artificial Intelligence (AI). “In this AI debate, neither everything is so good nor everything is so bad,” reflects Läckberg. If you grab a butcher knife, you can kill someone, but you can also make a wonderful dish. “AI can be used for good or very bad things, it can be a wonderful tool for writers, but it is not going to replace the human touch.” Fexeus, in line with a more “optimistic” perspective, believes that most writers do not want the help of AI because that is why they are writers. “People don’t want a text that no one knows who has written. “I’m not worried, I don’t think it’s going to put us in danger.”