Camilla Lackberg & The Creative Writing Assignment that Launched a Bestselling Crime Series

“I was probably the unhappiest economist in Sweden,” Camilla Läckberg told me, recalling her life before she began writing some of that nation’s most popular crime novels. She’d always wanted to be a writer, she explained, “and one day my mother and my now-ex-husband got sick of hearing me talk about it, so they signed me up for a writing course… Before that, I just couldn’t believe how you would form all those words together; taking the course, the idea became more down-to-earth. It became a craft, a skill.” For one of the class writing assignments, Läckberg was told to write the first chapter of a book: “I didn’t have the idea before the course,” she emphasized. “It wasn’t something that had been with me for years.” But once the initial concept of a respected biographer who returns to her hometown after her parents’ death and soon discovers her childhood friend has been murdered was set down, it stuck with her, and two-and-a-half years later, she had finished The Ice Princess.

Her debut novel landed with a small publisher and sold 3,000 copies—“not bad for a Swedish debutante,” she reflected—but not enough to quit her job as an economist for a cell phone company, either. So she found an agent who was able to place the sequel with a larger house; that book sold 30,000 copies, and by the fifth volume in the series, she was selling 200,000 copies in Sweden alone. (It helped that she’d also had two maternity leaves, during which she wrote two more books, those sales building up as her former career approached its conclusion.) The series now stands at seven books in Sweden, as The Ice Princess finally arrives to this country in an English-language edition this summer. Pegasus is publishing the first three books in hardcover, but less than a week after I met Läckberg during her visit to New York City for Thrillerfest, Free Press and Pocket Books announced they’d bought up the paperback rights to the initial triptych and would publish them in trade and mass market editions simultaneously.

“I always knew I wanted to write a series,” Läckberg said, “I love reading them, and as a writer it’s a wonderful opportunity to develop characters. I’ve been living with Erica and Patrik [the writer-turned-sleuth and her friend on the local police force] for so long, they’re like my friends now, I know them that well.” Because she conducted the interview in fluent English, I asked if she had any hand in the translation of her novels for this market. “I don’t have the rhythm for the language the way a native would,” she explained. “I don’t hear the fine tuning in the melodies of the language. And by the time I’ve finished a book,” she laughed, “I’ve proofread it about ten times already.” She is, however, on hand to help her translators sort out unfamiliar cultural concepts—which prompted me to ask about the various authors whose biographies Erica is said to have written. They’re real? I asked. Oh yes; “they’re the writers they force you to read in school because they’re Swedish classics,” Läckberg smiled.

22 July 2010 | interviews |