Christoffer Carlsson was born in 1986 in Marbäck, Sweden. He holds a PhD in criminology from Stockholm University and is one of Sweden's leading crime experts. He is the youngest winner of the Best Swedish Crime Novel of the Year, which he has won twice. The New York Times named his debut, Blaze Me a Sun, one of the best crime novels of the year. He lives in Stockholm.
Carlsson's new novel is The Living and the Dead.
At CrimeReads the author tagged four favorite crime novels that he finds himself "returning to again and again, usually late at night," including:
Kerstin Ekman, BlackwaterRead about the other entries on the list.
On Midsummer’s Eve, a woman stumbles upon two dead bodies in a tent. Eighteen years later, the killer is found.
Eighteen years. Makes you think about time and memory. That’s part of Blackwater’s immense power, for me—the way the novel understands time and people, how crime ripples through years and changes.
Maybe a memory is a sort of story that takes place inside, over and over again, and just like a story does, it evolves and changes with time. Memory is far too fickle a thing to capture the past; in Blackwater, memory is the opposite of what it claims to be. Memory succeeds at what nothing else can: memory makes itpossible to be reconciled with one’s history. What was once unbearable is no longer so. It is only a memory.
As I’ve heard it, the story goes: entering the kitchen where her husband sat having coffee one morning, Ekman said, “You know what? I think I’m writing a crime novel.”
As if the novel had surprised her.
“The novel showed me a double murder,” she said later. “If a novel does that, as a writer you need to try and figure them out, because the reader will. You have to respect your reader.”
Ekman had to go deeper, to find her way out. It was the only way; the novel challenged her to. So she did and wrote what is, for me, my favorite crime novel ever to come out of Sweden. Perhaps it is the Great Swedish Novel; it’s certainly a contender.
What is the Swedish experience, exactly? I’m not sure. I’m trying to figure that out.
In Blackwater, no one’s a villain, no one’s a hero. Everyone you meet is so incredibly ordinary and still mysterious. Everyone is searching for meaning wherever they can find it: in nature, community, in the idea of home, in silence, in their own history, in their sins. And possibly, eventually, only find it in the rare moment of truly touching, reaching another human being.
Blackwater is one of Elizabeth Hand's six favorite books.
--Marshal Zeringue
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