Crime Writers

Photo: Ola Erikson / Forflex (2022)

Sample of authors

Lagercrantz, David

David Lagercrantz is a Swedish author and journalist born in Solna and brought up there and in Drottningholm, both near Stockholm. He attended the Kungsholmen upper-secondary school and read philosophy and theology at university before transferring to the University of Gothenburg Department of Journalism, Media and Communication in the 1980s. After graduation he worked, among other things, at...

Further reading

Theme article

History of crime fiction

By: Johan Wopenka

Depending upon how one wishes to define the concept ‘crime fiction’, it is possible to trace its history and roots back in time. When Dorothy L. Sayers compiled her comprehensive three-volume anthology Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery and Horror (1928–34) she started with two stories from the Old Testament, and when Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee (alias Ellery Queen) wrote their fundamental The Detective Short Story : A Bibliography (1942), they listed eight Chinese collections of short stories which are believed to have been written down between 600 A.D. and 1800 A.D., some of them containing stories based on an older, oral tradition.

Further reading

Literary figures

Arto Söderstedt

Gender: Male

A Finland-Swedish top lawyer who tired of his job and moved with his family to Sweden where he trained to become a police officer. After a spell in Västerås, Arto Söderstedt was transferred to the Swedish Police Board’s special A-group unit, which Arne Dahl (pseudonym for Jan Arnald) has written about. After the group was split up, he returned in Dahl’s books about the international police force O...

Further reading