Sail of Stone

A CONVERSATION WITH ÅKE EDWARDSON

You have been a university lecturer, journalist, and press officer for the United Nations. What led you to become an author of detective fiction?

It was the only kick left in my life, so I decided to give it a go around 1993. Now it’s been twenty-one books, roughly half of them crime novels, the rest “literary” fiction, some plays, too.

Who inspired the character of Erik Winter?

I was tired of the tired detective in mid-90s novels! I wanted somebody younger, more determined, possessed, on his way full throttle into the new millennium, without mayonnaise stains on a shabby jacket.

The name? It’s to show the complicated personality of Erik Winter: it’s from the albino American blues guitarist Johnny Winter and the black Dutch soccer player Aron Winter.

Sail of Stone, the sixth novel in the Erik Winter series, is now being published in English ten years after its Swedish publication. Do you think the story will be different for an American audience?

An American audience is just as smart as readers in the rest of the world, probably smarter, so there will be no problem. Note that I have only intelligent readers; there are other books for the rest. The themes in Sail of Stone deal with the shadows of the past, the Good War, and the sea; those themes are larger than life and the passage of a mere ten years, or a hundred, makes no difference.

Do you have any advice for English readers just beginning the series with this sixth book? Is there any essential back story a first-time reader should know?

Erik Winter started out in the first novel as one of those arrogant dudes born in the early sixties (I was born in the humble early fifties), and as such he was (in the first couple of novels) very good at his work but pretty lousy at everything else, including relationships. I wanted him to grow, to learn something from his life: to learn the art of living, which is the hardest thing. When you get the hang of it you’re pushing eighty.

So this is a Bildungsroman within the crime story; it’s the only way to make it interesting I think. And when it comes to Erik, in the earlier novels he has married his girl, he has become a father, and he has matured a bit. He’s on his way. He could almost be my friend in this one.

Why did you decide to set your novels in Gothenburg? This novel includes vivid descriptions of many towns along the Scottish coast as well; what drew you to set a large portion of the novel in Scotland? Did you visit the small villages Winter and Macdonald travel through?

Gothenburg is the second largest city in Sweden, with over one million inhabitants. It’s by far the most dynamic city in the north of Europe; Stockholm, for instance, is just a prettily made-up corpse, dead and shining.

When I started out writing about Gothenburg in the early 90s, there was not much literature on the city, and absolutely no crime fiction. It was like no one had taken the city seriously, and I decided to do that, and I’m glad I did: the change here has been tremendous over the years, so the series on Erik Winter is really a saga of a big city changing from Workingman-land to Bladerunner-land. Even the crime is world-class now in Gothenburg; in 1995 I had to make that up.

Scotland and Gothenburg have old ties; streets of Gothenburg are named after Scots, and over the centuries there’s been a lot of business between Gothenburg and Scottish ports, such as Aberdeen, which lies straight over the North Sea. Above all there’s been that old fishermen’s connection, which the novel takes its drama from.

I visited every one of them! On several occasions. So don’t tell me being a novelist isn’t hard labor.

The novel places a significant focus on the relationship dynamics of its characters, and their personal lives play a role in the evolution of the plot as well. How do you strike a balance between developing the personal side of your characters and still telling a compelling crime story?

Yes. It’s the trick really. You can’t have the one without the other, and you really can’t tell a good story with hollow and shallow characters-everything depends on the people you put in the story. It’s important for me to have my readers see that my characters have a huge backstory, even if I don’t tell a word of it. I think you understand what I mean. This is the essence of writing, to make that Gestaltung of characters on the page. They are not alive, but if you do it right they could be any and all of the readers. That is the writer’s duty. If it isn’t done right the writer should work in other honorable professions.

You are a three-time winner of the Swedish Crime Writers’ Academy Award for best crime novel. Congratulations! What do you believe makes a successful crime novel?

We all write the same story. It’s like the blues: three chords. It could be wonderful and it could be awful; it depends on how it’s done, by whom. It’s the simplicity that does it. Simplicity exposes anyone in any field who isn’t up to it.

The three chords in a crime novel are:

1. Mystery

2. Search for answers

3. Solution

That’s all there is. Play on.

The detective work and department interactions are described in detail and seem very authentic. How did you become knowledgeable about such procedures? What type of research do you do to ensure accuracy?

Being a former journalist, I believe in research. Everything that happens in these novels could have happened in the real world, even if it sometimes seems strange. If you write a police procedural, the police procedural has to be absolutely right, like in any novel, about anything.

When it comes to the Winter novels, I’m fortunate to have my Chief Inspector friend Torbjörn, the head of Forensics Department of the Gothenburg Police, to read the whole manuscript in proof. That eliminates the last of my errors.

You include a variety of characters, yet all are well developed and play a specific role in the story. How do you create and maintain so many distinct personalities?

There is a clinical term for that, all those voices in your head… but seriously, this is what writing is about: to give voice and motion to the different personalities you carry-your masculine side, your feminine side, your violent side, your humble, your outspoken side… How could it be any other way? And writers are those who put it on paper.

Several of your books have been made into TV movies in Sweden. Were you involved with their production?

My only involvement in the productions was to condemn them afterward. It’s a writer’s absolute duty to pan anything done from his work regardless of quality. My motto: one single word says more than a thousand pictures.

Did you know how the novel would end before you began writing it? Did you have the Erik Winter series, and the evolution of his character, in mind from the beginning, or did everything develop continuously?

For me, that’s the key question. I don’t know that much when I start writing a novel, any more than the theme and idea of this specific book and a plot sketch on a single piece of paper, but I know one thing: the ending scene. I have to wait out that scene in my head before I can start writing, have to know where it will take place, who’s going to be there (apart from Winter), what the motion and emotion are going to be. Sometimes it takes an extra month or two of waiting to get started. I believe that if I, as a writer, know where I’m going in the book, the reader will know too, and follow.

You concluded the Erik Winter series with the tenth book, which was published in Sweden in 2010. What made you decide Winter’s story was completed?

I certainly didn’t have a whole series of ten big books in mind when I started on the first Winter novel. My plan was to try and finish that one, and have it published! But after that was done I wanted to write another one. I was curious about this lead character I had created, and somewhere in the middle I decided to try and write the Decalogue, that classical number.

The tenth book, The Last Winter, was actually published in Swedish in 2008. I was proud of that final one, and I thought that if I just went on writing more Winter novels, the quality would drop. So I said, this is it. Nevermore a Winter novel.

But I was lying. I’m still curious about this guy, after all this time. We had twelve years together, and you just don’t end such a relationship cold turkey. So this year I’ve decided to write a new big Winter novel, “Winter’s Return,” hopefully coming out in 2014.

In 2010, I published a “literary” novel (though I think my crime novels are just as “literary”), and in August 2011 came a thriller, Meet Me in Estepona.

What are you currently working on?

Currently I’m working on a young adult novel, Indian Winter, the third in a trilogy following Samurai Summer and Dragon Month, and I’m also writing stories for a big collection to be out in 2013, Going Home. So you can’t say I’m only in it for the money.