NO ONE IS ONLY BAD NO ONE IS REALLY GOOD
Swedish novelist’s thriller features nuanced characters caught in global crime ring
“The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo meets The Sopranos.”
That’s how one excited European critic responded to Alexander Soderberg, the latest Swedish crime novelist to explode into the international arena.
But Soderberg himself is more measured in his response to the hype engulfing his new thriller, The Andalucian Friend, just published in Canada.
Yes, he is following in the path of the late Stieg Larsson with the first volume of what will be a high- powered trilogy. And, yes, as was the case with The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, his dark and violent thriller does introduce us to a fascinating but morally compromised heroine.
But please don’t join the chorus of voices ready to label him the new Larsson. He knows that such comparisons are inevitable, but the 42- yearold Soderberg wants to be judged on his own merits.
“It’s flattering,” he says of the Larsson parallel. “But I don’t see myself as anyone’s successor. I just wanted to write a good book.”
The irony is that Soderberg, an established TV dramatist who has adapted novels by Camilla Lackberg and Ake Edwardson for the small screen, wasn’t contemplating a book at all when he started work on a scenario about a young woman who becomes caught up in the tentacles of an international crime ring.
“It started out as a synopsis for a TV script. Once I started writing, I realized that the story needed more space. So I reconceived it as a novel.”
The finished novel quickly found a Swedish publisher who also spotted its international potential. When the first hundred pages of an English translation began circulating at the 2011 Frankfurt Book Fair, they touched off a bidding frenzy. Even the furor over a memoir by Amy Winehouse’s father was trumped by the buzz at Frankfurt surrounding The Andalucian Friend.
One of the first to grab it was Liz Foley of the British publishing firm of Harvill Secker. She hailed it as “an incredibly sophisticated and compelling thriller.” She found lots of agreement as publishing houses in Italy, Germany, France, Spain, Norway and Denmark snapped it up as well.
Soderberg admits all this was exciting, but he’s trying to be low key about it. “It’s always gratifying when something you worked on is met with enthusiasm.”
He’s responding by email from his country home in southern Sweden where he is putting the finishing touches on Volume 2 of the trilogy. There’s the clear sense in his messages of a man who is determined to keep what’s happening in some kind of perspective. Indeed, the kind of career success now emerging seems secondary to the personal self- fulfillment which writing brings him.
“I’m not sure if I wanted to be anything in particular when I was growing up,” he says. “All I know is that I started to write early in life. It became a part of me, a sort of necessity. It was a way for me to get to know myself in a way. My writing was mostly personal in the sense that I never showed it to anyone.”
Those were the days when he would write down his personal thoughts. Then he attempted short stories and took stabs at humour. Eventually he found himself writing TV scripts for money — and discovering the full joy of storytelling. “Writing for me is … a need to create things. Writing has always been a solid companion, as a part of my personality.”
Soderberg’s complex crime thriller revels in sharply etched characterizations and astonishing twists and turns before reaching its blood- soaked climax. But it begins deceptively by introducing us to Sophie Brinkman — nurse, widow, single mother — and to the attraction she feels for a charming hospital patient named Hector Guzman. It’s an attraction that intensifies once Hector leaves hospital. Increasingly this is a man with whom she feels she could share her life.
But there’s a nasty downside here: Hector heads a ruthless international crime ring at war with a vicious German syndicate that will stop at nothing to gain control of the Guzman family’s profitable trade in arms and drugs. Sophie is drawn into this world, and in the process her loyalties and her own personal values are put to the test.
Soderberg says the story was triggered by “the idea of a woman in an escalating situation between a crime syndicate and the police.”
It was a “very broad” springboard at the beginning but eventually his storyline became more complex and new characters moved into his narrative — including a frightening hit man, Russian thugs, a freelance arms dealer, a psychotic policeman and a formidable female cop who starts revealing alarming new traits.
Despite his deftness with plotting, nuanced characterization is important to Soderberg. That’s why Hector, for all his brutality, has genuinely appealing qualities.
“It’s not necessarily complexity I was looking for, but subtlety. I wanted my characters to have a full emotional spectrum, just as real people do. Hector has ‘ likable’ qualities and some of my heroes have unlikeable qualities. No one is only bad and no one is really good.”
The pivotal character of Sophie continues to intrigue Soderberg as he works on the remaining volumes of the trilogy. “Sophie makes mistakes, she has flaws. She gets herself caught up in this conflict between rival syndicates and a police force with questionable motives. She’s an intelligent woman, so she knows at some level what she’s getting herself into. This inner conflict stems from an inner sorrow … so she is protecting herself on some level.
“But she is true and grounded, and this authenticity propels her forward. She is more than she realizes.”
Don’t assume, however, that Soderberg immersed himself in the world of The Sopranos to write The Andalucian Friend. He simply trusted in his own fertile imagination.
“I didn’t do any research. I think there is so much organized crime in the world of popular culture — novels, films, true crime — that I felt free enough to create my own version of it without worrying about accuracy.”
As for Soderberg himself, he is a creature of routine. “I usually start working at about 8 o’clock and I write until about 2 or 3,” he reports. “Then I drive to the stables, clear the dung, and take a ride on my horse, Quickstep, a grey and white gelding. We have an unrequited love relationship. I love him and he hates me — kind of. Then I hang out with my three daughters, eat, sleep. New day — same routine.”