On your nightstand now:
Alexander: My big brother's latest book about practical hypnosis and a tome of forensic science for crime scene investigators and prosecutors--it's very exciting and perfect as a bedtime story in the eyes of Lars Kepler. (I myself would rather read Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses.)
Alexandra: A fluorescent, plastic rabbit. When our five-year old daughter comes running in the middle of the night, she uses the rabbit-lamp as some kind of flashlight. Beside the rabbit on the table there are three glasses of water and Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, an author we both really like. I used to have a notebook and a pen beside my bed, in case I suddenly got a tremendous idea in the middle of the night. But nowadays (since we write together) I just wake Alexander up and tell him. His receptiveness to this varies with the quality of the idea.
Favorite book when you were a child:
Alexander: It was a book about a boy called Oscar who only ate houses. He loved bricks, nails, and reinforcing bars--I really identified with that boy (but I don't really remember in what way).
Alexandra: When I was a child I read The Three Investigators. It was almost an obsession. I used to play Three Investigators with my friends. I was Jupiter Jones, the chubby thinker, and my best friend Helena used to be Peter Crenshaw (we couldn't pronounce his last name, we only called him Pete) and Bob Andrews... well, he was played by whomever was around.
Your top five authors:
Alexander: Dostoevsky, Euripedes, Shakespeare, Ovid and Astrid Lindgren.
Alexandra: Rainer Maria Rilke, Emily Dickinson, Anton Chekhov, Charlotte Brontë and Friedrich Dürrenmatt.
Books you've faked reading:
Alexander: Almost all of them, I was about to say, but that's not true. Still... I have faked reading some, if we exclude school--I remember I faked reading Moby Dick once and got away with it.
Alexandra: I'll dare to say it since Book Brahmin isn't a Swedish page: I've faked reading some of our colleagues' and friends' books. It's terrible, forbidden.
Book you're an evangelist for:
Alexander: I've found myself an evangelist for The Exorcist--it must have been 20 years since I read it, but I've been thinking about it lately as a fantastic crime novel, brilliant and very surprising.
Alexandra: Right now it is Joyce Carol Oates's My Sister, My Love. It's a thriller-like drama, very well accomplished. Otherwise, I do have a need for poetry. It's good for me.
Book you've bought for the cover:
Alexander: I remember that I bought a book by Hermann Hesse despite the cover... and actually, I bought J.M. Coetzee's novel Disgrace for the cover. It contained a feeling I just had to explore. It was just a picture of a bony dog on a sandy road close to a rusty diesel tank or something.
Alexandra: That must be one of the Nancy Drew books from when I was a child. I remember that I was very disappointed. Since I loved Jupiter Jones and the exciting plots of The Three Investigators series, I found Nancy Drew too girlish and strangely vague.
Book that changed your life:
Alexander: Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea. I was 18, loved it, but thought to myself: How hard can it be to write a thin novel like that? So I sat down and wrote... it was maybe a bit harder than I'd imagined, but two years later my first novel was published. Well... I was not awarded the Nobel Prize for that one, but it was a start and that changed my life.
Alexandra: For Those I Loved by Martin Gray. I was about 13 when I read it, and the shock I got finding out the crimes of the Second World War gave me a scare that I have not gotten over yet. I think that crime fiction investigates the horrible sides of mankind in order to retell them as stories about justice and meaning in a world that is full of confusion and lack of mercy.
Favorite line from a book:
Alexander: It's a line from an Erskine Caldwell novel called God's Little Acre. I'm not sure I remember it right, but it's about a very pretty woman. The way I read it, it's not dirty at all, it's just full of passion: "She just makes a man want to get down on his knees and lick something."
Alexandra: Maybe I'm totally wrong now, but I think that Raymond Chandler wrote: "Bay City. It sounded like a song. A song in a dirty bathtub." As a young girl I read Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler a lot, and I really liked that kind of hardboiled and humorous metaphor.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
Alexander: One of the strangest and most fascinating novels I've ever read is The Witness by the late Argentinean author Juan José Saer. A group of colonial explorers are attacked and killed by a tribe in South America. Only the main character's life is spared. The tribe brings him home to keep him in their village as a kind of witness to an upcoming cannibalistic orgy.
Alexandra: Tarendol by René Barjavel. It's a love story that ends tragically. Just like when I first saw Romeo and Juliet, it was a story that broke my heart, and I was about 13 and cried and cried for weeks after I had read it. I hated the author who had not saved my heroes. Fiction is a strange and strong drug.
Why is there so much great crime writing going on in Scandinavia?
Alexander: One thought I had: The source for all thrillers is the old fear of darkness, but as a writer, during the writing process, you can actually stop the perpetrators and guarantee happy endings. That's a way to control or disarm the fear for a moment (in the same way a rollercoaster transforms the fear of heights into something fun). People have always been afraid of the dark--not only children, we're all afraid, we only pretend it's getting better when we grow up. And the fact is that it's not easy to find a darker place than Scandinavia during the winter. The sun doesn't even rise for three months in the northern parts. So with all this darkness, it's not that strange we have this strong tradition of crime writing.
Alexandra: I also think an important factor is our self-image. We have grown up in the feeling that our part of the world is the best, the ultimate, perfect--the norm. But the truth is that Sweden is a country with many faces, some of them really grim. This feeling--that our society isn't what it wants us to think it is--creates double feelings. A strange, creeping feeling: something in going on, beneath the surface, something very, very bad.
What was your entrance to the genre?
Alexander: It's actually our love for thrilling movies. We've been married for 19 years, and every evening we watch at least one movie. That's a whole lot of movies if you start counting. When we decided to write a crime novel together, we made a kind of challenge to ourselves--is it possible for us to transfer a filmic atmosphere into words, the high tempo and strong engagement? Because a crime novel must be as thrilling as a movie and as deep as a book. We wanted the readers to feel totally absorbed while reading Lars Kepler: that was our mission, anyway, when we decided to take part of the Scandinavian tradition of crime writing.
How do you write together?
Alexander: Some writers who work together divide the chapters between them, some divide the characters, but we don't do that. We write everything together like one person. We are actually Lars Kepler when we write, and he's just one. We discuss the plot all the time, when we pick up our children at school, when we shop for dinner. We even wake each other up in the middle of the night to discuss turning points. And when we actually write we always sit beside each other and change texts maybe 20 times a day. If we were to flick through The Hypnotist, we couldn't find one single sentence that only one of us wrote. They're all written by Lars.
Alexandra: First, when nobody knew who Lars Kepler was, a female journalist e-mailed us (we had a lars.kepler@hotmail.com address) and said that she had found out that Lars was a woman. The word "bloomers" occurs once in The Hypnotist and she was convinced that no man would know of such a garment. But it was actually Alexander who wrote that word.