‘A treasure hunt about the past’: Writer Johana Gustawsson on what makes crime fiction so popular

If I’d met Johana Gustawsson without ever reading her fiction, I wouldn’t have thought she was a crime fiction writer. “You’d think I wrote romance, yes?” she quips as she laughs, calling me out on my prejudice.

Gustawsson’s critically acclaimed Roy and Castells series, including Block 46, Keeper, and Blood Song, has won the Plume d’rgent, Balai de la découverte, Balai d’Or, and Prix Marseillais du Polar awards and is now published in 19 countries. The Malayalam translations of the series have crossed multiple reprints, making Gustawsson a regular resident of the crimes section in most DC Books bookstores. As great crime fiction rouses the arrival of producers, a TV adaptation of Gustawsson’s series is currently underway in a French, Swedish and UK co-production.

In a conversation with Scroll, Gustawsson spoke about crime as a serendipitous genre, the absence/depiction of violence in her novels, her relationship with her father, who is her first editor, and the writing life as a woman who never quite fits in.

You’ve mentioned that you wrote the Roy and Castells series to bear witness to the overlooked stories of the Second World War. What drew you to crime fiction as the vehicle for these stories, especially since the genre is often seen as more...

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