Anders la Motte. // photo by Jeff Richt
Swedish crime writer Anders de la Motte is a former police officer whose 2010 debut thriller Game won the Swedish Crime Writers’ Academy’s Debut Award. Since then, that book’s sequels and the Skåne Quartet have led to de la Motte being one of Sweden’s most popular crime authors. In 2022, the writer published The Mountain King, the first installment in his new Leo Asker series, and on Tuesday, August 26, its sequel, The Glass Man, is out from Atria Books.
In the latest installment, detective Leo Asker “has just settled in as head of the Department of Lost Souls, a unit for odd cases, when her father contacts her after years of silence. A body with no eyes has been found on his farm; the police are chasing him, and he is desperate for Leo’s help. But is her father as innocent as he claims, or is he trying to reel Leo into his vicious grip once again?”
There’s also the return of Asker’s friend Martin Hill, who has a journey of his own with which to deal, as he “moves to a secluded estate to write a biography about the business leader Gunnar Irving, intrigued by the fact that the legendary property contains a private island with an abandoned astronomical observatory. Soon, Hill discovers that the area has more stories to offer—about mysterious lights and mutilated bodies. While Asker and Hill try to find answers, The Glass Man rises from the depths of darkness from which no one ever returns. Nobody but him.”
The Glass Man continues de la Motte’s skill for threading multiple stories and points of view into a compelling read which might leave you needing to keep the lights on at night. The Leo Asker novels are creepy and fascinating, combining clever detective work with villains whose motives go far beyond the usual nefarious trappings into something monstrously sinister.
Ahead of The Glass Man‘s release, we hopped on Zoom with Anders de la Motte to discuss his writing process, having an international audience, and just what has him so obsessed with creepy underground lairs.
The Pitch: What is the translation process like for your books? What are the intricacies of making sure that things you wrote in one language translate well to another, especially given the cultural conventions of where you live versus most of North America?
Anders de la Motte: Really, it’s a very interesting process because I’m translated to about 20 countries, and in some cases the translators actually, have a list of questions that they send to me and I reply to them. You’re right, mostly it’s these cultural phenomena, where it’s a cultural reference that doesn’t match them, and they want me to explain it.
For some countries, I don’t hear anything until there is a book. Right? Sometimes it’s basically like, “It’s all Greek to me.” It could be in Greek, actually. I have no idea whatsoever. Sometimes I’m very surprised because some of them are thinner than the original and then, some are way thicker. This is the language with the most words. They are used to more expressions than Swedish or whatever.
For the English and U.S. translations, I typically read through them if possible and have a close connection with the translator. They can come back and ask questions, but also because quite a few of them are translated from English into another language.
Japan, for instance, doesn’t translate from Swedish to Japanese, they translate English to Japanese. So I try to put more focus on those translations. That’s more or less it. It’s a combination of control, and then you’re just praying that everything works out right.
The interesting thing I find about The Glass Man as a sequel to The Mountain King is that it seems as though you have an interest in the underground–the literal underground–as a setting for your thrillers.
I’m mainly interested in urban exploration and abandoned buildings and a lot of the abandoned buildings are at least underground or dark or darkness, and it’s really a great place to discover darkness in the human soul as well as actual darkness. There are levels of darkness. There’s darkness at night, but darkness underground is something completely different. When there’s no source of light, everything is completely pitch black, and even if it starts out with that setting, it builds some kind of suspense because we’re all, at some level, afraid of the dark, right?
We have this primal fear of darkness and also the curiosity that goes into an explanation, finding out what’s on the other side of the door, what’s on the other side of the wall, what’s inside the building. I think it’s a mix of those two.
When you write about darkness and abandoned buildings and underground and tunnels and minds–I just liked writing about it because it really taps into our deepest human fears for some reason. It’s a combination of those two fascinations, I guess.
How did you get into urban exploration as an interest?
I think I’ve always been a bit interested in it. When you talk about urban explorations, people say, “Oh, that sounds very complicated.” It’s not whatsoever. It’s really that kind of curiosity you had when you were 10. I lived in a small village, and of course, in every small village, there’s an abandoned house or a factory or something old, and there’s a story about it: “There’s a ghost there. There was a murder.” Something like that.
And of course, you have to get in when you’re 10 and have a look, and it’s not as scary as you think it would be. There’s no ghost, of course. Urban exploration is really about keeping that curiosity. Most of us lost it when we started getting interested in girls or music or whatever, but the people who are into urban exploration, they’ve just kept that childlike curiosity, trying to find out what’s on the other side of the door or own the stairs or whatever it is.
I have a friend who’s really, really into it, who’s my urban exploration mentor and he explains it like–he says really beautifully: “It’s like going on a vacation in time,” he says, which is a very good description because you’re visiting this place that might have been closed for many, many years and you’re looking for traces of the people who lived there or worked there or what they did and most of them are now no longer around and everything has been forgotten and abandoned.
You’re still trying to discover pieces of this. And if you just squint a little bit, you can be there and travel in time. I think that’s a beautiful expression and I’ve tried to parallel that. Urban exploration is a big theme for the series. The abandoned and forgotten buildings are a stark contrast to the people who work in the Department of Lost Souls, also known as the forgotten. They’re also abandoned and forgotten about, and no longer useful. There’s a parallel between the actual physical world and between these people. That’s sort of the theme I’m working with.
There’s also a parallel between the idea that, as you mentioned, you go to these places when you’re doing urban exploration and you find out there are no ghosts, but in these Leo Asker books, there is something haunting it. Definitely not paranormal, but extranormal to, to be certain.
Yeah. I mean, I love The X-Files. I was born in the ’70s, so I watched The X-Files a lot, and I like to write that. I don’t wanna write about the supernatural, but I want that little bit of a flirt. The first book is a little bit of it. It’s Nordic mythology, The Mountain King, and this one is a little bit sci-fi. It’s more about people who believe in UFOs than it is actually about UFOs. And a little bit of horror. Of course, there’s a bit of a Frankenstein theme there, as well.
I think one of that is one of the many things I enjoy about writing this series. If you write a detective story, a typical police story, you start with a murder, and then you have a murder investigation, and it ends with a murderer. That’s sort of a set format, which is fine, but here I can work with different formats and different types of storytelling and don’t get bored, which is every author’s nightmare: “I have a great series and some great characters, but now I’m getting bored.”
That’s one of the things I thought when I planned this series, that I wanted to keep the framework as open as possible so I could do all these things. I could have a completely normal story.
I could have this story for the next one, which is called The Rust Forest–I think might be The Rust Woods in the U.S.–going back to Viking mythology a little bit, and rune stones and stuff like that. I can do all these things without getting caught in a format.
The Department of Lost Souls is inspired by a real thing from when you were a police officer. Could you share a little more detail? I love what I’ve read, but you’ve crafted these very intriguing people who can literally contribute in a great way, who have just been forgotten because they’re not conventional in their approach, or they’re broken, or whatever, or all three.
All three. Yes. All of the above. Right. It’s really funny because whatever country I go to and talk about the books, I meet someone from the police and they all go, “Yeah, we have them too. In Spain, we call it ‘Siberia,’ but this was the same thing. This is where we send the undesirables that we can’t fire.” I’m sure they exist in the U.S.
I guess in every big government organization, they would exist because organizations suffocate people. If you’re working for the government, it’s fairly difficult to get fired, and you have to do something with them. You can’t put them in front of the public anymore, so you have to do something. My own experience was, when I started as a young policeman in Stockholm, we worked in a hallway, much like the one in the books, around this little atrium with no windows to the outside, just up.
At the end of this corridor where we worked were three doors that were closed for two months. We didn’t see anyone. I didn’t think anyone was working there. Then, it was someone’s birthday, and Swedish tradition is that you bring in the birthday cake to the coffee room to serve everyone, and more or less, when that birthday cake landed on the table, these three doors swung open.
Three older gentlemen in their early sixties, I would say, looked out, and they were slightly red-eyed and mint-smelling, and sort of nodded and took each piece of birthday cake, nodded again, and disappeared, never to be seen again, more or less, and everyone looked at each other.
“Who are they? Were they here the whole time? What were they doing here?” and then the rumors started going: “Yeah, I know this one. He was a famous police officer, but then, he got a divorce and he started drinking too much. This one over there, he was really violent and he almost killed a criminal during an arrest, and they had to put him there.”
We started moving around these doors very quietly, like, “Don’t disturb them,” and I thought that was such a fascinating story–that we have those people that they can’t put in front of the public, so you have to put them somewhere, and they put them there. I’ve kept that idea and I mixed it with another idea.
If you’re working in the police–especially if you’re working a switchboard, which I did for a couple of months–you have all kinds of people calling the police, especially at night, especially when there’s a full moon. They call about everything. I mean everything: “The King of Sweden is spying on me through the air vent. My neighbor actually killed the Swedish Prime Minister in ’86.”
They call about everything and you have to write it down, because you are representing the government. You have to write it, even though you know it’s nonsense. You write it down. It goes into the system. I was wondering now, where do these reports end up? Who’s the poor soul that has to read through all this garbage?
I combined those two ideas–this Department of Lost Souls, and then they get all these nonsense cases that are normally just closed down, but among all this nonsense, there might be something that’s actually real.
Having read the first two books in the Leo Asker series, I am now eagerly awaiting the third. What’s the release schedule look like for that?
To be honest, I don’t know. It was released here in November last year, so it is out. I guess it’s up to Simon & Schuster when they want to release it. I haven’t seen the final draft of the translation yet, but I’m working on the fourth part right now and it’s so much fun because for The Glass Man, I get a lot of comeback back and people say, “You made all these things up,” and actually I didn’t make a lot of things up.
Most of them are actually based on true events, like the mad scientist believing in UFOs. He’s based on a real character here in Sweden who is an entrepreneur. He started a very successful company and to his dying day, he claimed that he had all his ideas from a meeting with aliens in 1947. There’s even a very underwhelming monument of a flying saucer out in the woods that you can visit. I wasn’t so much fascinated by that, but I was more fascinated by the people who had to work for them for all these years.
“This is our origin story: this company was founded when he was cycling in the woods and there was an alien ship that landed next to him and they gave him the ideas. Yep. That was it. That’s our origin story.”
If you’re working with him, you sort of have to buy into it. I was so fascinated, I had to build something around that, and then most of the other things–the lake with the little island exists. All about the cryogenics, it’s more or less true, all of it. They just haven’t been able to revive someone yet. But you can pay about $50-60 a month to the company.
If you start reasonably young, you pay for that every month, and when you die, they show up with an ambulance full of ice and they take you to Switzerland and they put you in liquid nitrogen. They take all your fluids out and put in some antifreeze and they’ll freeze you to -200 and you will turn into glass. That’s that. All of these things are true. I just twisted it a little bit.
Anders de la Motte’s The Glass Man is out Tuesday, August 26, from Atria Books.