Episode 159 · 2022-11-05 · 35:45 · Recorded in English
Joona Linna and Nordic Noir | Lars Kepler | Negotiator 159
Alexander Ahndoril and Alexandra Coelho Ahndoril, who write together as Lars Kepler, explain why writing as a couple required inventing a third author entirely, and how they were eventually tracked down to their summer house by torchlight. The Finnish detective Joona Linna was created out of a wish to put a Finnish hero at the centre of Swedish crime fiction at a time when Finns were not well regarded there, with Väinö Linna's Rokka as the model. The couple also open up where Jurek Walter came from, the one idea they felt The Silence of the Lambs had left unused, and why researching real serial killers turned out to be too bleak to use as material. The idea for The Spider was found in a Småland forest in the pandemic summer of 2020. Recorded in English.
Core theses
- The pen name was not marketing: two authors writing one voice needed a third identity that belonged to neither of them.
- Joona Linna is a deliberate corrective — a Finnish hero placed at the centre of Swedish crime fiction at a moment when that was an unlikely choice.
- Jurek Walter exists because the authors thought The Silence of the Lambs had left one idea on the table, and the character is their answer to it.
- They stopped researching real serial killers because the material was unusable, which says something about where the genre's realism actually stops.
Watch and listen
Summary
Alexander Ahndoril and Alexandra Coelho Ahndoril, who write together as Lars Kepler, explain why writing as a couple required inventing a third author entirely, and how they were eventually tracked down to their summer house by torchlight. The Finnish detective Joona Linna was created out of a wish to put a Finnish hero at the centre of Swedish crime fiction at a time when Finns were not well regarded there, with Väinö Linna’s Rokka as the model. The couple also open up where Jurek Walter came from, the one idea they felt The Silence of the Lambs had left unused, and why researching real serial killers turned out to be too bleak to use as material. The idea for The Spider was found in a Småland forest in the pandemic summer of 2020. Recorded in English.
Inventing a third author
Two people writing one book can share the work, but they cannot share a voice by splitting it. Lars Kepler exists because the Ahndorils needed a single author who was neither of them, and the pseudonym is a working method before it is a marketing decision. The story of being found out at the summer house is the good anecdote; the reason for the name is the substantive part.
A Finnish hero in Stockholm
Joona Linna was a deliberate choice at a time when a Finn was not the obvious protagonist for Swedish crime fiction. The model was Rokka from Väinö Linna’s Tuntematon sotilas, which places the character’s lineage in Finnish literature rather than in the genre.
Where the research stopped
The couple read into real serial killers and abandoned it — the material was too bleak to build fiction on. That boundary is worth noting precisely because the genre trades on the claim of being grounded in the real thing.
Watch
The recording lives on the Neuvottelija channel: Joona Linna Nordic Noir | Lars Kepler | Negotiator 159. A Finnish edition of this episode is published at www.neuvottelija.fi.
In depth
The Neuvottelija AI editions carry a long-form write-up of this episode: English · suomeksi.
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People and topics
Guests: Alexander Ahndoril, Alexandra Coelho Ahndoril
Topics: Leadership & Governance