Johan Theorin's Books | Crime Books | Prize-Winning Fiction

Biography

Johan Theorin was born in 1963 in Gothenburg, Sweden. His mother was from Öland, a large Swedish island in the Baltic Sea. Öland is separated from the mainland by a three-and-a-half-mile bridge and is known for its summer holiday homes. The Swedish Royal family’s summer residence is on the island, and as a child, Johan – like many others – spent his summer holidays there. He stayed with his mother’s family, who have their roots on the island and were sailors, fishermen and stone cutters. During those holidays, he was fed a steady diet of the island’s supernatural tales and folklore.

Professional Career

Theorin grew up to become a writer and journalist, publishing short stories in Swedish newspapers and magazines. He also wrote interactive scripts for the internet and computer games.

“Interactive scripts are tricky to write because the script becomes not chronological but more like a maze, with many different paths the plot can take. But there is, of course, freedom in such storytelling compared to traditional novels that only have a single course of action.” (Deckarhuset)

As well as writing fiction, Theorin was a journalist for Svenska Dagbladet, Sweden’s third-largest paper. Whilst here, he wrote a series of articles about Sweden’s pornography industry, visiting many of the sex shops in and around Stockholm and talking to staff and customers so he could write about the trade.

“It was really depressing to visit that environment. A feeling of loneliness and vulnerability. And yet it attracts many men. We all have sexual needs, but pornography kidnaps sexuality and packages it as a commodity.” (Selma Stories)

The experience and articles provided the basis for a play in 1999, but after that, the knowledge lay dormant for almost twenty years.

The Öland Quartet

In 2007 Theorin published Skumtimmen (released in the U.K. as Echoes from the Dead a year later). It became a best seller in Sweden and was voted best first mystery by the Swedish Crime Writers’ Academy and the British Crime Writers’ Association. Set on Öland, it recounts the story of a six-year-old boy who went missing in the fog one September evening.

The following year, Theorin published another novel, Nattfåk or The Darkest Room. Again, set on Öland, though this time in winter, a young mother drowns in mysterious circumstances. The book outstripped its predecessor in the award stakes. This time it won best novel awards in the UK and Sweden, and it also won the coveted Glass Key Award, which is given jointly by all the Scandinavian crime writers’ associations.

Theorin followed these two books with The Quarry and The Voices Beyond, also set on Öland, to finalise a quartet of books.

“The goal was to write a novel for each of Öland’s seasons – an Öland quartet where the weather and the atmosphere of the landscape affect the characters of the story.” (Wayback Machine)

Writing Style

Johan Theorin’s books are hard to pigeonhole. UK judges of The Darkest Room said that it was “impossible to reduce … to ghost story, a police procedural or a gothic tale” and Theorin reinforces that thought:

“They are sort of a combination of dark crime stories and Scandinavian folklore and ghost stories. They are not horror or fantasy stories, really – the supernatural mostly stays in the background, and I leave it up to the readers to decide if there really are such things as ghosts and premonitions.” (Dead Good Books)

Like the novels of Fred Vargas, Theorin’s stories are permeated with myths and folklore, but whilst Vargas’s tales are surreal, Theorin’s stories leave you wondering what is true.

The other notable feature of Johan Theorin’s books is how he draws on the history and the landscape of Öland, a strange place which, in the summer months, is thriving with tourists, yet in the winter, is a remote, isolated and unimaginably harsh island.

‘But be careful of your eyes as you’re walking. The blizzard blows up sand and earth along with the snow.’

‘OK.’

‘And never, ever sit down to rest, Tilda, no matter how tired you are.’
The Darkest Room

Throughout his books, Theorin plays on this dichotomy.

“For us Swedes, the island is well-known as a popular summer place with lots of sun, sailing and sandy beaches. More than 200,000 tourists visit Öland in July and the Swedish royal family has a summer house on the west coast of the island,”

“But the rest of the year very few people live there, and especially up in the north where I live there are many villages which are completely empty most of the year. These contrasts have always fascinated me, and in both these novels, I speculate about the sinister and spooky things that can take place in isolated villages during the winter on Öland.” (The Guardian)

Leaving the Island

Since the success of the Öland quartet, Theorin grew bored of writing about the island, turning his attention to a Swedish fantasy series and a couple of stand-alone novels. The Asylum is set in a nursery connected to a high-security prison for psychopaths, and Swedish Love (not available in English) picks up on his experience as a journalist. It takes place on a porn film shoot in an isolated farmhouse and is a tale of sex and abusive male power.

In 2021, eight years after the last of the Öland quartet, Theorin’s novels returned to the island with the publishing of Benvittring (Weathered Bone, yet to be translated into English), which is a continuation of the quartet. Fortunately, the publishers have rechristened the series “The Öland suite”, so there is hope for a couple more novels.