Sara Blaedel, author of 'A Harmless Lie' - Denmark's 'Queen of Crime' talks about having an organised day, selling internationally, and killing for a living
Writer's Routine
Dan Simpson
4.9 • 599 Ratings
🗓️ 7 April 2022
⏱️ 38 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Sara Blaedel is Denmark's 'Queen of Crime'. 3 million copies have been sold in Denmark alone. The country has under 6 million people living in it.
She's published 25 books, and is best known for her Detective Louise Rick stories. The new one is 'A Harmless Lie', in which Louise has to rush back from holiday in Thailand, after a panicked phone call from her father. Her brother has attempted suicide, and everything is entangled in his estranged wife, and a girl who went missing a decade before.
We discuss her organised and thorough work-day, also how much she thinks about an international audience when she writes in Danish, and why she returns to write about murders for a living, which can be hugely emotionally draining.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, welcome along. It's a brand new episode of writers' routine this week, |
| 0:12.5 | chatting to Denmark's Queen of Crime, Sarah Bladel. She's best known for the Louise Rick books, |
| 0:18.8 | and she's published 25 different novels along the way. |
| 0:22.6 | We talk about how much she thinks of an international audience when she's writing in Danish, |
| 0:28.9 | how much do things need to be changed? Also, talking about change, how much her routine has |
| 0:33.7 | changed over the course of all those books. And you can hear what her son thinks about her murdering people when he gets home. |
| 0:41.0 | He just needed to look at me and then he said, |
| 0:44.0 | Mom, did you kill someone today? |
| 0:46.7 | He got some. |
| 0:47.6 | So, of course, yes, if I have a day where I've killed someone, |
| 0:52.6 | then it has an infect on me |
| 0:55.9 | but very often |
| 0:58.4 | I try to stop in a place where |
| 1:01.7 | I'm still curious |
| 1:03.8 | I'm still into it |
| 1:05.6 | so there's all that on the way stay there |
| 1:07.2 | it's a brand new episode of writer's routine |
| 1:09.4 | I'm Stay there. It's a brand new episode of Writers' Routine. |
| 1:19.2 | Yes, welcome along to the show. My name's Dan Simpson. Thank you for being there. |
| 1:25.3 | This is Writers Routine, where we take a look inside the working day of the most successful authors around. |
| 1:28.4 | And I'm delivering on that promise today, by the way. |
| 1:33.4 | It's a brilliant chat for you this week with Sarah Bladel, Denmark's Queen of Crime. |
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