A Word from the author Sarah Hollister who co-wrote This Land is No Stranger with Gil Reavill

Today, I am absolutely delighted to welcome  Sarah Hollister onto The Crime Warp. Sarah is one half of the Reavill and Hollister duo whose book, featuring Detective Veronika Brand, This Land Is No Stranger, has recently been released. Today Sarah tells us all about how the inspiration for the novel came about.

Dear Reader

 One night as I wandered through a heavy snowfall in the city of Stockholm, Sweden,  feeling lost and at loose ends in my adoptive country. I came upon a scene that stopped me dead in my tracks. A woman sat on the sidewalk, wrapped in a mound of blankets. She leaned against a storefront surrounded by other women, as if they were her ladies in waiting. Some held paper cups of steaming coffee.

They noticed me staring and smiled. One of the women extended an empty paper cup and I put a 20-kronor bill in it.

I asked where they were from. The queen mother of them answered, Bulgaria. It was the year 2007 and this was the first wave of Roma mendicants to appear on the streets of Stockholm. Bulgaria and Romania had just joined the European Union. As an American, I was unfamiliar with the Roma, still calling them gypsies and charmed by films depicting them as carefree travelers.

 

I watched as shoppers hurried past the little band of strangers, swaddled under their blankets, invisible. I felt strangely warmed by their camaraderie, smiles and togetherness.

At the same time, this is Sweden, a cold country. Where do they sleep at night? How could this obvious contradiction to the Swedish image of ‘for the good of all’ exist in plain sight?

 I was troubled. Someone should bring attention to the plight of these people. But who and how?

I considered my own arrival to Sweden, in no way comparable--a car picked me up at the airport and delivered me to a house with a warm fire burning in the fireplace, a glass of wine presented. In the years since, I have realized how precarious I was given that the house, the car, the wine, none of it belonged to me. The society I had entered was closed to me, unfamiliar, confusing in spite of my Western privilege, a passport, a job, housing and the fact that I ‘look’ Swedish as I’ve been told a number of times. These buffers are not available to the Roma.. 

 

Twenty years on and I am still confused, but less so. I have learned a few things, some of the language and many of the cultural signposts, but I will always be an outlier. There are certain barriers I will never cross, the DNA of thousands of years is bred into the blood of these Viking descendants. My intermediate level language skills leave me stranded in a group of Swedes who, not surprisingly, prefer their own language, even though most Swedes speak English, many fluently. Those who don’t will shy away from engagement with me. They are reserved, hesitant about initiating conversation or making small talk. Networking is only now making its way into the culture.

For the Roma, those from Romania and Bulgaria, most are illiterate, socially isolated, kept within the confines of their outlier status even within their own home countries, universally scorned, it’s understandable that they look to each other for nourishment and protection.

Five hundred years before this current migration of Roma, a group of Roma arrived in Sweden and stayed. Today their descendants are called Swedish Roma; they have fought for their civil rights and won. They are Swedish citizens, taxpayers and professionals. You will find them in academia, art galleries, and parliament. 

Like myself, they may appear assimilated, yet they stand apart as do other immigrants who journey in search of a better life. Three months after standing on the roof of midtown Manhattan high rise, watching the planes hit the World Trade Center towers, I moved to Sweden to be with my long-distance lover, a Swede. You could say I sought shelter. Though the affair fizzled, I stayed on feeling at times the proverbial stranger in a strange land. To this day, I have one foot here and the other back in America.

Again, I don’t equate my life with what the Roma or other refugees endure in their search for freedom from abuse. For years I thought about how to write about the plight of the Romany mendicants in Sweden, you could say the other of the other. So far down the social scale are they. 

How to approach the subject remained elusive, until the day I watched a tall man with a bag thrown over his shoulder, stop and collect coins from a young woman mendicant. Or so it appeared to me. Another piece of the story fell into place. Were the Roma mendicants, as some journalists suggested, being managed by outside, more sinister forces?

The tall man with the bag slung over his shoulder, became a mysterious Roma godfather figure and a key part of the narrative in the book I co-authored with New York Crime writer, Gil Reavill.

The theme of social critique is a constant in Nordic noir, separating the genre from other more purely crime fiction novels and detective procedurals. Our book is titled This Land is No Stranger, taken from a poem by the Swedish poet Gunnar Eklöf: “I am a stranger in this land / but this land is no stranger within me.”

 Nearly all our characters are, in one way or another, outliers and through them we show what it means to be the other. 

This Land Is No Stranger Blurb

With a career that is spiraling out of control and a nasty drug habit that has taken her to

Available here

rock bottom, NYC detective Veronika Brand is looking for a way out. When a call from Sweden interrupts her personal chaos, the foreign tongue of her distant Swedish relatives pulls her across the Atlantic with the lure of adventure and escape. But what she finds is far from the idyllic picture her grandmother painted. Instead of long languid summers basking in the midnight sun, she unearths secrets long since buried in the frozen ground.

In Krister Hammar, a local Sami land rights lawyer, she thinks she has found a kindred spirit. But when they stumble upon a brutal murder scene in a manor house owned by the rivals of her family, she starts questioning his truth. She finds herself being moved like a chess piece between the desolate region of Härjedalen in the north and the steely-cold streets of Stockholm, scrambling to find the links between her family history, a trail of missing Roma girls, and a series of vicious murders. In unfamiliar territory on the wrong side of the law, Veronika has her sights set only on the beast that preys on the wicked. Will she be able to see past the lure of the northern lights to the dark secrets that threaten to destroy her?

With a spin on traditional Nordic noir and Scanoir genres, this murder mystery thriller follows female protagonist and disgraced NYC cop Veronika Brand as she escapes her homegrown problems only to find herself in unfamiliar territory in the home of her ancestors, Sweden.

  Author Bios

Sarah Hollister is an American writer and playwright, living the Scandinavian reality on one of the 24,000 islands in the Swedish archipelago near Stockholm. Her plays Sisters’ Dance and Relative Truth have been produced in New York City, and she is a member of the Dramatikerförbund (Sweden’s drama guild), which awarded her residences at the Henning Mankell House in northern Sweden. She is a founding member of the Stockholm Writers Festival. A New York-based screenwriter and journalist, Gil Reavill often writes about crime, both in fiction, with the “13” series of thrillers (13 Hollywood Apes, 13 Stolen Girls, 13 Under the Wire) and non-fiction, with Mafia Summit and Aftermath, Inc. Reavill also co-wrote the screenplay for the corrupt-cop feature film, Dirty, starring Cuba Gooding, Jr. 

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