Lifestyle / Society

How Åre became the perfect spine-tingling setting for this Nordic noir

By Anna Clarke

Viveca Sten. Wearing: Leather coat with knitted arms, €2,200. By Malene Birger. Mulesing-free merino wool turtleneck, €220. House of Dagmar. Photo: Thomas Cooksey

Perhaps it’s the cold, perhaps it’s the dark, but there’s something that makes crime writing and Scandinavia eerily comfortable bedfellows. For bestselling Swedish novelist Viveca Sten – whose spine-tingling books have sold millions of copies all around the world, frequently topping best-sellers lists – it is, in part, her surroundings. Namely, the Stockholm archipelago in the summer and the ski town of Åre in the winter. Here, the latter serves as the backdrop for a thrillingly creepy short story, written exclusively for Vogue Scandinavia

The phrase ‘too close for comfort’ isn’t one that seems to have ever made it into Viveca Sten’s writer’s notes. Well, it can’t have done, considering she spends summers sunning herself at her family house on Sandhamn in Stockholm’s archipelago, an island that has seen decomposing bodies tangled in fishing nets wash up on its idyllic shoreline, severed limbs discarded in its woods and even once the frozen remains of a journalist on a snowy beach. Come winter time, she retreats to Åre, the ski village at which vast police searches for missing children have been mounted and where it’s not entirely untypical for dead bodies to turn up unannounced on the local ski lift. All in her novels, of course.

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For renowned crime writer Sten, who has long since been using her local stomping grounds as inspiration for her bestselling books (including her Åre murders and Sandhamn murders series, both of which have sold millions of copies worldwide) location really is everything. After the characters and a solid plot (“I literally dig into the tiniest detail to make sure that I know everything about the topic and the theme”) comes the all-important setting, “the third protagonist” in any crime novel, she says.

The locations may initially appear picture perfect, but Sten has a way of chipping away at that veneer. After all, where there is life, there is tension. “For somebody like me, who’s got a writer’s brain, I love to explore the cracks in the surface,” she explains. “If everything is absolutely wonderful and perfect, then of course there’s nothing to write about because it’s beautiful to look at but it’s very boring to read about.”

It’s actually quite a confined space. It’s very claustrophobic

Viveca Sten

And Åre, with its snow-peaked mountain ridges and crystal-clear oval lake nestled in the middle, is one such spot that is ripe with this just-below-the-surface agitation. It also provides the perfect setting to return to on the page for The Gondola, a short story penned by Sten exclusively for Vogue Scandinavia. “I knew immediately I wanted to write about Åre,” she says. “It’s staggeringly beautiful, but then of course, you have the tension between the different groups of people. You have the old families who lived in Åre for 10 or 15 generations, then you have the newcomers, people who moved there from Stockholm, and you have the very rich tourists who think that they can do whatever they please.” It’s in amongst this bubbling, boiling pot that Sten’s latest “hidden conflicts” emerge.

In one of the region’s iconic red ski gondolas we meet protagonist (and serial people-pleaser) Andrea, who hitches a ride up the snowy mountain only to find she has an uninvited guest accompanying her en route. “There’s a vibe to the gondola that’s usually associated with holiday fun, beautiful views, beautiful mountains, with the lake in the background,” says Sten, who turns that concept on its head. “It’s actually quite a confined space. It’s very claustrophobic.”

Ski resorts by their makeup are the perfect crime scene: they’re hectic (lots of distractions) and anonymous. When someone is in full getup – goggles, helmet and ski suit –it’s hard to identify one skier from the next. That’s why even Michelle Obama loved this pastime, Sten explains, when she was on the slopes she could be anyone and no one.

Having spent years in the high-pressure law world and heading up the largely male-dominated executive committees of Sweden’s most prominent organisations (she held a position as General Counsel at PostNord until 2011) before becoming a novelist, has Sten ever experienced any uncomfortable moments of her own? “In my generation, you know, it was just unheard of to protest and to say, ‘excuse me. You know what?’ As I grew older, and more experienced, of course I wouldn’t let those certain kinds of remarks pass anymore,” she says.

These days Sten also occupies another post: chairwoman of Vogue Scandinavia. “The allure of launching the world’s most famous fashion magazine in Scandinavia was irresistible,” she says. Though her novels have previously been adapted to the small screen – The Sandham Murders has to date had a worldwide audience of about 100 million viewers - and her Åre Murders series will soon get a similar treatment courtesy of Viaplay – this marks the first time Sten’s work has inspired a fashion editorial. For Sten, stepping on set was quite the experience.

“There were so many people,” she says. “I had no idea you needed so many people for a fashion shoot.” Then there were the racks and racks of clothes and tables full of accessories. “I could have easily taken home any single thing,” she notes. When she took her place in front of the camera, however, she wasn’t nervous – after all, she’s travelled the world promoting her books and certainly knows her way around a photoshoot. “Usually if I do press photos, I’m much more particular about what I wear – I like to be involved and go through everything with the stylist ,” she says. “This time I completely relinquished control, which is very unlike me. I thought, ‘This is not my turf’ – I had complete faith in you guys.”

Vogue Scandinavia