Cilla and Rolf Borjlind are script writers for crime and thrillers, and bestselling authors.
Below is a Q&A with the authors.
1.What can you tell us about your new book Spring Tide?
Spring Tide begins with a brutal murder of a young woman on a beach on the island Nordkoster, at the Swedish westcoast in 1987. In 2011 a young woman, Olivia Rönning, who is studying at the Police Academy in Stockholm, gets a voluntary coldcase task to work with during the summer holidays; Olivia picks the Nordkoster-case. She chooses the case partly because it puzzles her, the victim has not been identified, and partly because her dead father was one of the investigators in 1987. As the person she is, she rushes into the case, but when she tries to find the head of the investigation, detective superintendent Tom Stilton, she gets problems, no one seems to know where he his… And when she finally finds him it’s not where she expected...
Spring Tide is about a horrifying murder in 1987, but also about homeless people in Stockholm, violated kids and an exploitative multinational mining company.
2. Please can you tell us about the characters of Olivia and Tom.
Olivia Rönning is a young, ambitious woman who studies to be a policeofficer. She is sometimes too eager for her own good. Tom Stilton is an ex detective superintendent who has left his profession some years ago. He is tired of people and of himself. He has given up on most things in life. They are two very different characters in age, stages in life, and as people.
3. Please can you tell us about your writing process.
When we started working with Spring Tide we had the riddle from the beginning; the murder of the woman on the beach was an old idea. But then we had to solve the case. What had happened? We started creating the characters and constructing the story from the beginning to the end. It was very important to us that this work was very thouroghly done, since there are two of us everything must be in place before the actual writing starts. We spent a lot of time talking and changing things when new ideas turned up. After that we broke the story apart in short scenes, without dialogue. Then we put all those scenes up on a big wall, and tried to see any problems. After solving them, we divided the chapters and characters between ourselves. We are still using this method at the moment when writing book number three.
4. The book has been described as cinematic so is this something you have in mind when you were writing it?
Since we are scriptwriters from the beginning we think that it is something we have in us. We think in scenes, pictures and motions which probably gives a special effect when we write in literary form.
5. Can you tell us something about the Spring Tide TV series?
What we know at the moment is that a Swedish production company, Filmlance International, is going to produce the series and that we are going to write the script as soon as we have finished our third book. Probably it’s going to be a ten hour long series. Filmlance is behind crime-series as ”The Bridge” and Arne Dahl series that has been shown in the U.K. as well. They have bought the rights to all our three books.
6. How different is writing novels to writing for the screen?
There are some differences but also many similarities. Both forms demand the same kind of work when it come to create characters and story. The difference lies within the media; in a book you have to describe persons, environments, clothes, feelings and so on, in detail. On the screen, actors/directors/set designers interpret those things. A script is mainly dialogue and short descriptions to the actors/directors. As a scriptwriter you are one link in the chain of persons working with the final result, the film or TV-series. As a writer of a book it is what you write, that the reader gets. No one else’s interpretation of what you have written. Another big difference is within the language itself; a book demands a special voice and a literary tone.
To us, though, the biggest difference is the freedom you have when you write a book. We can write whatever we want without having a producer telling us that it’s too expensive.
7. What prompted you to move away from writing for the screen and take on crime fiction?
We have been writing for tv and screen together, for about 20 years, and mostly crime, so the step was not so big to us. We had been talking about writing a book for many years but hadn’t found the time to do it. But after finishing the adaption of the Swedish crimewriter Arne Dahl’s books, we decided to take a break from scriptwriting and do something completely our own, we wanted make our own universe. And we have not regretted it.
8. What is next for you both?
Right now we are in the middle of the work with our third book in the series and when it’s finished we will begin to write the script on Spring Tide.
