Läckberg’s Ghostwriting Dispute

Rumors have circulated for at least the last couple of years that Swedish crime novelist Camilla Läckberg—“the queen of Nordic noir,” as she’s often styled in the press—employs ghostwriters to boost her literary output. She has previously denied the charges, but a new report ratchets up scrutiny of her work. From The Guardian:

Läckberg, a star in her native Sweden who has been hailed as the country’s answer to Agatha Christie for her output of thrillers, kids’ stories and cookbooks, last week had to deny that she had tricked her admirers into buying books that were not written by her, after data analysis suggested she had used unattributed ghostwriters for some of her recent novels.

For an article in online magazine Kvartal, which became the talk of literary Sweden at this month’s Gothenburg book fair, journalist Lapo Lappin ran Läckberg’s novels through a “stylographic” data tool, which counts the most common words in a text, processes them using statistical methods and then compiles the results in a diagram. The tool found a consistency of style in the mystery novels set in her hometown of Fjällbacka that first made Läckberg’s name, centred around husband-and-wife detective duo Erica Falck and Patrik Hedström. A more recent series of revenge thrillers, however, was mapped on a different corner of its diagram altogether.

Kvartal’s journalist fed books by Sweden’s eight bestselling crime writers into another forensic linguistics tool, JGAAP—the same AI-powered programme that in 2013 revealed Harry Potter novelist JK Rowling to have authored the crime novel The Cuckoo’s Calling under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith.

The programme noted a marked similarity between the style of Läckberg’s revenge novels The Golden Cage (2019) and Wings of Silver (2020) and the output of fellow crime writer Pascal Engman [Femicide], who has worked as Läckberg’s editor at publishing house Forum. With another short novel, 2021’s Kvinnor utan nåd (Women Without Mercy), the programme identified Engman as the sole author.

Läckberg has strongly rebutted these latest claims, contending they’re attacks on her versatility as a stylist. At the same time, she acknowledges that Engman helped her “find a new voice” for her revenge yarns (“It’s not a secret by any means. And obviously I have succeeded very well.”). For his part, Engman denies he’s helped Läckberg as anything more than her editor. “Anyone who has published a book,” he tells Kvartal, “knows that it is an editor’s job to work with the author’s text in various ways. For the sake of clarity, I strongly refute what you are insinuating.”

All of this once more raises the question of whether it’s outright wrong for best-selling novelists to employ ghostwriters, or whether such partnerships are acceptable so long as credit is given publicly to the collaborators. “James Patterson is very open about the fact that he provides the plots, and other authors provide the words,” says journalist Lappin. “I can see the benefits of that approach. If an author were to merely credit their ghostwriter with a thank-you note at the back, that strikes me as false.”

There is surely more to be heard about this contoversy.