Leif G W Persson Books in Order

If you want the big political trilogy: Between Summer's Longing and Winter's End → Another Time, Another Life → Falling Freely, as If in a Dream
If you want blackly comic police work: Linda, As in the Linda Murder → He Who Kills the Dragon → The Sword of Justice
If you want one later, self-contained case: The Dying Detective

Leif G W Persson was born in Stockholm on March 12, 1945, and grew up in a working-class home in the Gärdet area. His father worked as a laborer and carpenter, and his mother was a homemaker. The world he came from, ordinary people, official power, and the gap between the two, stayed with him.

Crime and the state became his lifelong subjects.

Before he became a novelist, Persson trained as a criminologist and built a career inside and around Swedish policing. He worked for the National Police Board, taught criminology, and later served as professor of criminology linked to the Swedish police until retiring in 2012. He also became a familiar public voice in Sweden, explaining criminal cases on television and in newspapers with a style that was blunt, funny, and easy to recognize.

The sharp turn in his life came in 1977. During the Geijer affair, a political scandal involving allegations around Sweden's justice minister, Persson was identified as a source and lost his job at the police board. The episode hit him hard, but it also pushed him toward fiction. In 1978 he published Grisfesten, a novel that drew on the same world of police work, secrecy, and official embarrassment.

He came to crime fiction with case files in the back of his head.

That background helps explain why Persson's novels are so interested in systems, not just suspects. In Between Summer's Longing and Winter's End, Another Time, Another Life, and Falling Freely, as If in a Dream, he follows Lars Martin Johansson and his colleagues through investigations that open onto Cold War politics, intelligence failures, and the long afterlife of the 1986 murder of Prime Minister Olof Palme. Readers who like neat puzzle mysteries sometimes find these books sprawling. Readers who like dry humor, patient police work, and big political shadows tend to settle in fast.

He can also write on a smaller, meaner scale. Linda, As in the Linda Murder, He Who Kills the Dragon, and The Sword of Justice center on Evert Bäckström, one of the most unpleasant detectives in modern crime fiction, vain, greedy, lazy, and still annoyingly good at his job. Then there is The Dying Detective, in which an older Johansson, laid up after a stroke, tries to solve the murder of a child from a hospital bed. That book won the Glass Key, one of the major Nordic crime prizes, and it shows another side of Persson, less swagger, more weariness, and a stronger sense of time running out.

Across all these books, certain things keep coming back: class, police culture, bureaucratic vanity, old secrets, and the ways institutions protect themselves. Persson likes investigators who are tired, stubborn, compromised, or all three. He also has a taste for black comedy, especially when official people start pretending they are in control.

His work reached the screen too, and his family has kept one foot in the literary world, his daughter Malin Persson Giolito is also a novelist. These days Persson lives mostly on a farm in Södermanland and spends less time in his Stockholm apartment than he once did. Even in retirement, he has remained part of Sweden's public conversation about crime, justice, and what really happens behind closed doors.