The deck genre is being changed by new technology

"The cover genre is good at capturing the technological development in society," says Dag Hedman, professor of literature at the University of Gothenburg.

Jenny Rogneby, who is a writer and criminologist, has seen the work of the police change a lot in recent decades.

"Above all through the DNA technology that has been developed a lot since the 1980s, but also things like fingerprints, surveillance systems and facial recognition," says Jenny Rogneby.

"And that the police work has changed drastically in the decks as technology has come to play an increasingly important role in them," says Dag Hedman.

There are several historical examples of how the decker genre has been quick to adopt new technology. Already in 1907, just one year after the Swedish police started a national fingerprint register, Richard Austin Freeman wrote about a criminal who planted false fingerprints in the novel The red thumb mark.

And in 1974, Morris West wrote about bank fraud through data breaches in the novel Harlequin.

-There are those who think that diction is just entertainment literature and nothing else, but they are deceiving. Here you are part of the very latest, really at the forefront of technological development, ”says Dag Hedman.

Dag Hedman says it is almost a must for writers to have a certain interest in, and knowledge of, new technology. Many also have a special competence.

-There are cover writers who also work such as judges, forensic doctors, forensics or police.

Or science journalists - for example, Karin Bojs, who previously wrote, among other things, professional literature on DNA technology and genealogy (the book My European Family was awarded the August Prize 2015).

Now she is debuting as a writer with the book Klickad, whose heroine is a young, multi-competent journalist who moves in research environments.

-The book is entirely based on my past experiences as a science journalist. The idea is that there will be a three-part series about the major technological changes in the early 2000s and how they have affected both journalism and research. The deck genre makes it possible to rewrite the changes in a more easy way, says Karin Bojs.

Jenny Rogneby also has a special expertise, she worked as a police investigator for 7 years before writing her cover series about the police Leona.

-The fact that the work of the police has changed is evident in the literature. Authors make use of the changes, for example, in the way in which they lay out restraints, and how to allow perpetrators to try to get away from the police and hide their crimes.

-So the intrigues are greatly influenced by the technological development of the past decades, Dag Hedman fills in:

-If you look at Sherlock Holmes who went there with his magnifying glass, it was much easier for the reader to keep up with the reasoning and evidence: it was moving on a more everyday level.

In addition to more intricate intrigues, the major technical shifts of our time are also noticed in the personal gallery.

"Nowadays, the data hacker is a very popular figure in the genre, in Sweden we have, for example, Lisbeth Salander who would have been totally unthinkable 70 years ago," says Dag Hedman.