The writer behind the acclaimed Fiction thrillers. At work on The Fourth Wall — his first novel under his own name, set in the long shadows of Los Angeles.
Johan Hurtig is a Swedish novelist based in Stockholm. He is the writer behind the Fiction thrillers — published under the name Hurtig Wagrell — crime fiction known for its dark humour, its psychological precision, and its restless play with form and media.
Before fiction he trained as a film actor at Stockholm University of the Arts and spent over a decade as a comedian, screenwriter and journalist — writing for Café Magazine, Aftonbladet and Metro, and working across film and Swedish television. That ear for performance — for the gap between the public face and the private one — runs through everything he writes.
His work has been published in Sweden and Germany, with rights sold to Iceland. The Fourth Wall is the first novel to appear under his own name — and a meta-companion to the series.
A crime novelist arrives in Los Angeles with a deadline, a blank page and a bad case of doubt. He means to write a murder. Instead, between the bars of the Sunset Strip, a rooftop in Downtown and a long drive up Mulholland after midnight, he stumbles into a real one — and the book he came to invent starts inventing him.
Part homage to the city's noir tradition — the Chandlers, the Wilders, the late-night neon — and part play on the genre's own conventions. A Scandinavian crime novelist writing about a Scandinavian crime novelist, in the city that built the form he writes in.
The novel is set in real Los Angeles rooms. Their atmosphere, their staff and their late hours are part of the research.