Lang, Maria

Maria Lang is the pen name of the teacher and head mistress Dagmar (Maria) Lange, one of Sweden’s most popular, but also most criticised, crime novelists. Lange and Stieg Trenter dominated the Swedish crime fiction scene in the 1950s and ‘60s. In the media they were referred to as King Stieg and Queen Maria. Dagmar Lange was born in Västerås. The family moved to Lindesberg in 1915 where her father, Claes Lange, had found employment as a newspaper editor. He died two years later, only 27 years old, of a ruptured appendix, and Dagmar’s mother, Elsa, had to move back to her parents’ home in Västerås. In 1919, she married a travelling salesman, Carl Ivar Olsson, and the family settled down in Nora. Dagmar got on well with her stepfather.