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Dan Buthler, seated, resting his chin on his hand.

Dan Buthler

Twenty thrillers since 2007. Five series. One recurring question: what happens to people caught inside systems bigger than they are?

Dan Buthler is a Swedish-based crime writer, born on the Danish island of Bornholm in 1965. He is the author of the Gabriel Creuz series and the co-author of the Christopher Silfverbielke, Jacob Colt, Alex Storm and Richard Axman novels — twenty books since his debut in 2007.

His route to writing was not the usual one. Technical gymnasium, then running his own business, then economics in Lund, then the internet division at Dagens Nyheter — where he left his last conventional job on the final day of 1999. That mix of commerce, technology and institutions runs through everything he writes.

Most of his books have been written with someone else. Thirteen with Dag Öhrlund between 2007 and 2018, four with Leffe Grimwalker, and the Richard Axman novels with Fredrik Sandberg. Gabriel Creuz is his solo work — and the series where the preoccupation with inherited power, law and buried history comes fully into focus.

He also hosts Spänningspodden, a Swedish podcast about thrillers and the people who write them. Away from the desk: ball sports, golf and handball mostly, and a long-standing interest in world affairs and how systems connect to each other.

I write about roles, not gender.

Dan Buthler

The short version

  1. 1965

    Born on Bornholm

    Born on the Danish island of Bornholm. The family moved to Sweden in 1974 — first Gislaved, then Gothenburg.

  2. 1999

    Left the day job

    After economics in Lund and a spell in the internet division at Dagens Nyheter, he finished his last conventional job on the final day of the century.

  3. 2007

    Debut — mord.net

    The first Jacob Colt novel, written with Dag Öhrlund, opens a collaboration that would run for eleven years and thirteen books.

  4. 2008

    Christopher Silfverbielke arrives

    En nästan vanlig man introduces the character who would carry nine books and become one of Swedish crime fiction’s most persistent antagonists.

  5. 2019

    Alex Storm

    A new collaboration, with Leffe Grimwalker, and a new subject: an ordinary man pulled into organised crime against his will.

  6. 2024

    Gabriel Creuz — writing alone

    Rök utan eld begins his first solo series: a convicted lawyer, a noble family, and the old structures that still decide who gets believed.

The work

20 books across 5 series.

  • Gabriel Creuz

    3 books · 2024– · written alone

    A lawyer goes to prison for a fraud he had nothing to do with. He comes out with no practice, no standing and no idea who put him there — and the only people with answers are the family he spent his life avoiding. Dan's first solo series, and the one being written for English readers now.

  • Christopher Silfverbielke

    9 books · 2008–2018 · with Dag Öhrlund

    Nine books about a man who looks like everyone else. Christopher Silfverbielke is polite, successful and entirely without conscience, and the series follows him for a decade as the people around him work out what he is — usually too late.

  • Alex Storm

    4 books · 2019–2021 · with Leffe Grimwalker

    Alex Storm finally has the life he wanted: a wife, a child on the way, a business that works. Then the debts arrive, and the only people willing to help are the ones you cannot take help from. Four books about an ordinary man being taken apart.

  • Jacob Colt

    3 books · 2007–2010 · with Dag Öhrlund

    The series that started it all, in 2007. Detective Jacob Colt works cases that begin online and end in bodies — extortion, trafficking, murder arranged by people who never meet their victims.

  • Richard Axman

    1 book · 2025– · with Fredrik Sandberg

    A Swedish doctor drinking his way through the aftermath of his own life, working in the poorest part of São Paulo. The newest series, and the first to send Dan's writing outside Europe.

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