The Writing on the Wall

Staalesen is one of Scandinavia’s finest crime writers, best known for his Varg Veum private eye series set in Bergen, Norway’s second city. An eminent judge is found dead and clad in women’s lingerie in a hotel room. A good-looking, well-balanced middle-class teenager disappears. The girl’s mother hires Varg Veum to find her. Gradually the two cases come together in carefully crafted narrative that takes the reader from the feminist movement to men behaving badly, from the press to the police, from Girl Guides to prostitutes. The novel is a slow-burner that reaches a terrific temperature. Staalesen is a Norwegian Chandler – with fewer wisecracks, perhaps, but capable of generating a dark intensity that few crime writers can rival. He paints a haunting and detailed picture of the rain-soaked coastal city and its inhabitants. He shows us a society streaked with rottenness from top to bottom. He also writes extremely well, something that comes over even in translation. He is a master of those subtly resonant sentences that linger in the mind for days. “Life is something you lose,” says one character. “Bit by bit.” Scandinavian crime fiction is becoming increasingly popular in the UK. It doesn’t come much better than this. Some of Staalesen’s novels have been published here before – among them, Wolves in the Dark and Yours Until Death, both of which were critically acclaimed. Now is the time to start reading him if you haven’t already.