Blogtour review - Wolves in the Dark by Gunnar Staalesen

Wolves in the Dark
Gunnar Staalesen, translated by Don Bartlett
Orenda Books, 30 June 2017
PB, 305pp

I'm grateful to Orenda Books for a copy of Wolves in the Dark.

When it says dark, it really means dark. I take my hat off to Staalesen for the treatment he's prepared to mete out to his long running protagonist, Varg Veum.

I've only read a couple of these books before, and this is, I think, no 21 in the series which has been running now for 40 years. So my attachment to the character is perhaps bmuch less than will be that of the typical Norwegian reader. Yet even so, I almost gasped out loud at what happens to Veum in this book.

It has been a bad time for the ex social worker turned private eye. Having lost his true love, Karin, when a case spilled over into his private life, Veum went through a dark time, a time of drink and other types of self indulgence -  all the more alarming for never being described directly: Staalesesn uses a very effective technique in this book of giving glimpses of what happened during that period - just flashes here and there as Veum recovers memories, never sure what is real and what's false.

The point is, we don't know how bad it was, exactly what he did, or how far he went. That question becomes pressing when some stuff from the bad times reaches out to bite him. One morning, Veum is turned out of his bed and hauled off to the police station to answer for images found on his computer - images of child abuse.

Of course, Veum is innocent. He says so.

We trust him.

Don't we?

And his lover Sølvi - whose daughter, Helene, Veum spends time with - trusts him.

Doesn't she?

These questions really begin screaming at us when Veum, sick of the accusations, desperate to clear his name, makes a run for it into the backstreets of Bergen - and needs sanctuary.

It's an electric situation. Yes, we think Veum is innocent. But yes, also, we know there have been too many nice, smiling, plausible men who "don't seem the type", who protest their innocence, who swear that the filth "must have been planted" on their computers, that they've been framed, set up. Poor them.

It is, as I said, very dark indeed. Can Veum dredge enough from his drink raddled mind to work out what happened - to sort fact from fantasy? A series of cases he was involved with may give a hint, but he's no better at recalling those than he is his private life - Staalesen essentially gives us not one case but several, which partly overlap, and sets us - and Veum - a fiendish challenge with the clock ticking, and Veum's freedom in jeopardy all the time.

But worse - there is real corruption behind what happened here. If Veum wasn't guilty, who was? And who may be in danger even as he desperately cudgels his brain for lost details and missing facts?

It's the most intense crime fiction I've read for a long, long time - and I'll warn you, in places, doesn't make for comfortable reading at all, as you might expect, given the subject. Dark, dark, dark. But also audacious and showing that this series and this author are still able to surprise, to take risks, to reinvent themselves and press the boundaries.

Shocking, nail biting and tense, this is THE thriller of the summer.

Blogtour Review! We Shall Inherit the Wind by Gunnar Staalesen

We Shall Inherit the Wind
Gunnar Staalesen (translated by Don Bartlett)
Orenda Books, 2015
Paperback, 262 pages

I'm grateful to Liz at http://lizlovesbooks.com/ for kindly inviting me to join this blogtour alongside a number of excellent bloggers (for a full list see poster below).

This was the first time I'd heard of Norwegian private investigator Varg Veum, hero of a series of noirish detective novels.  he's apparently famous in his adopted home town of Bergen where there is even a statue of him.  One mark down for English insularity, then, and I'm glad Orenda Books have now made some of these available in the UK.

In this book, Varg is asked to investigate the disappearance of Mons Maeland, a businessman interested in bringing windfarms to a small island in the west of Norway.  Mons has family troubles, there is oppositional from environmentalists to the windfarms, and also a fundamentalist religious faction on the island that looks upon such developments with dour disapproval.

For me, this mix of social and personal issues was fascinating. I don't know much about Norway and it's easy to assume that some very lazy Nordic stereotypes will apply - liberal, easygoing people, consensus on environmental issues and lots of pine furniture.  So it's jarring and unexpected to see Veum asking, for example, whether "Dancing was allowed then?" and getting the answer "Not in all circles, of course".  Or to see environmental campaigners resort to violence to stop wind turbines (of all things!)

Other aspects of the book are more familiar, perhaps - dodgy business deals, family tensions and inheritances.

It's less unsettling, but equally stimulating, to see cultural references such as to "the Havamal, an old Norse poem" or to the "potato pioneering priests of yore" establishing the book's atmosphere as very different from a crime novel set in England, Scotland or the US. This is a land of fjords, islands, bridges and ferries. Travel invariably requires a ferry or a boat. And our detective isn't an ex policeman but a retired social worker - but don't let that give you the impression he's any kind of pushover. "Varg" means "wolf" and Veum bares his teeth serveral times in the book, including facing up to a thug with the memorable phrase "Tell your mongrel to stay on its mat!" which I am determined to use myself one day.

In discovering what has happened to Maeland, however, Veum's greatest strength is his patient ability to unpick what he's told by wife, children, friends, the inhabitants of Brennoy and those militant environmentalists. The picture builds up, step by step: there are no blinding flashes of deduction or revelations from the forensics lab.

Veum's greatest weakness, perhaps, is his inability to leave things alone, which leads to disaster - indeed there are foreshadowings of that disaster through the early part of the book, from simple feelings of unease to the comment that a blind has been drawn has been drawn as Veum passes, as if to shut out evil.

Not having read any previous books about this detective I don't know much backstory, beyond the little given away here (an account of how he met his girlfriend and a tally, towards the end, of injuries he's suffered).  This did mean I wasn't particularly invested in Veum as a character, seeing him more as a narrator, perhaps. However while not telling the reader a great deal, Staalsen hints a lot and I would imagine Veum has a distinctly chequered past which I look forward to reading more about

A good addition not just to the roster of Scandi detectives but also to the range of crime writing available in English.  More please...