In
June it is forty years since the first novel about Varg Veum was published in
Norway. It bears the title Bukken til
havresekken and is still not translated into English. The title comes from
an old Norwegian saying: ‘You do not tell the buck to watch the bag of oats.’ (Bukken til havresekken translates
directly as: ‘The buck to the bag of oats’.) The French edition was called: Le Loup dans la bergerie, which means
‘The wolf in the sheepfold’ and therefore has a similar meaning: ‘You don’t ask
a wolf to look after the sheep.’ But in Germany it was simply called it: Das Haus mit der grünen Tür (‘The House
with the Green Door’, which, interestingly, was my working title for the book, although
I never told anyone about that. How did they know?!)
The
book was an experiment. I wanted to move the traditional private eye novel from
America to Norway, while taking account of the differences between the US of the
1930s, 40s and 50s, and Norway in the 1970s. So Varg Veum was without doubt a
close relative of Philip Marlowe and Lew Archer; but he was transformed into a
Scandinavian, left-wing social democrat, with whom many of my readers at the
time could sympathise. He had a different type of background too: he was originally
a social worker, employed by the local authority to help children who were in
difficult situations or came from families where their parents were not able to
take care of them.
My
inspiration as a crime writer originally came from the Swedish couple, Sjöwall
& Wahlöö, who, between 1965 and 1975, had a huge impact on international
crime fiction with their ten novels about the Stockholm-based police inspector
Martin Beck. My first two crime novels (and the fourth) were police procedurals
in more or less the same style as Sjöwall & Wahlöö, with added inspiration coming
from the American writer Chester Himes and his books about Coffin Ed Johnson
and Grave Digger Jones. In the back of my head, however, there was also the
traditional plotting I’d learnt by reading Agatha Christie, Quentin Patrick,
Erle Stanley Gardner and many other great plot constructors. And I had, of
course, read Arthur Conan Doyle and been fascinated by the combination of
Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson since I first read The Hound of the Baskervilles when I was twelve years old.
However,
it was only when I read Raymond Chandler for the first time, in 1971, that I really
understood what good literature a crime novel could be. At that time I had
published two experimental novels that were more inspired by Jack Kerouac than
by crime writers, but I could see the similarities between Kerouac and Chandler,
particularly the poetic and playful language. This made me think: Perhaps – some day – a crime novel?
After having more or less failed (I have to admit) as a mainstream, ‘serious’
novelist, I then started my career as a crime writer in 1975, with the first of
my police procedurals, and in 1977 the first Varg Veum novel.
I
have to admit that I was sceptical about the experiment myself: was it possible
to transfer this American style of crime writing to Norway in the 70s? But no
critic protested that you couldn’t set a private detective story in
contemporary Bergen, and the readers loved it. Having finished my third and
last police procedural, in 1979, I then wrote number two in what was now going
to be the Varg Veum series: Yours until Death.
This book is available in English.
In
June 2017, my seventeenth novel in the series, Wolves in the Dark, is published in the UK and will be available as
an ebook all over the world. During the forty years between the first book and
this, Varg has aged only twenty-five years. (The action in this book takes
place in 2002, when he is almost sixty.) But he is still has the same roots: shooting
off one-liners like a stressed Philip Marlowe, and solving mysteries like a sad
and disturbed Lew Archer. In this book Varg deals with one of the most
difficult cases of his career: he is on the run from the police himself, at the
same time as trying to find out who is seeking revenge on him, and why? The
combination of these ‘who’ and ‘why’ questions forms the basis for most modern
crime novels. But it is the ‘why’ that is perhaps even more important now than
in the earlier periods of the genre; and this is certainly the case in Wolves
in the Dark.
The
book also deals with a couple of big themes: the problem of hacking into private
computers; and – more tragically – the abuse of children carried out by international
groups; a problem that has been demonstrated by a big investigation being conducted
by the police in Bergen right now, as I write these words.
It
seems that the stuff crime novels are made of never goes away.
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