The Hotel That Inspired the Kind Worth Saving by Peter Swanson

A few years ago, I spent three nights by myself at an old resort hotel in Maine. The reason I was at this hotel (the name of which I’ll leave unsaid) was fairly complicated. The short story version is that I was helping a friend transport his kids to and from a nearby summer camp. The interesting part of the story, at least to me, was that the hotel was once a grand resort getaway, the kind of place where people spent their summers, taking the waters, getting out of the heat of the city. 

The bones of that original hotel were still evident in the wrap-around porch, the enormous dining room, a sloping lawn dotted here and there with cupolas and shuffle board courts, but everything was a little bit run-down and shabby. The families had been replaced by golfers enticed by the cheap drinks from the bar and the buffet dinners, and I’d say the average age of the clientele was around the three-quarters of a century mark.

I enjoyed my time there despite what was a notable hospital smell in the hallways and bedrooms. I discovered a musty library on the third floor filled with donated books from vacations past. I found an adjacent game room with stacked board games, the most recent of which was probably the original Trivial Pursuit from the 1980s. And did I mention the drinks were cheap? This wasn’t that long ago but mixed drinks were at most about four dollars apiece.

Along with the senior set, there were a few miserable teenagers at the hotel, brought along by parents or grandparents, and the expressions on their faces reminded me of pictures I’d seen of prisoners of war. There were so few young people at the hotel that I did wonder if they’d gravitate toward one another in solidarity. This thought led to an idea for a story. I imagined a hotel like this one, and two teenagers, each brought there against their will for an extended stay. These teens would recognize each other as coming from the same town, although they’d never spoken before. The girl would be a star gymnast and popular and the boy would be a strange loner.

In any other circumstance they would never become friends but these two kids, eventually named Joan and Richard, become not just friends but partners in crime. The library from the real hotel made it into my imagined hotel—the Windward Resort in Kennewick, Maine—and my two young people use it to meet in secret, have long conversations, and hatch a plot to remove a common enemy.

There’s a moment after coming up with a new idea when I need to decide what length of story that idea will justify. In other words, am I writing a short story, or a novella, or do I have enough story to write an entire book? At first, I didn’t think that Joan’s and Richard’s secret and murderous friendship was quite enough for a full novel, but then I thought of a way to bring two more characters into the tale. 

These characters were familiar to me, already, because they were from my second novel, The Kind Worth Killing. I’d always wanted to return to my detective character, Henry Kimball, and to the antihero from that book, Lily Kintner. I realized that Joan and Richard would continue their relationship long after leaving the Windward Resort and that there was a way in which both Henry and Lily could become part of their story. And that’s when I realised that I was writing a novel, and not just a novel, but a sort of sequel to The Kind Worth Killing.

So I’d like to thank that old resort hotel in Maine for bringing me both Joan and Richard, and for bringing me back to my old friends Henry Kimball and Lily Kintner. As a writer you never know where you are going to get stories from; it’s both the joy and the haphazardness of the profession. Maybe I’ll go back to that hotel someday, maybe to celebrate the release of The Kind Worth Saving. The rooms might be musty but the drinks are cheap.

The Kind Worth Saving by Peter Swanson is out now (Faber, £14.99)

The ingenious sequel to The Kind Worth Killing finds private detective and former teacher Henry Kimball embroiled in a labyrinthine mystery involving the infidelity of one of his ex-pupils' husbands.Two's company, three's fatal. 'Do you remember me?' She asked, after stepping into my office. When private detective and former teacher Henry Kimball is hired to investigate an ex-pupil's cheating husband, he senses all is not quite what it seems, and before he knows it he's gotten far too close to the other woman. As the case gets ever stranger, he turns to the only person he can trust, Lily Kintner, someone with dark secrets of her own.

More information about Peter Swanson and his work can be found on his website. He cn also be found on Twitter @PeterSwanson3, on Instagram @peterswanson and on Facebook.

 

Welcome to Bergen! by Gunnar Staalesen

Gunnar Staalesen was born in Bergen, Norway in 1947. He made his debut at the age of 22 with Seasons of Innocence and in 1977 he published the first book in the Varg Veum series. Twelve film adaptations of his Varg Veum crime novels have appeared since 2007, starring the popular Norwegian actor Trond Epsen Seim, and a further seies is being filmed now. Staalesen, who has won three Golden Pistols (including the Prize of Honour), lives in Bergen with his wife. There is a life-sized statue of Varg Veum in the centre of Bergen.

I am not sure if the tourist industry in Bergen is entirely happy with the picture I paint of the city in most of my books – rainy, dark and dangerous (at least to some of the characters). But I know that tourists travel from UK, from France, Germany and Denmark – even the USA – to walk in the streets of Varg Veum… ‘Down these mean streets a man must go…’ as Raymond Chandler wrote about his own detective, Philip Marlowe. And Varg Veum is, without doubt, a Norwegian cousin of both Marlowe and Lew Archer, the detective in Ross Macdonald’s books.

But of course the image is much darker in a crime novel than in reality. The same law rules for real-life Edinburgh and the one you meet in Ian Rankin’s crime novels. Or whatever city in which you find your detective.

Gunnar Staalesen & Varg Veum

There is a relationship between detectives and their cities, and that started – I believe – with London in Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. When reading these stories, we get a vivid image of a foggy, dark and Victorian city, not as detailed as in the books of Charles Dickens perhaps, but fascinating enough.

To give just a few examples, the tradition continued with Dashiell Hammett’s The Continental Op and later on Sam Spade in San Francisco, Maigret in Paris, Philip Marlowe and Lew Archer in LA, Martin Beck in Stockholm, John Rebus in Edinburgh and Pepe Carvalho in Barcelona. When I wrote my first Varg Veum novel, published in Norway in 1977, I took a humble place in this tradition. And that is why the city Bergen plays an important role in my writing. (I have also written a very popular trilogy about the city, published in Norway, Denmark and France, which takes the reader through all the whole of the 20th century, from the night that a murder was committed on 1 January 1900 to the day that it is solved – by Varg Veum – on 31 December 1999. In Norway the series is very often referred to as “The Bergen trilogy”, in French “Le roman de Bergen”.)

So what and where is Bergen?

Bergen is the second largest city in Norway, with c. 250,000 inhabitants today. It was the unofficial capital of Norway in the 12th and 13th centuries, before the country experienced 400 years of governance by Denmark and almost 100 years in union with Sweden. It was not until 1905 that Norway became an independent nation again, and this is why so many Norwegians were – and still are – sceptical of joining the European Union.

Ian Rankin and Antti Tuomainen in front of Varg Veum’s street.

Bergen is situated on the West coast, a beautiful city surrounded by between six and nine mountains (the traditional count is seven, a holy number), and the tourist office calls it ‘The gateway to the fjords’, which is correct. There is a fjord leading you to the good harbour in Bergen – the reason why the city is situated just here – and you are not far from the two longest fjords in Norway, the Hardanger fjord and the Sogn and Fjordane fjord. In the tourist season the city is more or less packed with tourists. In the autumn, winter and early spring – when most of the Varg Veum novels take place – it is a rainy city, and the inhabitants love it when a new record of rainfall pro anno is reached. (The latest one was set in 2015, but I won’t not tell you what it was…)

Not a bad city for a private detective, or…?

Where Roses Never Die, by Gunnar Staalesen (Orenda Books) translated by Don Bartlett, is out now.

September 1977. Mette Misvær, a three-year-old girl, disappears without trace from the sandpit outside her home. Her tiny, close, middle-class community in the tranquil suburb of Nordas is devastated, but their enquiries and the police produce nothing. Curtains twitch, suspicions are raised, but Mette is never found. Almost 25 years later, as the expiry date for the statute of limitations draws near, Mette’s mother approaches PI Varg Veum, in a last, desperate attempt to find out what happened to her daughter. As Veum starts to dig, he uncovers an intricate web of secrets, lies and shocking events that have been methodically concealed. When another brutal incident takes place, a pattern begins to emerge …