Countless characters
By Gunnar Staalesen
Big Sister is the eighteenth novel in the Varg Veum
series. The first one, which hasn’t been translated into English yet, was
published more than forty years ago, in 1977. Number nineteen is almost
finished and will be published in Norway this autumn.
During all
these years and across all these books, I have created more characters then I can
remember – and I have never counted them. Some of them I have lived with on and
off over the years; others have disappeared – some dying and some retiring from
police work. But if I leaf through one of my books and read a page here and
there, I can still recognise my characters – mostly by name – even if it is
almost forty years since I invented some of them. I can still see them clearly
in my mind, too, often because many – at least in terms of their physical
appearance – are modelled on people from real life, such as a local politician,
an actor or a football player I have seen, a writer colleague, or even a
publisher or a journalist that I have met, even women that I have fallen in
love with from a distance…
When I
started to write seriously, at seventeen years old, there were several writers who
had a significant impression on me: Jack Kerouac, Albert Camus, some Norwegian
writers – although still not Sjöwall & Wahlöö and Chandler (they came some
years later). Similarly, during my childhood I read and loved the great storytellers:
Dumas, Hugo, Jules Verne, Stevenson, Scott – and, of course, Charles Dickens.
What impressed me with Dickens was the way he created his characters: funny
names that were easy to remember, their way of speaking, and their set of
physical characteristics. All his characters are painted so vividly, you can see
them before your eyes as you read – and at that age I read a lot of Dickens’
novels. Although I didn’t go on to write books in his style, I tried to work
like him when creating my own characters. In fact, there is a lot of Dickens in
crime fiction – for example, you can easily see how Chandler builds character
in the same way in his books. And there is a huge character-creating tradition
in English-language writing, from Shakespeare to Dickens to Chandler, and a lot
more names I haven’t the room to mention!
The action
in the Varg Veum novels starts in 1976 and Big
Sister takes place in 2003. Clearly, Varg has grown older during these
years – he was thirty-four at the beginning and now he’s sixty-one. The same has
happened to all the characters around him, of course. The police officers he
meets in the first part of the series are all retired now, apart from Hamre,
who will retire after the book I am writing now. Women have come and gone too.
His wife, from who he was already divorced in the first book, has a girlfriend
now; his son, who was a small child in the first book, has a son himself, making
Varg a grandfather. (His son is a professor in literature at the University of
Oslo, and we do not meet him much in the later part of the series.) His
journalist best friend died some years ago, after playing an important role as
an informant in many of the books, and Karin, his girlfriend and wife-to-be, died
in one of the most recent books published in the UK. During all the books I try
to keep track of these characters – their ages, their occupations, their looks
etc. – so that I do not make any mistakes. But it is not a failsafe archive, so
some smaller mistakes have occurred over the years.
In
1997-2000, when I wrote my trilogy about Norway, Europe and the world in the twentieth
century – some years before Ken Follett and Jan Guillou did the same – I told
the stories of several families in Bergen. One of these was the tale of Varg
Veum’s parents: what happened to them before they met, how they came to meet, and
the story of their marriage. As in most families, they had their secrets. One
of these was about Varg’s older half-sister, who was born in another town
before his mother went to Bergen and met his father, the tram conductor from
the fjords. This secret is one of the elements in my most recent Varg book, and
is one of the reasons that the novel has the title Big Sister.
Varg’s
sister’s name is Norma. She was a character who I loved creating and I hope all
my readers will like her too.
About 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. He is the author of over 20 titles, which have been
published in 24 countries and sold over five million copies. Twelve film
adaptations of his Varg Veum crime novels have appeared since 2007, starring
the popular Norwegian actor Trond Epsen Seim, and a further series is being
filmed now. Staalesen, who has won three Golden Pistols (including the Prize of
Honour) and the Petrona Award, and been shortlisted for the CWA Dagger, lives
in Bergen with his wife.
About Big Sister
Big Sister
By Gunnar Staalesen
Published by Orenda Books (E-book- available now; Paperback - 20 June 2018)
Publisher's description
Varg Veum receives a surprise visit in his office. A woman introduces herself as his half-sister, and she has a job for him. Her god-daughter, a 19-year-old trainee nurse from Haugesund, moved from her bedsit in Bergen two weeks ago. Since then no one has heard anything from her. She didn't leave an address. She doesn't answer her phone. And the police refuse to take her case seriously.
Veum’s investigation uncovers a series of carefully covered-up crimes and pent-up hatreds, and the trail leads to a gang of extreme bikers on the hunt for a group of people whose dark deeds are hidden by the anonymity of the Internet. And then things get personal…
Veum’s investigation uncovers a series of carefully covered-up crimes and pent-up hatreds, and the trail leads to a gang of extreme bikers on the hunt for a group of people whose dark deeds are hidden by the anonymity of the Internet. And then things get personal…
Here's a snippet of my review: 'Big Sister is perfectly packaged Nordic crime fiction, with its amazing sense of place and chilling plot - one particular scene left me feeling cold (not many books have that effect on me).'
Click here to read the whole review.
