We Shall Inherit the Wind

The fifteenth in the famous series featuring PI Varg Veum.

Varg Veum’s girlfriend Karin Bjørge is in hospital with life-threatening injuries, and Veum has to admit it: the blame is his. Everything began with a seemingly innocent case of a disappearance. The husband one of Karin’s friends had vanished without a trace a few days before he was to take part in an inspection of the site of a planned wind farm. The investigationleads the Bergen detective into a case saturated with conflicts, where environmental terrorism, religious fanaticism, dubious business ethics and an unsolved disappearance mystery from the past are important ingredients. Then the first body appears – tied to a cross, facing the mouth of the fjord …

REVIEWS

"Staalesen is a Norwegian Raymond Chandler – with fewer wisecracks, perhaps, but capable of generating a dark intensity that few crime writers can rival." Andrew Taylor/Sherlock

"… there is generally something Ibsenian about this detective novel in which past sins play such an important part in the present… a great read." Bergens Tidende

"Bergen may be a beautiful city, but it has its less salubrious side – and Gunnar Staalesen’s volatile detective Varg Veum knows every inch of it. Norwegian master Staalesen is an author who eschews police procedural narratives for noirish private eye pieces such as We Shall Inherit the Wind, with Veum topically on the trail of a missing windfarm inspector and encountering the usual battery of hostility and non-cooperation, along with (more dangerously) environmental terrorism and religious fanaticism. Staalesen dislikes Scandinavian parochial in his writing, and continues to work — bravely, some would say — in a traditional US-style genre, drawing on such writers as the late Ross Macdonald. Nevertheless, he is a contemporary writer; there is some abrasive Scandicrime social commentary here; as Veum says: ‘How could so many people who worked all day for the same admirable purpose – to create a better global environment – end up in their own camp, beneath their own flag, with impassable territorial lines?" Finacial Times

"Staalesen shares a similar style and concerns with Fossum, and there is a world-weary existential sadness that hangs over his central detective. The prose is stripped back and simple, and both writers like to leave the deep emotion bubbling under the surface – the real turmoil of their characters’ lives just under the surface for the reader to intuit, rather than have it spelled out for them." The Big Issue

"With its exploration of family dynamics and the complex web of human behaviour, Staalesen’s novel echoes the great California author Ross MacDonald’s Lew Archer mysteries. There are some incredible set-pieces including a botched act of terrorism that has frightening consequences, but the Varg Veum series is more concerned with character and motivation than spectacle, and it’s in the quieter scenes that the real drama lies."Herald Scotland

Foreign sales: Denmark, Vindrose Iceland, Draumsýn Poland, Slowo/Obraz terytoria UK, Orenda Books France, Éditions Gaïa The Netherlands, Uitgeverij Marmer

Stylish Mixture of Current Issues and Timelessness

With “We Shall Inherit the Wind” Gunnar Staalesen has written his fifteenth crime novel about private investigator, Varg Veum. The title creates associations with the meek who, according to the Bible, will inherit the earth, but the meek in this book are few and far between. Here they are replaced by much more active fanatics of all hues, including eco-warriors with a doomsday view of the future.

The story takes place in 1998. In the opening scene Veum is sitting at the death bed of his beloved Karin. He accepts the blame for the injuries inflicted on her, and this leads to the unravelling of a dramatic story. To all intents and purposes, the plot is about power and energy versus environmental considerations. And the debate surrounding power lines in Hardanger, a current issue in Norway, makes it clear that this time Staalesen has delivered fiction that is bang up-to-date, with recognisable battle lines and the generally prevailing arguments for both sides.

The apparent motive for Veum travelling to the fictional island of Brennøy, on the far coast of Gulen, is a missing person case. The person in question, Mons Mæland, the owner of the land where the wind farm is planned, it turns out has been killed. Alongside the matter of who killed him and why, there is a parallel plot: Mæland’s wife went missing sixteen years before. She was lost at sea, as the expression goes, but was never found.

“We Shall Inherit the Wind” alternates neatly between trails where past history, with timeless themes such as love, revenge and desire, gradually supersedes the drama surrounding the wind turbines. And trails are constantly being laid which are so intricate that the reader never feels more intelligent (or more stupid) than Veum. The characters in the book are drawn with more nuances and more psychological insight than in most crime novels. Karin dies, Veum lives and the book has a surprising ending that may remind the reader of “A Doll’s House”. In fact, there is generally something Ibsenian about this detective novel in which past sins play such an important part in the present. Ibsen’s criticism of pure idealism can also be felt in “We Shall Inherit the Wind”, a novel which is both up-todate and timeless, in other words a great read.

Gro Jørstad Nilsen, Bergens Tidende, 12.09.2010

Chapter 1

They say a dying man sees life passing before his eyes. I don’t know. I haven’t died so many times yet. But I do know that it is certainly true for a man sitting by someone’s death bed.Sitting there at her side in Haukeland Hospital, looking at her battered face, the needles in her arm, the probe in her nose, the tube in her mouth and the oscillating lines on the screen above her bed which showed her heart function, blood pressure and the oxygen content in her veins, I felt as if I were watching a stuttering, jumping amateur film of the years we had known each other, played on a somewhat antiquated projector I had never quite been able to focus. But then I was no technical whiz. I never had been.I met Karin Bjørge for the first time when I was still working in social services, in early 1971. She looked us up on behalf of her family and was shown into my office by Elsa Drage, one of the nicest dragons I have ever known. At that time we were both considerably younger, none of us a day over thirty. Siren, her sister, was fourteen and it was on her account she had come. Karin herself and her father had been searching for her for days. They had contacted the police, who had put her on the missing persons list, but as no unidentifiable body had been registered and there was nothing initially that suggested anything criminal had happened, they had not been able to promise anything. ‘But Dad’s got a bad heart,’ she said, ‘and my mother keeps fretting and fretting … that’s why I’ve come to you, to find out if you can do something.’

Translated by Don Bartlett