Book review: Big Sister, by Gunnar Staalesen

Gunnar Staalesen is a Norwegian writer best known for his series of crime novels detailing the investigations of Varg Veum, a Bergen PI and former social worker. It’s a notably long-running series: the first of the Veum books, the still-untranslated Bukken till havresekken, was published in 1977, just two years after the last of Sjöwall & Wahlöö’s ‘Martin Beck’ novels. I’ve previously reviewed Where Roses Never Die (which won last year’s Petrona Award) and Wolves in the Dark.

Big Sister (Storesøster, 2016, translated by Don Bartlett) is approximately the twentieth in the Varg Veum sequence. It opens, as is appropriate for a novel with a title that may well nod towards Raymond Chandler’s The Little Sister, with a meeting between the PI and a mysterious woman who has a matter she wants investigated. But the woman, Norma Bakkevik, is no femme fatale: she’s Veum’s long-lost older half-sister. The case with which she wants his help is the disappearance of her goddaughter Emma, a nineteen-year-old trainee nurse for whom the trail ends at the Bergen apartment which Emma shared with two other students, and which she quit without notice. Veum sets about interviewing the flatmates, their landlord, Emma’s estranged parents, and anyone else who might conceivably know something about the missing young woman; while none of them appear to know anything useful, it soon emerges that Emma’s backstory is a notably troubled one, with a few big skeletons in the family closet. When Veum starts investigating these skeletons, things take a distinctly menacing turn …

The central mystery is well-framed, and accompanied by a couple of other intertwined conundrums, one of which concerns Veum’s own origins. The book nicely plays off the personal against the occupational, and the characters—several of whom are notably hard-edged and defensive—are clearly and distinctly drawn, ensuring that the slowly-unfolding investigation remains both interesting and surprising.

Staalesen deserves to be more widely read than he is: the Veum books are masterpieces in tension and intrigue, and the writing and plotting is as assured as you’d expect from a series now rounding out its fourth decade. The books are both classically noirish (the fearlessly inquisitive Veum, whose tipple of choice is akvavit, is as much the hard-drinking PI as the best of them, though in Big Sister he’s comparatively abstemious) and innately Scandinavian, with a strong sense of place and a deep concern for the exploration of societal issues; and Veum’s background as a social worker gives him an edge that, if not necessarily more compassionate than Philip Marlowe, is at least more informed. I suspect, though, that none of the above really captures the vitality of the work, of which the best sense would, of course, be gained by reading the books themselves. You can take that as a hint, if you wish.