Yours Until Death Gunnar Staalesen

Yours Until Death  Gunnar Staalesen

Overview:

Originally published in Norway in 1979 and first translated into (and published in) English in 1993, YOURS UNTIL DEATH is an early volume in a series featuring Varg Veum, a not very successful private eye. As the novel opens, Varg, whose name was sarcastically said by his father to mean "Outlaw", is missing his ex-wife and son and lamenting his impecunious state when an eight-year-old boy, Roar, comes bursting into his office. Roar has had his bicycle stolen by a local gang of teenage thugs and has looked in the phone book for a private detective. He lives alone with his mother, Wenche, and does not want her to try to recapture the bike because the thugs beat up and molested the mother of one of Roar's friends who tried to remonstrate with them for an earlier misdeed.

Perhaps because Roar reminds Varg of his own estranged son, he decides to take on the case, quickly tracking the gang to a hut in the woods and retrieving the boy's bike. Roar lives in a large tower block and invites Varg home after his rather bruising success. Hence, Varg meets the alluring Wenche, and learns her story, as well as discovering for himself what life is like in the grim flats, where most of the families have been abandoned by the fathers, and the teenage gang, headed up by the (allegedly) psychopathic Joker, rule.

Plagued by melancholy and a sense of sympathy for the underdog, Varg begins to dig into the circumstances of the tower-block dwellers, interviewing the truculent Gunnar, the leader of the local youth club and the only person who seems to have any influence over the boys, and Joker's mother Hildur, now an old drunk living on her memories.

Soon, the unstable situation blows up into a real crime, and the police become involved. Varg and Joker are both witnesses, and based on his previous experiences with the police, Varg manages to infiltrate himself into the investigation. In the best traditions of detective fiction, he meets all the people who know the victim and the accused, listens to their stories and broods about what it all means. By the end, ours and Varg's prejudices have been taken out, aired, turned around and, after Varg's dogged persistence at uncovering every aspect to the lives of the small cast of characters however inconsequential, the identity and motivation of the criminal are revealed- leaving a sense of sadness and missed opportunity, as well as sheer, unnecessary waste.

Yours Until Death is an unbearably tense novel of revenge and murder about marriage, childhood, bereavement and the destructive force of passion. First published in Norwegian in 1979, it was described by the critic Nils Nordberg as ""one of the finest, most serious, most ambitious books in post-war Norwegian crime writing."" ""Staalsen's mastery of pacing enables him to develop his characters in a leisurely way without sacrificing tension and suspense.

ENJOYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!

And Blessed Are The Ones Who Care For Their Fellow Men!