GUNNAR STAALESEN'S COLD HEARTS

There is something familiar about Hege, the prostitute who hires Varg Veum to find her friend Margrethe, or Maggi, another hooker who has vanished off the streets of Bergen. Hege, it turns out, had once dated Veum's son, and the coincidence sets the tone for this tale of deep shadows in Norwegian life. It is the story of big city crime in a small village of a city, of the mores of small town mentality clashing with the morality, or lack of it, in modern life. The underlying theme, of course, is that Norwegian hearts are cold, even when they're showing warmth.

Veum learns quickly that Maggi's brother has just escaped from prison, and soon he's involved with a missing shipment of drugs, a Russian hooker beaten by two men she went off with after Maggi refused to service them the night she disappeared, and most of all the sad story of Maggi's family, and the local committee who had taken it upon themselves to help raise her and her siblings when her parents proved incapable of it.

Veum is a different kind of detective—he was a social worker, once upon a time, and much of his detecting seems to run along those lines. The serious crimes of the present have their echoes in the quieter crimes of the past, and although Gunnar Staalesen seems to be compared frequently to Raymond Chandler, he struck me as somehow closer to Ross MacDonald, and Veum much more like Lew Archer than Philip Marlowe, more of a blank slate of a character, a man whose own character remains neutral while he provides the reader with a sympathetic entry point to a different sort of world. Also like both those detectives, he's above the lure of the one-night stand; perhaps Veum is the one whose heart is more than cold.

How well this works depends on how well-drawn the supporting characters are, and Staalesen is extremely good on the people Veum appears to understand best—the ones he recognises from his social services career. He's less good with criminals, although here there is a bit of Philip Marlowe in the way he does stand up to men much more violent than he is, and is relatively successful at it.

The story also depends on the balance between drawing it out and missing the obvious being deft, here the mixing of the subplots keeps Veum, and us, guessing even when we seem to know what was going on. In the end, Staalesen, like Archer, uncovers the hidden past, and watches it rebound to the present. Although the plot does revolve, in plot, around using a rusty nail edge to cut through bindings, which was old in the silent movie serials, there is a neat twist, and there is also the sense that the Norwegian justice system is incapable of really coping with the worst their society throws up.

Cold Hearts by Gunnar Staalesen

Arcadia £8.99 ISBN 9781908129437

JOHN SHANNON'S POISON SKY: A Forgotten Friday Entry

It was a couple of years ago I wrote about John Shannon's Palos Verde Blue for my American Eye column in Shots (you can link to it via this post), so when this earlier (2000) Jack Liffey novel crossed my path, I read it with great interest, to see where Liffey was then, and how Shannon wrote about him.

In some ways, The Poison Sky is a better novel, particularly for the way it backgrounds Liffey's own life and character somewhat, and brings to the foreground his observations. In this he reminded me of Lew Archer, and the careful way in which Ross MacDonald kept Archer's perceptions relatively neutral; he served as an unusually accurate and detailed observer, but he kept the reader on an even footing. Rarely do you have to filter what you are seeing through your own apprehension of Archer's prejudices or blind spots. And when Liffey is hired to find a runaway boy who's hooked up with an extremely defensive and secretive religious cult we are in prime Archer territory, and Shannon handles it brilliantly. Liffey's empathy brings out people's true feelings, and his cracking wise doesn't hurt either, but the story is never about him. The big question, however, is why the cult seems to be coming down on him so hard.

The other plot concerns the boy's father, who has been the victim of an industrial accident at work, and has been researching Bophal online. Of course the stories overlap, and that is where Palos Verdes Blue displays a surer hand; the entry of hardened criminals into the story and the action climax in The Poison Sky are a hard trick to pull off, and Shannon can't do it without changing the tone somewhat, to the point where Liffey himself seems almost a different character. That may be what you have to lose when you're that close to Lew Archer, but if Liffey is more his own man in later novels, it means the story proceeds more seamlessly. Where the comparison with MacDonald holds up further, and what is the same in both the Liffey novels I've read, is the way social concerns are central to the story, and the crime. There isn't the buried past which always seems to resurface in MacDonald (James Lee Burke has now cornered the market in that) but Liffey's cases always seem to confront society's ills head on, and we need more of that.

So in the end I discovered what I'd set to, how Shannon was writing and what Liffey was like then. If it's impressive to create a character like Lew Archer, it's even more impressive when he becomes a character like himself.