Gunnar Staalesen (born 1947 in Bergen) is a Norwegian writer best known for crime fiction. He created the private detective Varg Veum, and through him Bergen, on Norway's rainy west coast, has become one of the most recognisable settings in Nordic noir, the genre that has come to be called Nordic noir.
He studied French, English and comparative literature at the University of Bergen and worked as a journalist, a film critic and a press secretary at the theatre Den Nationale Scene. He published his first novel, Times of Innocence, in 1969. After a few crime novels with other police protagonists, he introduced Veum in 1977 with Bukken til havresekken. Veum is a former social worker turned private eye, a figure meant to place the classic American detective in modern Bergen. The stories often expose social injustice, which Veum observes from the margins.
Beyond the Veum series, he wrote a trilogy of historical novels about Bergen in the twentieth century, which he regards as his best work. His legacy lies in giving Norwegian crime fiction a distinct voice, and his books have been adapted for cinema, television, radio and the stage.
Key works
- Times of Innocence (1969), his first novel
- Bukken til havresekken (1977), the first Varg Veum novel
- I mørket er alle ulver grå (1983), a Veum crime novel
- 1900. Morgenrød (1997), the first part of the Bergen historical trilogy
Curiosities
A name with history
In Old Norse, the phrase «Varg Veum» translates literally as «wolf in a sanctuary», meaning a person made an outlaw.
Twelve films
Between 2007 and 2012, twelve films based on the Veum series were made, all starring Trond Espen Seim.
A reader from adolescence
He credits his early interest in crime fiction to reading Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes books as a teenager.
Original Filopedia text based on Wikipedia (es) and Wikipedia (en) and Wikidata.