“Her eyes had turned almost violet… They didn’t look as if birds might fly out of them now. They looked as if they led to dark tunnels, to smoke-filled cellar rooms, to rooms with garishly painted walls, to opium dens. To villages deep in the jungle.”
Yours Until Death by Gunnar Staalesen is about a private detective named Varg who’s hired by a young boy to recover his stolen bike. Varg soon finds himself intervening in the machinations of a menacing gang of delinquent youths that is terrorizing their small town*. Little does the detective know that this simple request will seal his fate, leading him down a labyrinth of murder and deception.
Staalesen’s first installment in the series has all the ingredients of a solid Nordic noir: undercurrents of loneliness, staunch stoicism and the pervasive chill of the icy elements. The main character, Varg, is your stereotypical hard-boiled detective with a chip on his shoulder. Despite Varg’s tendency to lust after anything that moves, and the author’s unfortunate predilection for describing every woman’s chest size, I realized I was quite fond of this morose, alcoholic (anti)hero. Staalesen has a unique, almost hallucinatory quality to his writing that I found mesmerizing and disorienting all at the same time.
At first glance, Yours Until Death may seem like your typical thriller. But at its core it’s a cultural commentary on marriage. In Scandinavia, the institution of marriage is considered outdated, with many couples eschewing the union altogether. Staalesen seems to believe that adultery is nearly inevitable, so why bother? His perspective is reminiscent of my divorced and very cynical anthropology professor, who asserted that much like gibbons, humans actually practice serial monogamy. Perhaps he’s right, but nevertheless, a fictional detective novel is a strange vessel to transmit these views.
Yours Until Death is a solid Scandinavian thriller, but not without its share of hangups. The pacing was inconsistent and I couldn’t quite lose myself completely in the story. Other than Varg and Roar, most of the characters were distinctly unlikable. And yet, I still have every intention of reading the sequel. There’s something about Staalesen’s prose and snappy dialogue that intrigues me. It shivers with a potential that promises better things on the horizon. After all, he can’t have won the Golden Pistol award for nothing.
Rating: 4/5 Stars
Purchase it at an independent bookstore near you here.
*Are child gangs and delinquent youths an epidemic in Scandinavia? This theme also appears in another nordic noir I read recently- The Hypnotist by Lars Kepler.
