Hans Lahlum: Chameleon People

Hans Olav Lahlum

Gjøvik, 16 June 2013

Looking back on my afterword from 2013, I have to admit that my planning for the next years turned out to be very unreliable. True enough, I did publish The House By the Sea later in 2013, but that teen novel is still the only book I’ve completed that doesn’t feature K2 and Patricia (instead, it stars K2’s grandnephew and his girlfriend, trying to understand their relationship while solving a murder mystery in a small village on the coast of northern Norway in 2012). But I then completed a fifth novel about K2 and Patricia in 2014, a sixth in 2015 and a seventh in 2016.

English readers interested to follow K2 and Patricia beyond the end of this novel will get the chance to do so in 2017 and 2018, although in 2017 I will write a different novel from a different era and with very different main characters, and it will be in Norwegian. I am very happy and thankful that Mantle will publish three more novels in the series, and would like to thank everyone at Mantle for their help. I would also like to take this opportunity to thank my English-speaking readers in various countries for all the comments they have sent me.

The first chapters of this novel refers briefly to the fourth, fifth and sixth cases with K2 and Patricia. These are all short stories from my 2012 Norwegian book De fem fyrstikkene ( The Five Matches ), which is not available in English. Rest assured that I looked over the text and made sure the reader would have no problems whatsoever jumping over these three stories, from the third novel taking place in 1970 to this fourth one in 1972.

Twice in the text of Chameleon People , a biography of the UK’s former Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin (1881-1951), is mentioned. This is volume one of Alan Bullock’s The Life and Times of Ernest Bevin , first published in 1960. Also twice mentioned in this novel is a quote from an American writer about continuing with life after the death of her husband. The mystery writer is Mary Roberts Rhinehart (1876-1958), still known worldwide for her legendary (and still very funny) novel The Circular Staircase (1908). The exact words from the 1948 edition of her autobiography, My Story , are ‘The shared life is gone. Hereafter you walk alone, but you do walk.’ In her final appearance in this novel, Miriam Filtvedt Bentsen quotes a former US President – ‘I have tried so hard to do right’. These were the final words of Grover Cleveland (1837-1908), who was president from 1885-89 and from 1893-97.

Chameleon People makes several references to Dutchman Marinus van der Lubbe (1909-34) and German-American Bruno Richard Hauptmann (1899-1936). The characters in the novel consider both men innocent of the crimes of which they were convicted and were executed for. In the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties, van der Lubbe and Hauptmann were often listed in articles and books about wrongful convictions. Later research has more or less concluded that van der Lubbe did start the Reichstag fire in 1933, although his trial was a farce and circumstances (including the possible involvement of Hermann Göring and the Nazi Party) remain somewhat unclear. This is the conclusion drawn in Ian Kershaw’s excellent biography Hitler (2008). In the case of Bruno Hauptmann, it seems clear that the ladder used for the Lindbergh kidnapping in 1932 came from his garage, but it remains disputed whether Hauptmann himself was guilty of the kidnapping and/or the subsequent murder. For a fairly balanced take on this complex and fascinating case, I recommend Richard T. Cahill’s book Hauptmann’s Ladder: A Step-by-Step Analysis of the Lindbergh Kidnapping (2014).

Hans Olav Lahlum

Gjøvik, 25 June 2016

HANS OLAV LAHLUM is a Norwegian crime author, historian, chess player and politician. The books that make up his crime series featuring Criminal Investigator Kolbjørn Kristiansen (known as K2) and his precocious young assistant Patricia are bestsellers in Norway. The Human Flies was the first, and was followed by Satellite People and The Catalyst Killing. Chameleon People is the fourth book in the series.