Van Veeteren is a fictional retired Detective Chief Inspector and the main character in a series of ten novels by Håkan Nesser

Håkan Nesser

Håkan Nesser is a Swedish author and teacher who has written a number of successful novels, mostly crime fiction. He has won Best Swedish Crime Novel Award three times, and his novel Carambole won the Glass Key award in 2000...

, of which nine have been filmed. In the films, Van Veeteren is portrayed by Sven Wollter

Sven Wollter

Sven Wollter is a Swedish actor. He was born and grew up in Gothenburg.Sven Wollter is an actor in Sweden and has starred in many films such as, The Man on the Roof, The Man from Majorca, Änglagård and Jerusalem, based on the novel by Selma Lagerlöf...

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The stage

The novels take place in a fictional town called Maardam, situated somewhere in a northern European country resembling the Netherlands, Sweden, Germany and Poland. Maardam has around 300 000 inhabitants (according to the first novel, The Mind's Eye

The Mind's Eye (novel)

The Mind's Eye is a 1993 novel by Håkan Nesser in the Van Veeteren series, translated into English in 2008 by Laurie Thompson. Nesser was awarded the 1993 Swedish Crime Writers' Academy Prize for new authors for this novel....

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The person

• The main character, Van Veeteren, is in his sixties. In the first five novels he is still a Detective Chief Inspector, but in the last five novels he is retired, but sometimes he leaves his antiquarian book store to help out with investigations. In his youth, he was a student at the university of Maardam. Van Veeteren is a bit grumpy and cynical, enjoys dark beer and chess. He has two children, Erich and Jess. He is divorced, but meets a new woman, Ulrike Fremdli, during the series. Van Veeteren is very intuitive when it comes to reading people. He has only one unsolved case in his resume, The Case G.