The Parson at Veilby

Sometime in the late 1990s, my wife went to a used book sale and brought home a handsome if slightly tattered paperback published in 1957 in Denmark.

From the Danish Peninsula, by Steen Steensen Blicher (1782-1848), had been translated into English and illustrated with woodcuts. It contains three poems and a novella-length tale, “The Parson at Veilby,” based on an actual event said to have taken place in Jutland, northern Denmark, in the 17th century.

Blicher told the tale through a series of fictional journal entries by a young judge, Erik Sörensen. 

The judge writes of meeting a local parson – a physically strong and hot-tempered man – and his beautiful, kind-hearted daughter. A rich farmer proposes marriage to the young woman, but she turns him down. The farmer is further offended when the parson refuses to pressure his daughter into accepting. The judge falls in love with the young woman, asks her to marry him, and, with her father’s blessing, she says yes.

What follows is a nightmare of trickery, vengeance, and justice gone awry. After a dead body is unearthed, the parson is accused of murder and put on trial. Based on the evidence presented and the parson’s unexpected confession, Judge Sörensen has no choice but to find the man guilty of a crime that, the reader later learns, never actually took place.

I found “The Parson at Veilby” compelling, inexorable, grim. At the time, I was considering setting a mystery in central Pennsylvania during that region’s ironmaking era in the early 1800s. I realized I could adapt Blicher’s tale as an interior plot within a longer narrative. As did Blicher, I would present this inner story through the journal of a young jurist: Judge Hiram Biddle, newly arrived in my fictional Colerain County.

In “The Parson at Veilby,” after Judge Sörensen grows old, he learns that he fell prey to an elaborate scheme that caused him to condemn an innocent man to death, wrecking his own future and that of his betrothed. Shocked by this revelation, he suffers a stroke and dies. By then, the perpetrator of the subterfuge has been dead and in his grave for years.

I thought about my own mystery-in-the-making. What if my judge, Hiram Biddle, now elderly, also learns that he was evilly duped 30 years ago, but does not die of natural causes – he holds a shotgun against his breast and presses the trigger. What if the culprit who played that iniquitous trick lives on, having amassed power and wealth, and intends to cover up his crime at any cost?

And what if the judge’s friend, a young, inexperienced sheriff named Gideon Stoltz, is driven to discover why his mentor committed suicide?

From a dusty journal in Hiram Biddle’s library, Gideon learns that, three decades ago, the judge presided over the trial of a preacher accused of murdering his hired man. Although engaged to marry the preacher’s daughter, Judge Biddle adhered to the law: based on the evidence set forth during a court trial, he found the preacher guilty of capital murder and sentenced him to hang. Afterward, the judge’s fiancée left Colerain County and was never heard from again.

This story-within-a-story underpins the challenge Gideon must face as he seeks to bring a dangerous, diabolical man to justice for a crime committed long in the past.

Many things can inspire a mystery’s plot: an old letter, a family secret, a confluence of historical events, a story in today’s newspaper reporting an act of greed or envy or unbridled passion.

Or a tale in a small, tattered volume picked up at a used book sale.

(Learn more about A Stranger Here Below, the Gideon Stoltz mystery that “The Parson at Veilby” helped inspire.)