The Rector of Veilbye (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781500384753)

Steen Steensen Blicher (1782-1848) was a Danish crime writer active in the early part of the Victorian Era. He is considered a trail blazer in Danish literature and is credited with pioneering the novella in that country as well as being one of the first crime writers and one of the first authors to employ the device of the unreliable narrator (which would be used later by the Modernists, notably Joseph Conrad in Nostromo, Heart of Darkness and other works). He was the son of a parson who could trace his lineage back to Martin Luther.

Most of his writing is set in Jutland, the name given to the peninsula that juts out in Northern Europe toward the rest of Scandinavia, forming the mainland part of Denmark.

Today he is remembered for The Rector of Veilbye. The novella is based upon a real life murder case from 1626 in Vejlby, Denmark which Blicher was familiar with from Erik Pontoppidan's Danish Church History (1741) and partly through oral tradition. Blicher's disturbing story has been adapted for the screen three times by Danish filmmakers in 1922, 1931 and 1972. The original case upon which the story is based is the type of story that would make even the most weather-hardened Dane shiver. The trial of Pastor Sen Jensen Quist of Vejlby took place at Aarhus in 1626. The trial centered around the unexplained disappearance in 1607 of a farm laborer named Jesper Hovgaard who was employed at Pastor Quist's rectory. Fifteen years later, in 1622, human remains were unearthed on the grounds of the rectory. The bones were believed to belong to Hovgaard and word soon spread that the Reverend Quist had slaughtered him and tried to conceal the crime. During the police investigation, two local men, who had past animosity toward Quist, testified that they witnessed the cleric murder Hovgaard while in a drunken rage. The Reverend professed his innocence but was found guilty and executed by decapitation on July 20, 1626. In 1934, Quist's son who had become the Pastor of Vejlby discovered that the witnesses had been bribed and the two men whose false testimony sent the Reverend to his death were executed for perjury in 1634. In 2006, The Rector of Veilbye was selected for inclusion in the Cultural Canon of Denmark by the Danish Ministry of Culture. During the ceremony, an official declared that, "the style illuminates elegiac pain and discomfort in an eerily intense drama, and the story is difficult to shake off."