The Rule and the Exception

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A father with low-key but high aspirations

There are men who become legends by chasing the rules, and then there’s Baguette Ylivire—a man who seems to attract rules just so he can politely sidestep them. If you’ve ever wondered where Tuomas Ylivire, that infamously unruly author of Too Bright To Shine, inherited his curiosity and irreverence for established order, look no further than his father: Chief Inspector Niilo “Baguette” Ylivire.

Baguette has the posture and composure of a man carved from pine, yet there’s a glint in his gaze that betrays a lifetime of watching the system—always with one eye on the blueprint and the other searching for the secret trapdoor. His colleagues see a calm, methodical detective, his paperwork always immaculate, his demeanour reserved to the point of austerity. They forget, or never quite notice, the little slippages: a signature missing here, a sudden detour there, a clue followed into the shadows that everyone else ignored. If the rules are the floorboards, Baguette is the draught that proves not everything is nailed down.

His son Tuomas, of course, is the natural evolution of this mindset—curious to the point of mischief, a tinkerer with words and worlds, believing, as all good Finns do, that anything can be fixed with enough lateral thinking and a little bit of borrowed wire. The only rule, for both father and son, is that the only rule is an exception. You’d call it chaos if it wasn’t so oddly effective. And the ambition follows like a flood from them.

Unconditional love

Baguette’s love for Tuomas is a quiet, durable thing—pride expressed not in speeches but in the careful tuning of a bicycle, the rare, conspiratorial wink after a narrow escape, or the simple trust that his son will find his way, even if that way runs through a forest of complications. There is a special pride in seeing your child break the rules, especially if you were the one who showed them how to do it elegantly.

A stoic mother with burning emotions

At home, the Ylivire household is a crucible of contradictions. Baguette’s wife, Hermione Baxter, entered his life ten years his senior and several light-years ahead in wit. British, sardonic, and a cyclone of innovation, she’s the only woman who could ever outfox him—and she has, many times. It is said their relationship began under the shadow of much suspicion (and perhaps a small bookie’s pool at the police station), but what do odds mean to people who make a habit of unmaking the world’s lazy certainties? Hermione taught Tuomas Oxford English and even now delights in the way he weaponises language, raising bilingual mayhem like a true family heirloom.

A naughty boy – a decent man

But let’s not mistake eccentricity for frivolity. Baguette’s life has been shaped by history’s hard edge. At fifteen, emboldened by the invincible spring of youth, he found himself in the arms of a slightly older girl—a moment of awakening his mother, Sanna, received with laughter rather than shame. Sanna was a force in her own right: a protest marcher, a fighter for causes no one else would touch, especially after her brother was murdered for being gay at a time when society pretended such things didn’t happen. From her, Baguette learned that to change the world, you don’t throw rocks from outside—you slip inside, find the lever, and move the whole machine from within.

That conviction brought him to the police, to the badge, to the eternal grind of process and the delicate art of knowing exactly when to break it. His guiding light? Justice, always. If the rules help, use them. If they don’t, improvise. But never, ever betray the people who trust you.

There’s a photograph on Baguette’s desk—he, Tuomas, and Hermione, all smiling (well, Hermione is smirking, Tuomas grinning, and Baguette maintaining what he would call “professional neutrality”). If you look closely, you’ll see something else, too: a little wildness, a shared understanding that the world is there to be engaged, bent, and, when necessary, joyfully reinvented.

So, when you think of Baguette, remember: the heart of that story beats in a line of people who never saw a rule they didn’t want to test, and never saw an injustice they could ignore. Some families pass down heirlooms. The Ylivires pass down the thrill of the exception.

Cheers