Henning Mankell
- tonyhyland
- Oct 27, 2024
- 2 min read
Henning Mankell, who died aged 67,took the existing Swedish tradition of crime writing as a form of left-wing social criticism and gave it international recognition, capturing in his melancholy, drunken, bullish detective Kurt Wallander a sense of struggle in bewildered defeat that echoed round the world.
His tone is perfectly captured in the first Wallander novel, Faceless Killers (1991), when the detective comes across a murder scene: “Wallander thought of his own wife, who had left him, and wondered where to begin. A bestial murder, he thought. And if we’re really unlucky, it’ll be a double murder.”
There were other, contemporary figures of middle-aged male detectives being dragged through their future backwards as if it were a briar hedge but Wallander was the purest example and probably the most successful one. He first appeared when Sweden was in the middle of a precipitate retreat from the optimistic utopianism of the 1960s and 70s, so that the corruption and decay of the hero found an echo in the corruption and decay of the society around him.
After a slow start, the 10 Wallander novels (plus a volume of short stories and a novel centred on Wallander’ s daughter, Linda, in which he also featured) sold millions of copies in various languages. Two separate Swedish television series were made featuring the character, who took on a life of his own within them: both were sold around the world, as was a wonderful BBC adaptation, featuring Kenneth Branagh.
As the series progressed, Wallander seemed to become more miserable: “Every time he came home in the evening after a stressful and depressing work day, he was reminded that once upon a time he had lived there with a family. Now the furniture stared at him as if accusing him of desertion,” he reflected in the last novel (The Troubled Man, 2009), where he is also losing his memory to dementia.
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