Another solution to a "used up" character

Henning Mankell has written nearly a dozen crime novels featuring Swedish detective Kurt Wallander. Wallander fits the stereotype of crime novel detectives. But Mankell added some spark that made his character stand out.

In The Troubled Man, Mankell announces the end of Wallander's "public" life. "After that," Mankell writes, "there is nothing more. The story of Kurt Wallander is finished, once and for all."

But before that last line, before he is swallowed up by the shadow of forgetfulness, Wallander works to resolve one more mystery. This one involves the disappearance of his daughter's father-in-law-to-be. The older man had been a commander in the Swedish navy who had been involved in a bit of international intrigue involving a Russian submarine trapped in a Swedish fjord. Well, everyone assumed it was a Russian submarine and no one would talk about how or why it had escaped identification and capture.

Of course it's more complicated than that. The wife of the commander also disappeared. Long ago, she had been a refugee from East Germany. Or, at least everyone thought she was a refugee. Had she been a spy? Was there a larger meaning to the papers found on her body? And how does this affect Wallander's daughter and new granddaughter?

Oh, and was this somehow related to the murder of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme in 1986?

Mankell

Mankell adds so many distant and political aspects to the mix, that it's hard to imagine Wallander finding any firm answers. Probably only Stieg Larsson's Lisbeth Salander could have figured it all out and played vigilante to punish the evil doers.

Mankell is a master at story telling and character creation. He's also a master at putting one character out to pasture. I don't think I've read all the Wallander novels, though I've seen quite a few television versions. I might have to go through plot summaries and find the ones I haven't read yet.

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• The author's home page
• Janet Maslin's review in The New York Times
• Brian Oliver's review in The Guardian
• Kenneth Turan's review in The Los Angeles Times
• James Urgquart's review in The Independent

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Video based on literature

I don't usually write about visual media. But I've had some health problems for the last month and have not had enough energy to read much more than newspaper headlines.

This afternoon I logged on to Netflix looking for a couple old favorites (think The Prisoner and SCTV; they're only available on DVDs).

What I did find was Wallander, the Swedish TV series. I enjoyed the BBC series starring Kenneth Branagh as Henning Mankell's dyspeptic detective, so I decided to take a look at the original.

The Swedish series is made up of 29 episodes. The one I watched was Hämnden (The Revenge). It was the first episode of the second season and released to theaters before it was broadcast. For that reason, it might not be fair to compare this with the episodes of Wallander produced by the BBC.

Henriksson as Wallander

In any case, it was so much more satisfying than the BBC episodes. There were several themes: immigrants to Sweden; women's rights; the role of the military in a system that runs on rule-of-law, and how to preserve civil liberties in the face of terrorism. Oh, and there's some personal stuff about Kurt Wallander.

Krister Henriksson, who plays Wallander in the Swedish version, portrays a more human, less depressive detective than Branagh. The detective still has no life beyond his job and his dog -- even though he had just bought a house on the coast outside of Ystad, the small town he works in.

I look forward to watching other episodes of the home-grown Swedish version of Wallander, even if I have to read sub-titles keep track of what's going on.

Have you seen any of the episodes of the Swedish series, Wallander? What did you think? Write and tell this little bit of the world what you thought.

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Or go to Netflix.

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The NYT reviewer speaketh

Marilyn Stasio, writing in The New York Times really likes the final Wallander novel by Henning Mankell, but she's not so enthusiastic about Jacqueline Winspear's new Maisie Dobbs mystery.

She does recommend a second Michael Robertson mystery about the brothers Heath, who rent an office for their law firm on London's Baker Street in exchange for answering letters sent to Sherlock Holmes. The first book was The Baker Street Letters. The new one is The Brothers of Baker Street. Hmmm...

Wait for it

Henning Mankell: the last Wallander

Forget the 40 plays, the Gaza flotilla arrest and the good work in Africa, what Henning Mankell is really famous for is the anguished detective he created 22 years ago. Now, with the final Wallander novel published this week, he tells Jon Henley why he is happy to say farewell

That's it then; the end. Twenty-two years after his first appearance and more than a decade since the one everybody - even his creator - had assumed would be his last, Inspector Kurt Wallander is working his last case.

The lugubrious, all too human but ultimately decent Swedish cop with the never-ending health problems and the terrible family life has sold 30m books in 45 different languages. This will be a sad day for a lot of people.

But not, on balance, for Henning Mankell. "Hand on heart," he says, "I thought I'd written his last adventure a long time ago. I don't even particularly like the man. We have certain things in common: we enjoy the same kind of music, we have a similarly conscientious approach to work. We wouldn't be enemies if we knew each other, but he wouldn't be a close friend. He's not someone I'd invite to dinner."...

"When you reach your 60s, you realise certain things," he says. "First, that you've lived well over half your life. Second, that you've pretty much made all your really big decisions; people very rarely change direction after that. And that leads you to look back. It's quite a . . . scary moment. So I asked: am I afraid of anything? I'm not afraid of dying. Nor of pain; we can control most pain these days. But there is one thing I'm scared of."

The thing Mankell is scared of is the reason this is Wallander's last case, so obviously I'm not going to tell you what it is. But thinking about that, and about the whole business of looking back on a life, and the idea of Wallander realising how all along he had been so resolutely non-political, then wondering what might happen if you confronted him with perhaps the biggest political scandal in Sweden's postwar history – thinking about all those things, Mankell says, "I began to think I really might have a story for Wallander. One last one."...

Crime writing, he came to realise, was not – as everyone had always told him – a literary genre that was invented by Poe or Hammett or even by Shakespeare. "It was around in classical drama," he says. "Even then, we were holding up a mirror to crime to observe society. Look at Medea: a woman murders her kids because she's jealous of her husband. If that's not a crime story, I don't know what is. And if the ancient Greeks had had a police force, you can be damn sure a detective inspector would have had a part in Medea. Society and its contradictions become clear when you write about crime."

Wallander took off almost instantly in Scandinavia, and nearly as fast in continental Europe. Britain, after a slower start, is catching up, carried on a wave of Scandi-crime enthusiasm that also features the likes of Stieg Larsson, Jo Nesbø and Detective Sarah Lund. Wallander, though, retains a special appeal. What is it?

Partly, Mankell reckons, that he has never instrumentalised the detective. "Everything has always started from a big question, not from within Wallander," he says. "I did sometimes use him, of course. But I never held him between my fingers and looked at him and said: So, what can I find out with you today? I'd written three novels with him before I realised this was . . . like a cello, that I could play."

It's also important that Wallander is real. "No one could imagine James Bond stopping to inject himself with insulin," Mankell says. "That's because James Bond isn't real. So it's important that Wallander has diabetes, he's ill, his ideas progress, he has relationship problems. He changes, like we all do." It helps, too, that he thinks: "It's challenging to have him enter a room and think for 10 pages. But that's what I'm interested in – how he reads facts, traces, situations. Running around and shooting people is easy. And it isn't normal. Normally you solve problems by thinking."...

But now Wallander has reached the end of his road. Would Mankell, prolific and hugely successful for over 40 years, be happy for the rumpled detective to be his greatest legacy? He thinks. "I believe," he says, "the most important thing you do in your life, you may not even know what it is. It may be that one day you sat down on a bench to comfort someone who is crying. That could be the most important thing you ever do. So no, I would like to be thought of as a good, and quite generous man, who tried to make life a little better for others through what he did. And the things he wrote."...

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Another book I didn't really read

Masterpiece Mystery recently featured three stories featuring Kurt Wallander, the repressed and obsessive Swedish detective created by Henning Mankell. The Wallander mysteries are intriguing and Wallander as a character is too. I keep expecting him to break out and become a real person. Maybe I shouldn't.

I picked up Depths by Mankell at the Northfield library. I'd forgotten that Mankell has written things besides the Wallander mysteries. I didn't look too closely at the book. I should have.

The back of the book jacket might have given me a hint. There's a quote from a Swedish newspaper review: "Mankell's most ambitious literary work so far." For me, that kind of response is a warning.

Depths is not a mystery and Wallander is not a character.

It's the tale of a troubled and obsessive Swedish naval officer set in 1914 as a world war is about to begin. I can't critique much about this book, because I only read about a third of it. It's constructed with little chapters of one to a dozen paragraphs each. The book jacket biography says Mankell has written many plays. The tiny chapters are like tiny scenes from a movie. Or maybe they're like individual frames in one of those antique things called films. Each of those frames is a still picture. When you run them through a projector, you get the simulation of movement.

Practically nothing happens in most of the scenes in Depths. I kept reading expecting the scenes to add up to something. I don't understand the arithmetic of the book. Even when it seemed that something had happened, I couldn't understand what was going on. (Reminded me of calculus in fact.)

I got tired of the main character rowing off into the fog to stalk a woman who lived a solitary life on an island off the Swedish coast. She was as as helpless and hopeless as he was, and nothing made much sense. Maybe if I was Swedish and not American I'd understand more. (Depths was a best seller in Sweden.) Maybe if I could better recognize my own helplessnesses. It's really not worth the effort for me. I think it should have been a short story (or as Paul Binding suggested in his review - link below - a tragic folk ballad).

After struggling through about a third of the book (maybe only a quarter), I skipped to the end and read the last couple scenes. Evidently things had happened and there was an ending with cosmic justice (I guess). But if it took 400 pages to get there, I'm glad I didn't read all those pages to find out. Next time I'll make sure I'm checking out one of the Wallander books.

Have you read any of Mankell's books? Have you read Depths? How have you responded? Write and tell this little bit of the world what you thought.

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• Lucy Ellmann's overly-long and spot on review of Depths in the New York Times
  
• Ian Thompson's review in the Guardian (UK)
  
• Paul Binding's review in The Independent (UK)
  
• Myra Junyk's review from Curled Up

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Reread and finally write

At the Amery library, I checked out two books. One of them was another Henning Mankell novel, Befor the Frost, a Linda Wallander Mystery.

I read this one awhile ago. It must have been between the time I stopped publishing an actual newsletter and when I started this blog.

I didn't remember the title, but I did find things in the first 30 pages familiar. I read random chapters through the rest of the book to remind me of the plot and the characters.

Linda Wallander is the daughter of Kurt Wallander, the chief character of most of Mankell's Swedish mysteries. This book begins as the young Wallander is about to join the police force in Ystad, where the elder Wallander is a chief inspector.

[at left: Johanna Sällström who played Linda Wallander on Swedish TV]

There are a number of mysteries that the two of them get involved in. One involves one of Linda's friends. Another begins with the suicides and murders in Jonestown. The mysteries all merge by the end in a plot to blow up cathedrals all over Sandinavia on September 10, 2001. Mankell seems to be reminding us that fanatic suicides are not restricted to Muslim cultures.

In spite of the themes in the stories, there is a lot less of Mankell's pessimism and unhappiness in this story than in many of his books. Maybe because Linda Wallander is young and still hopeful. The stories are intricate and detailed. It's a long book and probably good for a winter read.

Any other responses?

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• Inspector Wallander fan site with links to many reviews.
  
• The Publisher's web site
  
• Fiona Walker's review at Mystery Ink

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Sweden to Zambia

On the way to Sidetrack (the little refuge in the woods), I stopped at the new library in Amery. What a great new facility. No more are the window ledges full of books. No longer are there carts full of books in the middle of aisles.

There's plenty of new space. There are tables and comfy chairs and a fireplace. There are even empty shelves waiting for new books. Hooray for the Amery library.

As I was scanning the shelves, I saw, in the mystery section, a Henning Mankell book. Slightly curious and very skeptical, I picked it up. The description inside the front cover said, "Interweaving past and present, Sweden and Zambia, The Eye of the Leopard draws on bestselling author Henning Mankill's deep understanding of the two worlds he calls home: Sweden... and Africa..."

"Well," I said to myself, "it's not set in Sweden. Maybe the dispeptic Swede won't be so pessimistic if he's writing a story about a Swede in Africa."

Wrong!

I should have read the first couple sentences. "He wakes in the African night, convinced that his body has split in two. Cracked open, as if his guts had exploded, with the blood running down his face and chest."

His main character doesn't know what to do with his life. As a child, he'd had a realization that he was an individual and that his life was separate from everyone else's. He ends up in law school, but decides he doesn't want to be a lawyer.

He goes to Zambia because a woman who had befriended him as a motherless child wanted to go there. He stays in Zambia because he's asked and he doesn't know what else to do. He stays for 20 years even though he doesn't like what he's doing and he's scared most of the time and he doesn't understand Africa or Africans.

It's not a mystery in the conventional sense.

About half way through the book, I decided it's the Swedish/Zambian version of Camus' The Stranger. I skimmed most of the rest of the book. On page 246 (out of 315), Mankell writes (in the voice of his main character), "From my upbringing I received neither self-knowledge nor a sense of purpose... Now I try to move through hostile terrain without surrendering to confusion."

That's how I got through most of the book: without "a sense of purpose" and "without surrenduring to confusion." I still can't really answer the question of why I sort of read the whole thing. Maybe I kept hoping for some kind of redemption for the character or the author.

No such luck.

Why would Mankell choose to live in Zambia? Why would he choose to live in Sweden? Why does he choose to live? I guess he either gets by without "a sense of purpose" or he's not writing about himself at all.

So it goes.

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See also:

• Chris Petit's review in The Guardian, Out of Sweden
  
• Anna Patterson's review in The IndependentThe Eye of the Leopard
  
• Henning Mankell's web site

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Stories about people

I read two books recently that I expected to be very different from one another. I was pleasantly surprised.

One of the problems with some mystery novels is that there's so much focus on the crime and the clues that the characters are neglected. Then there are books about people and the less deadly things in their lives in which there's too little story for me.

I thought about that some while reading One Step Behind by Henning Mankell [right]. This is a murder mystery involving a serial killer and a very involved plot. Mankell tells a good story this time. (Better than The Dogs of Riga that I read last fall.

This time too, the main character, detective Kurt Wallander, came across to me as a multi-dimensional character. I kept comparing the portrayal of Wallander to Tony Hillerman's portrayal of Joe Leaphorn. Over the course of all the books he appeared in, Leaphorn became a well-rounded, complex guy. One Step Behind is the sixth book about the Swedish detective, and Wallander is a pretty complete person. Certainly more complete than the guy I read about earlier. I may go back and read some of the in-between books.

The division of the world of literature into plot-driven books and character-driven books came into focus again when I read Mountain Time by Ivan Doig.

I had heard of Doig [right], but I had never read any of his books. He's gotten some awards and good reviews in high places. But somehow I was put off by a guy whose last name seems to be an onomatopoeia for a sound effect. Pardon my silly prejudice.

Then one of Nancy's high school friends recommended Doig's books. The endorsement was so heartfelt from someone who seems to be a thoughtful and utterly honest person, that I couldn't resist picking up one of Doig's books the next time I was in the Northfield library.

I was about a third of the way through Mountain Time when I remarked to a friend that this book was the opposite of the plot-driven mysteries. What I'd read in the beginning of the book was all about the people with practically no story.

Well, my early impression was wrong. There was a story to tell in Mountain Time. Telling it began slowly with limning the characters. And both the characters and the story telling are great in this book.

Without a series of books filled with improbable murders within which to flesh out the characters, Doig creates the sisters McCaskill and Lexa's POSSLQ, Mitch Rozier. And then he tells the story of a short period in their lives. That period involves resolution of parent-child relationships, sibling rivalries, love, distrust, jealousy, heartache, and nearly forced marches through beautiful mountain wilderness.

I really liked both of these books. And liked them for their similarities -- good story telling and interesting people. They're not perfect, but I don't think that's a reasonable expectation. There are some of those pesky improbabilities in both books. (I almost quite reading Mountain Time 30 pages from the end, but Doig earned a save.) Mankell and Doig persuaded me to read more of their books.

I recommend both One Step Behind and Mountain Time.

If you read either, write and tell this little bit of the world what you think.

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• Henning Mankell's English language web site
  
  
• A reading group guide to One Step Behind
  
  
• A review at Epinions
  
  
• A review from Bookends
  
  
• Ivan Doig's web site
  
  
• Chapter 1 of Mountain Time

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Swedish mystery (again)

The street on which Kurt Wallander and his daughter Linda shared an apartment in Before the Frost. Photo by Simon Hämmerle

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I picked up two more Henning Mankell mysteries at the Northfield library to take along on my trip to Oregon. I started Before the Frost before I left, but it was a big hardcover, so I didn't pull it out during the flight west. I finished in Eugene while taking breaks from writing an instructors' manual and spending time with my mother.

This Mankell story is mainly about a police recruit named Linda Wallander. In this fictional Swedish world, Linda is the daughter of Kurt Wallander, detective inspector about whom Mankell wrote half a dozen other mysteries.

This story is pretty good, although the main characters are so flawed they seem real. Now, I am pretty sure that there aren't any perfect families, but I'm glad I'm not part of the Wallander family. Father Kurt unpredictably veers from ignoring anything his daughter says to telling her to present her theories at a case conference in police headquarters. Daughter Linda goes from being thoughtlessly cautious to being dangerously venturesome.

And most of the other characters -- especially the crazy bad guys -- aren't any more predictable. Now with crazies, that's understandable. But with an experienced investigator and a rookie just out of the police academy, such behavior is unexpected. Unless these people are real humans with a history we don't know much about. Mankell seems to have created those characters in this book.

He's also created a convoluted plot full of violence and mystery.

Overall, it's a long book full or realistic characters, and it's good reading. I liked this one better than the first Mankell's books I read a couple weeks ago.

If you other ideas, write and tell us.


From Swedish TV, three actors who play major characters in Before the Frost: Ola Rapace (plays dectective Stefan Lindman), Krister Henriksson (plays Kurt Wallander), and Johanna Sällström (who plays Linda Wallander).

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See

• Henning Mankell's site for Before the Frost
• A review of Before the Frost from The Age (Australia)
• Fiona Walker's review of Before the Frost at Mystery Ink
• Ystad, Sweden web camera
• "The new inspector Morse?"
  

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