The Dogs of Riga (1992)

When I was reading the Martin Beck series by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö I kept seeing connections with Ed McBain's 87th Precinct series. Now that I'm reading the Kurt Wallander series by Henning Mankell, I'm sometimes connecting the stories to Beck. For example, in the second book in that series, The Man Who Went Up in Smoke from 1966, the Swedish police detective Beck travels to Hungary, at the time a Soviet satellite, to investigate the disappearance of a journalist. In The Dogs of Riga, Swedish police detective Wallander travels to Latvia to investigate a drug-related double homicide. Latvia in 1992, of course, is vastly more unsettled than even Hungary in 1966, which provides a lot of the interest. When Mankell was working on this novel Germany had been reunified but the Soviet Union still existed. Mankell felt compelled to add an afterword shortly before publication to clarify some (not all) of the ambiguities in an environment of swiftly developing political events. For all that, this is not historical fiction, nor really even police procedural, but more on the order of a Ludlum-style thriller, at which it is very good. Mankell's mystery is well conceived and complex, and the air of late-Soviet paranoia feels perfect. In fact, by about halfway through, the shadowy world of Latvian law enforcement is far the most interesting thread. By the time of the climax it's all so well done it becomes a gripping stay-up-all-night raver. This was only the second Wallander I'd read, after Faceless Killers, and at first I was worried because Wallander was going two-for-two on falling in love inappropriately. As it turns out, the Latvian woman he meets here, Baiba Liepa, has a continuing presence in the series, and there aren't that many others. In general, Wallander's personal life is not that interesting anyway. Mankell figured that out quickly and mostly stuck close to his main skill, which was constructing interesting, satisfying mysteries out of topical social forces and doing it in unforced natural ways. He's not particularly hammering any point, just laying out intriguing situations. Here that involves relations between Sweden and NATO on the one hand, and Latvia and the USSR on the other, proxies in a way for capitalism and communism yet in either case populated by interesting individual people. The Latvian stuff may tend to run to some extremes, with a brave and noble underground fighting for human rights versus evil totalitarian bureaucrats (who torture people and otherwise destroy lives). Mankell does not let the West off the hook, but his views of those shortcomings are more subtle, more like seeing toxic banality supported by constant barrages of empty commercial sentiments tending to make citizens alienated and disaffected. Maybe not so original, but a big, fun, and sprawling story to read.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.