An Event in Autumn (2004)

This is by far the shortest Kurt Wallander tale by Henning Mankell outside of the short story collection The Pyramid. An Event in Autumn came six years after the previous Kurt Wallander novel proper (1998's Firewall, followed the year after by the story collection and then a Linda Wallander novel in 2002), a fairly long gap for this series, which came at the rate of one per year in the '90s. It's typical of a Wallander story, complex with dogged police work. Daughter Linda is on hand, a police officer herself now. Many of the police characters are still there, though not all. I missed one in particular, a woman detective, gone without explanation. (There's one more Wallander to go, published five years after this. Maybe she'll show up again.) I didn't feel like Mankell's heart was much in this, though he's always good enough to enjoy reading. The most interesting part of the edition I read was an essay from 2013 called "Mankell on Wallander," in which he wanders through the facets of the series. He probably stopped the series at about the right time—there's something increasingly missing in these last novels. He wrote a lot of other things as well and had a career in theater too. He's definitely out of the groove in this one. The irascible coroner Nyberg is reduced to a stereotype, or even more so, as there was always some of it in his antics. It's a cold case—even the 25-year statute of limitations in Sweden for murder has passed. All they have to work with is the skeleton of a human hand found buried on a piece of property. The case goes back to the chaos of World War II but doesn't feel particularly significant or insightful. Maybe Mankell was not as good at shorter lengths, as the stories in The Pyramid are similarly weaker and unfocused. That said, I still enjoyed An Event in Autumn even if it felt a little like paltry portions—not length so much as development of Mankell's various social-realist themes, about the police, about government, about democracy and society. Sometimes in the series the ambitions can set things askew. The Nelson Mandela one (The White Lioness) felt to me more like a Ludlum type of thriller. But I enjoy Mankell's meticulous plotting always, wrapping his social critiques around police investigation. He touches on much of this in the essay. The original title translates in Swedish to Hand (Handen) because of the starting point for this mystery. It seems weird to me to change it to An Event in Autumn for English. It's set in the autumn, but what's wrong with the author's title (or is it even his?)? Go figure!

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.