The Troubled Man (2009)

Most of the Kurt Wallander novels by Henning Mankell (the originals in Swedish) came out like clockwork in the '90s, but the last two straggled in at five-year intervals. The one before this is short (An Event in Autumn, technically a Linda Wallander novel), and the one before that, The Pyramid, was a collection of stories. Perhaps the last handful feel like Mankell might have been just slightly (or more) bored with the project. There's some of that here, perhaps inevitably, and there's some series tidying-up that feels mechanical. But it's a fairly big novel with a fairly big case, once again charged with international and historical issues, perhaps most notably with reverberations of the Cold War. By their size, complexity, and pace, the majority of Mankell's novels feel more like political thrillers than detective stories or police procedurals. There's really not much genre innovation to them, except using genre as scaffolding for larger political and social ideas. In that way, Mankell does an admirable wrap on the whole series with The Troubled Man. The case is mysterious enough to offer gratification in the resolution. It's hard to miss that Wallander and Mankell are saying a lot of goodbyes here. Wallander's ex-wife Mona (Linda's mother) shows up for the first time since Faceless Killers, I believe, the first novel in the series. Wallander's one-time girlfriend after the divorce, the Latvian Baiba Liepa, has a dramatic sequence too. Rydberg, who died in Faceless Killers, still haunts Wallander's thoughts as his mentor. Other threads from the series are dropped entirely, such as coworkers who seemed to have a future in it and some other storylines. Mankell's writing actually ranged widely beyond detective fiction, including plays, screenplays, and YA literature. He was certainly much more than a narrow genre writer. You always sense that, and his decisions are easy to trust. Sometimes he feels almost protective of Wallander's privacy, the main reason, given more than once, for withholding information. Other things here, some of the resolutions and problems that plague Wallander, feel mechanical. Here, for example, he is 60, still diabetic and battling his weight, but now he also has onset Alzheimer's. It scares me silly in a way, of course, but also feels like it's emerging unconsciously from Mankell's own anxieties and one-more-thing worries. Still, all around, it's a generous finish to a worthwhile series, the whole thing a classic of Nordic noir.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.