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.

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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!

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Before the Frost (2002)

Definitely some new wrinkles to the Kurt Wallander story in this later Henning Mankell novel—most notably that it features Wallander's daughter Linda, who has become a police officer after spending her 20s figuring things out. In fact, it's more her novel than Kurt's, intended as the first of a trilogy. It was never finished because Mankell was too distraught after the actress playing her in a TV production committed suicide. This reminds me I should check in with some of the Wallander TV and movie versions one of these times. Kenneth Branagh plays him in one. As always, Mankell's plotting is solid, but Before the Frost still feels a little underbaked somehow. Mankell scheduled the climax of the action here for September 8, 2001—yeah, he generally has his stories all charted out on timelines. Then he appeared to feel the need to acknowledge 9/11. His bad people this time around are radicalized Christians—including a survivor of Jonestown, in an audacious stroke typical of Mankell. This guy is the mastermind, utilizing all the lessons he learned from Jim Jones. Using radicalized Christians as a plot point might have felt awkward for Mankell in the immediate aftermath of a new level of radicalized Muslim strikes. But I'm glad he stayed the course. Radicalized Christians are at least as much trouble. Part of the feeling of lack of development in this one is likely due to the planned trilogy never being finished. These events all take place just before Linda starts her police career, and there's also a new love interest for her (reportedly from another non-Wallander novel by the busy Mankell). Before the Frost more seems to be exploring the relationship between Kurt and Linda, parent and grown child, complicated further because Linda is an only child of divorced parents. The fights between Kurt and Linda are abrupt and absurdly brutal. Also, at least one character, Ann-Britt Hoglund, is suddenly almost unrecognizable. She's remarkably cold to Linda. What happened here? I thought Hoglund was one of the most interesting side characters in the Kurt Wallander series. Other detectives seem slightly different too, but it's more in line with Linda's point of view. Another weak element is that one of Linda's closest childhood friends is a pathological liar and this comes as news to Linda. You'd think she'd have noticed by now. Interesting curiosity in the Wallander series anyway.

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Firewall (1998)

This is another solid novel in Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander series of thrillers focused around police investigations in southern Sweden, though they are nearing the end now. Mankell's strength remains his ability to concoct complicated stories with very confusing details. Eventually they come into focus in believable rather than outlandish or convenient ways. I don't read enough thrillers to know—maybe this is nothing special. But Mankell seems to be pretty good at it. Usually after the first third or so of one of these, as here, I'm convinced he has painted himself into a corner he cannot get out of, and then he does, usually in style. He pushes some elements for effect, of course, and they don't always add up entirely, but mostly they do. As you might guess from the title this one is about cybercrime. As you might guess from the publication date it almost looks quaint now. But that's only in terms of the state of the technology in the era of Windows 98. At one point, for example, Wallander learns what backdoor access means and thinks to himself he knew computers had windows but not doors. Bada-bing, bada-boom. Tip your waitress. Some of the violence once again is for shock value (literally in the case of one character who is electrocuted at a power plant, causing a widespread blackout) but mostly it's there to confuse us as much as the police, and it does work on us if not, eventually, the police. You have to accept that the villains are prodigiously resourceful comic book figures, but that's not out of reach for a thriller. Most of Mankell's character development has not seemed that inspired in this series, but Wallander's thoughts of dating again come with a gut punch this time. There are some interesting interpersonal work politics developments in Firewall too, but I wish now I remembered more about Martinsson from the earlier books. In general everyone turns on Wallander in this one. The reason is pretty good but the rejection and suspicion of him seem more overplayed. Fortunately, Mankell has many more attractive qualities, from his intricate plotting to his brooding air, with a certain stamp of Nordic noir. OK, sometimes the brooding air is overplayed too, but you can't have everything.

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One Step Behind (1997)

Here's another really good one from the Kurt Wallander series by Henning Mankell. Some of the devices may be growing somewhat threadbare—another climax with Wallander in grave mortal peril, more health problems, brooding attacks of doubt, new friends. It's a thriller series more than police procedural let alone hardboiled detective so action-packed scenes are inevitable. Mankell's plotting is as good as ever. It relies on some shaky premises but the case remains intriguingly mysterious for a long time. Another repetition: the most heinous crimes ever seen in the region. That has already been used at least twice before in the series (One Step Behind is seventh of 12). At first I thought this was going to be a mass murder variation, but no, in due course it turns out to be another serial killer. The love for serial killers obviously reached Sweden in the '90s too. But I can forgive these miscues because this one is just so cracking good most of the way. A group of college-age kids disappears in early summer. They are believed to be traveling, as their parents receive postcards from points in Europe, but one mother is convinced they are forged and it's not her daughter's handwriting. Then one of the police detective Kurt Wallander's colleagues, Svedberg, is found brutally murdered. He had been working unofficially and in secret on the disappearance. Now I have to admit Svedberg never made that much impression on me in the series. In fact, sometimes I'm sure I'm confused a little about Wallander's and Martin Beck's coworkers. Anyway, a lot of interesting revelations about him come to light in the investigation. One of Wallander's new friends is a postman who delivers mail by boat in an island area of Sweden. He's more of a plot device here but looks like he might be around for the future. The other is a preening new prosecutor who doubts Wallander's abilities. Baiba Liepa has been summarily dismissed from the series, it appears—they broke up between the last novel and this one. I like that Mankell did that and I also like that he did it offstage. There is also not much in this one about Wallander's daughter, Linda, and I like that too. Maybe what I like is that a lot of the clutter of Wallander's personal life has been cleared away and we mostly focus on the case. Overall this is one of the best. The elements may be familiar, but Mankell is still getting more skillful working with them.

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The Fifth Woman (1996)

I'm calling the sixth Kurt Wallander mystery by Henning Mankell one of the best in the series. As always, it's totally engrossing nearly from start to finish. And, also once again, there's more evidence for what a master of plot Mankell is. Some of the elements may rankle a little. The brutality of the crimes is first on that list—so grotesque here they finally begin to verge on parody. Especially when they start to eat at Wallander from the inside out, as they often do. As they would anyone, obviously, including many readers. Mankell does not exactly "play fair" in this one, tipping us early to who the killer is. We see some scenes from the killer's view, which also gives us information, but the specific identity of this culprit is not that important. If Wallander is a link between Martin Beck and Stieg Larsson's trilogy, and he might be, here is where the theme of misogyny and its various fruits first really shows up. For once I don't want to give too much away as the details of this one are there to be discovered. But the primary focus here is specifically on many of the ill ways men treat women, and they are never isolated cases. We should know it's going on constantly, as police officers are likely to know well themselves. In a way, Wallander represents a type of social complacency, a police detective who can still be shocked and deeply disturbed by what he witnesses, and yet is unable to generalize it somehow and so is never quite hardened to his job. He remains an interesting character for all his flaws and the increasing use of him as a superhero (the girl with the dragon tattoo herself, Lisbeth Salander, practically arrives as a superhero). This novel also includes significant developments in Wallander's life, which can be affecting even though more and more I think that kind of stuff only clutters up some of these narratives. Another thing I noticed here is how good Mankell is on time passing. We get a nice sense that we are seeing the life of a man as he passes through his 40s. This kind of keeping faith with real time is tricky business in any continuing series and among other things Mankell is doing much better at that than many others.

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Sidetracked (1995)

In the Kurt Wallander series so far, the good news for me has been how good Henning Mankell was at creating complicated plots that fall together. In terms of genre, he still seems to me closer to thriller than police procedural. That has been a little disappointing because thrillers generally aren't that thrilling for me—lots of action and movement but inevitably they seem to reach a point where all focus is on some orchestrated Big Event in a big scene. That said, Mankell is tremendously skilled at it. In Sidetracked he reveals very early who the bad guy is, which creates a nice tension when Wallander and/or members of his team are physically in his presence, unknowing. It's a 14-year-old boy with a Native American fixation who is kinda sorta a serial killer. An FBI analyst is on hand consulting with Wallander on the case—a profiler, more or less, still a new idea in the '90s, so I take it this is fairly well grounded in research. Still, this kid is not my idea of a serial killer. He has too much of a concrete motivation, even if it is lunatic. It's lunatic in a rational way, like the Unabomber. He's also over-accomplished, capable of amazing feats, like a superhero or supervillain (looking forward again to Stieg Larsson). Wallander is tormented as usual by social issues within what he considers a decaying social democracy (Sweden), and his personal relations are strained with his father, daughter, and love interest, who first appeared in an earlier novel in the series (The Dogs of Riga) and has lingered on the sidelines since. One of the main themes in Sidetracked is human trafficking and the unscrupulous rich people who enable it (e.g., Donald Trump, Alan Dershowitz, Harvey Weinstein, Bill Clinton). I like a lot of the elements in this one and it's an absorbing and quick-paced read. It's competently done—above average, really, like all the blurbers say—so I think my quibbles about thrillers are more likely straining at genre limitations. It's just not the kind of Adam-12 police procedural that's generally my preference, but it's sober about the real world, which is also a preference. Mankell may not always be for me, in other words, but so far he's always been good at the things he does.

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The Man Who Smiled (1994)

This is still an early-ish novel in Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander series, fourth or fifth of 12 depending on how you count them. I can see how it might not be considered up to some of the others. It spends a lot of time on Wallander's personal life. He's interesting, but I'm more interested in the police procedures and the social realism. It also has some tendency to drop into action / thriller / suspense modes, which too often start to feel unpleasantly like Tom Clancy or Robert Ludlum commercial fare. These kinds of stories don't work so well for me. But it's still a pretty interesting case and one of Mankell's strong suits remains putting together a satisfyingly complex mystery story. He's maybe not as interested in actual police procedures as me, but he knows how to use them to get a plot from one point to the next. That said, The Man Who Smiled has some flaws. The danger in which Wallander and crew find themselves, for example, is sometimes extraordinarily high, as early when Wallander computes there is a bomb in the gas tank of the car he is driving, with only moments to pull over and get far away from it. At the same time these police officers are often just as extraordinarily unconcerned about the dangers. Still, I'd call the miscues more like quibbles. Mankell is good and the novel is enjoyable. As always, he works some social justice into the story—this time Wallander is going after a corporate tycoon. Interestingly, nowadays we accept and even embrace the idea that corporate tycoons are deceitful and manipulative. Our sick president is only an extreme example. But in Sweden in 1994 there is not only the instinctive deference to wealth, but also positive affirmation of its moral good standing, if not superiority. Wallander's immediate supervisor is very troubled that the tycoon is even a suspect. For the rest of us, cynics, we can see clearly how people are cut down everywhere this tycoon goes. It's ultimately little surprise to find out he's operating in the black market for human body parts. Compare the Larry Niven story, "The Jigsaw Man," from Dangerous Visions. Mankell's version is more the way you would expect this type of market to work, from top to bottom. In some ways our villain Alfred Harderberg looks forward to the vast evils of Stieg Larsson's Dragon Tattoo series, though he is little like the sadistic misogynists found there. But he's pretty bad. Something about this series that baffles me: Wallander's father's painting business. He paints exactly the same landscape scene over and over, sometimes with a grouse in the foreground. I know it's a joke, especially that he makes a living from it, but it's so weird. Sweden can't possibly be the kitschiest place on the planet. Can it?

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The White Lioness (1993)

I liked a lot of things about this Kurt Wallander story by Henning Mankell, though its scope and size put it more in the range of big-time bestseller thriller than police procedural. We've already seen Mankell's ambitions to transcend genre limitations, not least by giving them such deeply international themes and concerns. The previous novel, The Dogs of Riga, involved the reunification of Germany and the imminent collapse of the Soviet Union. This one involves South Africa at the end of apartheid—in fact, it is about an assassination attempt on Nelson Mandela. I'm not sure I like such high-profile goings-on going on in my tidy little police procedurals, but Mankell was a part-time resident and lifelong student of South Africa, so he comes by it honestly. Mankell demonstrates again, more emphatically than ever, that he is a positive master at orchestrating plot. From the disappearance of a young wife and mother in southern Sweden, and back and forth to the highest echelons of South African power, Mankell puts the police detective Wallander on the case, which includes a disaffected high-level KGB agent, two African assassins with varying spiritual inclinations, a handful of Communist stooges, President F.W. de Klerk himself, brutal white supremacists of course, a Methodist minister, and Wallander's own daughter. There's plenty of mortal danger to go around and the stakes are very high. I never believed we were in South African history, though South Africa itself was quite believable, including de Klerk, often seen burning the midnight oil in the spring of 1992, when this novel takes place. The White Lioness was never published in English until 1998 so it might have already been easy to miss the scorching immediacy of the historical moment and context Mankell worked in—practically a tightrope act. The transition was still ongoing in 1993 and still could have gone wrong even as he was writing. An assassination of Mandela was hardly unlikely—where would Mankell have been then? As I say, the 500 pages of The White Lioness add up to thriller more than anything else. I often thought of Robert Ludlum as I wended along through all these meticulously constructed events. Kurt Wallander is interesting and likable, gruff but ploddingly competent, with inspired intuition and fierce commitment. He's hot-tempered, a little bit foolish, but a lot wise. He's a heroic figure and there are others like him here, who recognize one another. Well, it's genre. The bad people are in the mold of German Nazis. So it works for the most part, and works pretty well, but may lean toward the mechanical and indulgent by size. It will probably keep you up most of the night if you let it.

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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.

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The Pyramid (1999)

Here's a small problem with series of novels, or maybe we should call them franchises because TV, movies, and even short stories can suffer the problem too. The Wikipedia article on Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander series notes that this collection of long stories comes first in terms of a chronological order. But that's only by the settings of these stories (so-called), which are "early cases" ranging from as far back as 1969 to just before the action of Faceless Killers, the first Wallander novel. This collection is a reasonably big book and there are only five stories; they're not exactly short stories in any conventional sense. The shortest run around 30 pages and the longest goes some 160. They are more like episodes from novels, with blunted climaxes. So The Pyramid may be the first one to read in terms of a strict timeline. I jumped it ahead of the rest after I learned that. But I don't think it's the way to go. These stories presume more previous knowledge of the series than I had, such as Wallander's relationships with his father, wife, and daughter. They often display what I call Revenge of the Sith syndrome, by which I mean a prequel too concerned by far with continuities, crossing the t's and dotting the i's of known details. The last story here, the title story and longest, actually takes us to the morning of the first day in Faceless Killers. That's way too cute for me. While these stories open some interesting windows into Wallander's character, more often they feel padded out and just a little wearied of the project. "The Pyramid," the long story, is built around an unnecessary scene with his father, which adds little to our understanding of either character and bogs down a crime investigation right in the middle. Not that there is much to these investigations, which are pro forma at best, and uninspired. I admit, at this point, I have reached a certain level of comfort or familiarity with Wallander and Mankell. I like the police detective Wallander, a gruff and impatient investigator with a moral compass and good instincts, a taste for opera, and all the frustrations of modern Western life. In this era when short stories have become virtually antiquated, perhaps Mankell was simply better as a novelist. I would say this should be read in publication order, and it's probably for completists only.

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Faceless Killers (1991)

[False start here.]

Full disclosure, my blog is littered with abandoned projects. One I've been gnawing at for some time is the police procedural, mainly in fiction but some on TV and at the movies too. Early on, because 10 years ago they were everywhere you looked, I flailed at Nordic noir in the form of Stieg Larsson's so-called (so-translated) Girl With the Dragon Tattoo novels (the first two, never made it to the third), and then the false start at Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander novels. Wallander is a police detective in a small city in southern Sweden, his stories set mostly in the '90s. Then an Amazon deal opened up most of Ed McBain's 87th Precinct series to me in a convenient way. When I remembered the influence McBain had on Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, the path to Nordic noir became more clear. As a curious aside, I saw an interview with Maj Sjöwall from about 2014 (as I recall), in which she stated flatly that she found Henning Mankell boring. I worried about that, circling back to Faceless Killers again to consider going through Mankell's 11 or so Kurt Wallander tomes. But I did not find it boring at all—in fact, it was even more interesting with its themes of immigrant tensions and hostilities. It features vigilante white nationalist groups killing immigrants, especially immigrants of color, for the sake of terror. It seemed far away and imaginary when I wrote my 2012 review and so much more starkly real now. Faceless Killers might be the one to read if you only read one. So my plan now is on to the rest of them. As a meandering point of interest, other police procedural-related items I would like to get to from there include finishing the Dragon Tattoo trilogy and its TV and movie productions, continuing with the Law & Order seasons, maybe Hill Street Blues, and eventually the Jack Webb empire, including especially Adam-12. We'll see how far I get.

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Faceless Killers (1991)

If the Stieg Larsson trilogy counts as a police procedural, and it might as well, that would make this the second such Swedish exercise I have sampled recently charting the plodding and tedious processes of police investigation contrasted with the lurid and horrific crimes under investigation. It's basic genre work, with a formula and variations that work any number of places, from "Dragnet" to Ed McBain to "Law and Order." You like that kind of thing or you don't, and if you do, you will probably like this. Both Larsson and Henning Mankell also put me in mind of the old Martin Beck series by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo, which I enjoyed quite a bit in the '80s. Faceless Killers is the first of Mankell's series featuring the Swedish detective Kurt Wallander, and if there aren't too many surprises, mostly just the usual by-the-numbers police routines, it's still a nice night's read. The case: An old couple who live in an isolated rural location is brutally murdered—overkilled. Investigator Wallander working the case is amiably competent, for the most part, though his life is a big interesting mess. Hard to know how well he will wear over several novels but he's an interesting preliminary character study here, part pig and part Sherlock Holmes. He and his peers chase down the clues and leads and try to figure it all out. There's a wee bit of danger here and there along the way. The most interesting part, aside from the central mystery, is its treatment of the "immigrant problem" in Sweden at the time, the early '90s (a "problem" that could well be even worse now for all I know). Certainly all the most familiar strains of the issue are there—20 years later, in the United States, it feels a little prescient, most notably in the ugly, harsh, and violent response by nativists to the arrival of immigrants, with all their contradictory promises of cheap labor and perceived threat to "water down" the dominant culture. The tale doesn't have much to say beyond any of that, just notes the outlines and basic dynamics of the conflict as part of the context of the mystery. But it's a nice theme to find interwoven in. I am curious to see how these and some of the other themes here may or may not be developed across the larger series.

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