Henning mankell faceless killers book covers
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By the eighth novel, Firewall (1998, to be published here next year), the stress and strain of detective work have taken their toll. Often he wonders if he should be a policeman at all, but stoically pushes on with his investigations into murder, child abuse, drug-smuggling and racial violence. Miserably divorced, Inspector Wallander contemplates a spell in a health spa but prefers to drink more whisky and falls into lugubrious talk of his (and humanity's) demise. If that is not enough, Wallander's 80-year-old father (a landscape painter with "7,000 sunsets" to his name) appears to be declining into dementia. He has been stopped by his colleagues for drink-driving, and his grown-up daughter Linda has attempted suicide. He eats too many take-aways and has put on seven kilos in the three months since his wife Mona left him. From his first appearance in Faceless Killers, published in Sweden in 1991, the fortysomething detective is in a bad way. Mankell portrays him as a sternly pensive slogger with health problems. Kurt Wallander remains one of the most impressive and credible creations of crime fiction today. And the flat, monotonous landscapes in these euro-thrillers remind one of Norfolk." The morose and grumpy Wallander is a sort of Baltic Inspector Rebus. Of course there's something new and strange in them for Anglo-Saxon readers, but they're also curiously, comfortingly familiar. Marcel Berlins, the author and legal commentator, says: "If you think about it, these Scandinavian whodunits are really quite British. Seemingly, literary detection is drifting to chillier parts. He has been followed into English translation by other Scandinavian thriller writers such as Karin Fossum and Eva-Marie Liffner, Norwegian and Swedish respectively. This Danish thriller radiated an unfamiliar polar chill, but it was Mankell who truly opened the door for Nordic crime. The trend was set in 1994 with Peter Høeg's Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow. In Sweden one of his most faithful admirers is Ingmar Bergman: Mankell is married to the film director's daughter, Eva.ĭetective fiction from Scandinavia has been fashionable in Britain for some time. As well as thrillers, he has written children's books and novels on African themes. Now 55, Mankell divides his time between Sweden and Mozambique, where he runs a theatre company. Sooner or later a crime writer will get the Nobel prize (not me - I'm Swedish) because the old snobbery against the genre is fast vanishing." In Sweden, the Wallander mysteries are reportedly read by the prime minister and half his cabinet, as well as by the judiciary. "If you can call Le Carré a crime writer, he investigates the contradictions inside man, between men, and between man and society and I hope to do the same. Mankell cites John le Carré as another key influence and admires the way he develops George Smiley with each subsequent book. I could never write a crime story just for the sake of it, because I always want to talk about certain things in society." He says the best crime story he has ever read is Macbeth - "a terrible allegory about the corrupting tendency of power that could equally be about President Nixon". "You hold a mirror to crime to see what's happening in society. "I work in an old tradition that goes back to the ancient Greeks," Mankell says. "But Mankell is modern, and he makes you reflect on society." Questions of responsibility and morality - of justice and democracy - are explicitly raised, which is unusual in detective fiction. "There's a belief that crime fiction should be about little old ladies solving murders in country villages," she says. She admires their edgy, convincing police work and social concerns. Ruth Rendell, who is half Swedish, has read all nine in the original.
#Henning mankell faceless killers book covers series
In his native Sweden the series was to triumph spectacularly and he has sold more than 20 million books worldwide Wallander outsells Harry Potter in Germany and is top of the book charts in Brazil.
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T welve years ago, when Henning Mankell published the first of his Inspector Wallander novels, he could not have imagined how successful they would be.