![]() 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. 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. Having recently been reading the Harry Hole books by Jo Nesbo I can see correlations between the two male leads.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. While Wallander sets out to solve the murder case we learn more about him, about his failed marriage, his estranged daughter and his drink problem all of which make him a sympathetic character as does his modesty and self depreciation about his policing abilities and the mistakes made along the way. The book opens with the brutal murder of two pensioners living on a remote farm, the brutality of the attack shocks the police and they are determined to find the culprits whatever the cost.īefore the woman dies she repeatedly utters the word foreign, the police are reluctant to let this information out into the public domain as the Swedish immigration policy is one that always raises tension as does the fact that large refugee camps exist in the areas surrounding where the couple were killed. ![]() Set in the Swedish town of Ystad this is the first book in the Kurt Wallander series.
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