Not since the Martin Beck mysteries, the ten-book series written in the late Sixties and early Seventies by the Swedish couple Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, have I found any detective novels that appeal to me as much as Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallander books. The fact that the more recent series is also Swedish may have something to do with this appeal. It is a pleasure to find myself back in that small, orderly, easily violable, essentially humane culture—a culture I’ve learned about mainly through reading these two detective series. (Whether it even remotely resembles the real Sweden is another question entirely.) Things in Sweden have changed, of course, since Martin Beck’s time. They have changed, as Kurt Wallander repeatedly complains, just since he started solving murders a little over a decade ago. As the world has become increasingly violent and heartless, even rural southern Sweden, Wallander’s formerly isolated stomping ground, has gone the way of the world. Drug trade, international conspiracy, murder-for-hire, racist violence, child abuse, computer crime, and many new kinds of insanity have flooded in through Sweden’s open borders. But there remains a core of solid dailiness, embodied in the life and personality of Inspector Wallander, that somehow keeps the extreme horrors at bay. The view Mankell puts forward in these detective stories is neither meliorist nor optimistic, but even at its darkest it is a view that ultimately depends on a belief in human decency. Whether the belief is well-founded is not the sole point. It endures anyway.
The first Kurt Wallander mystery came out in 1991, and they then began appearing on a nearly annual basis, with each book set about a year earlier than its date of publication. What this topicality meant was that Mankell was often riding the wave of history before it had even had time to break on our shores. The 1992 Dogs of Riga, for instance, anticipated the disarray into which the Soviet Union and its satellite states would soon fall; the 1993 White Lioness was even more prescient about the dying gasps of apartheid in South Africa. Part of the reason for reading Mankell obviously lies in his penetrating social and political vision. He occupies a larger world than ours (than mine, anyway: he spends part of each year in Sweden and the rest directing a theater company in Mozambique), and he is able to make a great deal of what he observes in that world. But to rest the praise for the Kurt Wallander series entirely on this largeness would be to ignore what is perhaps best about the books: their rueful, tender attention to daily detail.
The books are compulsively readable, but that is not because they pack one wallop after another. On the contrary, part of what makes them so easy to sink into is the relative leisureliness of their pace. We spend a lot of time with Kurt Wallander doing his laundry, or rather, forgetting to do his laundry and having to sign up once again for a slot in his apartment building’s laundry room. We watch him make shopping lists, stop for hamburgers at fast-food restaurants, take his old Peugeot in for repairs or replacement, go to the doctor, visit his elderly father, call his daughter on the phone, and check the temperature on the thermometer outside his kitchen window. There is a lot of reference to the weather in these books, and most of it is not case-related; it is instead a central element in this small-town Swedish world which becomes, for the duration, our world. We learn the street names of Ystad (the town in the Skåne region where Wallander lives and works), and we learn that it is possible to walk from Wallander’s apartment on Mariagatan to a downtown restaurant, or from the police station to the local hospital. Probably no detective in literature—and certainly no other overweight detective—has done more casual walking than Wallander; I guess the others are all in too much of a hurry, or else they live in places where you can easily catch a cab or the subway. Wallander is not slow, but he’s methodical. When he’s on a case, he’ll often work halfway through the night and still be at work by seven the next morning. (The books are very precise about reporting the time of day and the day of the week.) There are occasional moments of sudden tension, shoot-outs and car chases and the like, but mainly what we do in these books is watch Wallander think.
The detective form has always been well suited to showing us thought processes—look at Sherlock Holmes—but Henning Mankell goes a step further. Thought, in Mankell’s hands, is not entirely something logical or rational, though it can be both; it is also the hunch, the instinct, the unconscious realization. Sometimes we spend two or three pages just sitting with Wallander while he reads through the case file once again. Sometimes we watch as he looks at photographs, or stands quietly in a victim’s apartment, hoping to be able to spot the one thing that’s not quite right. Fully half of Wallander’s time seems to be spent waiting for these elusive thoughts to rise to the surface. The solution, or part of it, floats at the corner of his mind, just out of reach, and if he turns to face it directly, it darts away. It is this motion, of the mind’s attempt at retrieval, that is the most characteristic and alluring action in the Wallander mysteries. And it is perhaps this ongoing process of watching thought take place which explains why we don’t, at the end of a Wallander book, feel the usual let-down of the mystery novel. The arrival at the solution is not all that matters; a great deal of the interest, and the pleasure, comes from how we got there. This is why the books can be compulsively readable even on a second or third reading, as I discovered when I took them up again for this article. Intending to skim for the plots alone, I found myself willy-nilly relaxing into that luxurious, detail-studded pace.
Of the nine Inspector Wallander mysteries, seven have been translated into English. The two missing ones are a 1994 book called The Man Who Smiled (my Swedish informant assures me that the original title sounds as strange as this English rendering) and a final volume that the Germans call Wallander’s First Case and Other Tales, though the Swedish title is simply The Pyramid. Perhaps we will eventually get these two as well, but don’t let their absence prevent you from jumping right in with the seven we’ve got.
The translations (there are three different translators) are unobtrusive, and that is a great virtue. In fact, I am tempted to say that the writing in the Wallander books is itself unobtrusive. I am not sure what it would mean to describe a mystery novel as well-written on the sentence level; it could easily signal unnecessary distraction or show-offiness. The sentences of the Wallander books do not beg to be read aloud as poetry. That is not their strength. Like Wallander himself, they are serviceable, methodical, decent, and often transparent, though capable of hiding information at times. They are the perfect medium in which to transmit thought, which can be fragmentary and inchoate as well as solid and complete. Their unobtrusiveness is, in this respect, their most valuable quality, for it enables us to feel that the thoughts are coming to us direct.
The thinking we have access to is not just that of Kurt Wallander. In the first two books, Faceless Killers and The Dogs of Riga, we begin as we might in a typical Law and Order episode, with the people who discover the bodies. The perceptions of these relatively unimportant bystanders offer us our first exposure to the murders that shape the books; after that, we shift to Inspector Wallander’s perspective for the rest of each novel. For the third book in the series, though, Mankell came up with a much more complicated structure. The White Lioness begins in the mind of the Swedish real estate agent who will become the first murder victim. The narrative then switches viewpoints as wildly as it does continents: from the detectives in Ystad to some spookily powerful figures in South Africa, thence to their hired killers back on Swedish soil, and finally to the South African detectives who are working to foil the conspirators’ plot. The effect of this shifting sensibility is to make everybody, including the killers, more accessible and in a way more sympathetic.
Mankell re-uses the technique to great effect in the subsequent books. The next three (not counting the untranslated Mannen som log) are Sidetracked, The Fifth Woman, and One Step Behind, each of which tops its predecessor as an entrancingly complicated mystery plot. Firewall, the last in the translated series, is slightly more streamlined, though it has its own special merits, particularly those of closure. In these later novels, Mankell often begins by occupying the mind of the criminal. This does not destroy the suspense; we can be inside someone’s mind without knowing who he is. But it does lend a combination of creepiness and compassion to the discovery process. Part of the capacious humanity of the Wallander books lies in the fact that even the perpetrators of atrocious crimes are included in the narrative voice: they too count as people with interior lives. And Kurt Wallander seems to share this vision, in that he more than once finds himself sympathizing with the craziest and most damaged of the murderers he’s caught.
You can read the Wallander books in any order you choose, which is what I did the first time around. As mysteries they are entirely self-contained, and the personal material is recapitulated often enough for outsiders to catch up. Even on your first exposure to a Wallander novel, you will soon learn the names of Wallander’s regular colleagues, the status of his relationship with his long-time Latvian girlfriend, the nature of the current job held by his daughter Linda, and the fact that his elderly father, a painter, has spent a lifetime executing a series of nearly identical sunset landscapes, some with a grouse and some without.
But if you start with Faceless Killers and work your way chronologically forward to Firewall, you will get something else besides. As with the Martin Beck mysteries, you will be treated to the unfolding of a life over time. In the first novel, Wallander is forty-two. He has been separated from his wife for only a few months, his daughter is barely speaking to him, and he is just beginning to worry about his bad eating habits, his loneliness, his disillusion with police work, and the other concerns that will increasingly plague him over the long term. Rydberg, the old police detective who taught Wallander how to think, is still alive in Faceless Killers, though he is already dying of cancer; in subsequent volumes he becomes a ghostly presence whose helpful ideas Wallander repeatedly tries to conjure up.
By the time we get to Firewall, it is 1997 and Kurt Wallander is fifty years old. He has met, spent four complicated years with, and broken up with Baiba Liepa, the girlfriend from Riga. His old father has died, but not before taking an important final trip to Rome with him. Wallander himself is by now suffering from diabetes but still can’t seem to control what he eats. A couple of longtime friends—the prosecutor Per Åkeson, a childhood acquaintance named Sten Widén—have given up their jobs and taken off for exciting new lives in distant places; Wallander envies them their freedom but knows he will stay where he is. Though he is proud of his professional achievements, he is more than ever aware of his shortcomings and feels himself slipping behind. Computers, for instance, have taken over the police station, and Wallander is the only one who still doesn’t know how to use them. The crimes he has to deal with have become more impersonal, more violent, and more widespread. In the course of the seven years and seven books, one colleague, a reliable if somewhat dull and under-appreciated officer, has been murdered; another, who started out as a promising, fresh-faced cadet, has turned out to be an ambitious back-stabber. So Wallander, always a bit of a loner, now has fewer people than ever to confide in. On the other hand, he has grown closer to the one female detective in his squad—he is becoming her Rydberg, it seems—and his daughter, now on cordial terms with him, is talking about joining the police herself. So there is, if not hope, at any rate a future.
Henning Mankell, having created this paragon of quotidian survival, seems anxious to distance himself from Kurt Wallander. “If we met, we’d never get on,” he recently told an interviewer from The Guardian. “I’d prefer to meet Sherlock Holmes. Wallander has a strange attitude to women. He is lazy in his personal life.” But then he adds, as if disturbed by it, “Women readers adore him. Perhaps they sense he is needy. What interests me is the way he is thinking. You can have six or seven pages when that’s all he is doing.” Perhaps that’s what interests the women readers, too. Adoration, in any case, does not seem the appropriate word here. We have enough literary figures who arouse our strong passions, the kinds of characters who flame up with a brief intensity and die before their novels are over. Sometimes—maybe especially in these times—we just need someone who can endure.
Wendy Lesser is the founding editor of The Threepenny Review and the author of six books of nonfiction. Her first novel, The Pagoda in the Garden, is due out in October 2005.
