Living on thanks to beloved detective
It’s not easy for an author to catch on across borders, but Swedish crime novelist Henning Mankell did it, all on the strength of a single character.
Although he wrote novels and plays about many things, he was best known for his beloved, difficult Det. Kurt Wallander. His 10 Wallander books were adapted into the English-language TV series “Wallander,” starring Kenneth Branagh (and were adapted separately in Sweden).
Mankell, who had publicly announced that he had cancer, died Monday at age 67. But his work will live on.
When American readers got their first taste of Mankell’s books, they knew Wallander was something special. Here’s a taste of what our reviewers said:
In 1997, “Faceless Killers” was the first of the Wallander books to be published in America. It was “an exquisite novel of mesmerizing depth and suspense,” wrote author Margo Kaufman. “I confess I have a crush on the Swedish sleuth, who exhibits an appealing combination of Scandinavian melancholy and a surprising joie de vivre.”
Mankell’s books started appearing with regularity and were reviewed for several years by L.A. Times crime columnist Eugen Weber. Mankell is “a master of atmosphere and suspense,” he wrote of “One Step Behind” in 2002. “In Mankell’s hands, a Swedish police investigation devolves into a crazy, mazy, shifty, tortuous tale of political activity interspersed with edifying passages about the problems of a South Africa that has been turned on its head in the last 10 years,” he wrote of 2003’s “The White Lioness.”
By 2006, when “The Man Who Smiled” came out, Mankell was being compared to great writers, and coming out ahead. “There has long been a tendency among some Scandinavian writers (think Ibsen, Strindberg) to cast a sense of gloom over their works. Mankell, by contrast, is a master at developing varied atmospheres, creating deeply probed, vulnerable — and hence believable — characters, as well as devising ingenious plots,” wrote Elaine Harp.
In 2008, Joe Queenan became a Mankell devotee after reading “The Dogs of Riga.” “Mankell is a deceptively gifted writer,” Queenan wrote, “who uses the plebian mystery format to address the disintegration of Swedish society, the horrors of old age, the very meaning of police work.”