Henning Mankell’s detective hero, Kurt Wallander, is best known to Americans through the PBS Wallander Masterpiece Mystery Series, starring Kenneth Branaugh. But Mankell’s novels, including short fiction such as The Pyramid, also deserve to be well known—wildly popular, in fact. He’s a terrific writer.
The Wallander books comprise eight, highly compelling stories (written in the 1990s and translated into English only within the last five years or so):
Recently in a bookstore in Singapore (of all places, almost literally the polar opposite of Malmo, Sweden, where the Wallander series is set) I stumbled upon Mankell’s Italian Shoes, a novel about a disgraced Swedish surgeon who lives alone on a remote island — and then discovers in old age that he fathered a daughter in the 1960s.
I enjoyed Italian Shoes so much that I turned for the first time to the Wallander series, beginning with The Pyramid, a prequel although the last written in the series. In the Foreword to an edition of The Pyramid: The First Wallander Cases, Henning Mankell says, “It was only after I had written the eighth and final installment in the series about Kurt Wallander that I thought of the subtitle I had always sought but never found. When everything, or at least most of it, was over I understood that the subtitle naturally had to be ‘Novels about the Swedish Anxiety.’”
This comment may seem to be a dismal idea not likely to appeal American readers, but the Swedish “anxiety” turns out to be American “anxiety,” too, a deep concern that our best days are behind us—the very same concern that inspired the great American hard-boiled detectives of the Great Depression.
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