Henning Mankell: True Detective

The Swedish writer Henning Mankell, who died recently from lung cancer at the age of 67, is an author of several plays and books, including some for children. But his most famed creation is the character of Kurt Wallander, a gloomy and melancholic detective in a series of mystery novels centred in Sweden. The character became a critical sensation and led to the sale of close to 40 million copies of his books in several languages.

In the books, Kurt Wallander is a forty-something, depressed and diabetic police inspector. He is self-destructive, pessimistic, divorced, and shares a complicated relationship with his father, who is suffering from dementia, and his grown-up daughter. Through the novels featuring this character, starting from Faceless Killers, published in 1991, to the tenth and last, The Troubled Man in 2009, Mankell chronicled the changes taking place in Europe, tackling issues ranging from corruption and crime after the breakup of the Soviet Union to racism and the immigration policies of modern-day Europe. He once told The Guardian in an interview, while speaking about the influence of the British writer John le Carré on his work, “[Le Carré] investigates the contradictions inside man, between men, and between man and society; and I hope to do the same.”

The writer came up with the character of Wallander, it is said, after he returned to Sweden from Mozambique, where he spent several years, in the 1980s and began to witness the new mood of racism and xenophobia in his home country. He found the name of the character by running his finger through a telephone directory. In the same Guardian interview, he said, “I work in an old tradition that goes back to the ancient Greeks. You hold a mirror to crime to see what’s happening in society. I could never write a crime story just for the sake of it, because I always want to talk about certain things in society.”

With the publication of the Wallander novels, Mankell became a leading member of what came to be known as ‘Scandi Crime’. The character became so popular that it was adapted for television several times, both in Sweden and the UK. After his first few Wallander books came the other heavyweights of this genre, the fellow Swede Stieg Larsson with his Millennium novels, the ‘Norwegian queen of crime’ Karin Fossum, and so on.

Born in Stockholm in 1948, Mankell was raised by his father in a flat above a courtroom in Sweden’s Härjedalen province. His father worked as a judge. His mother had left the family when Mankell was around one. He saw her next about 14 years later. By the age of 16, Henning had left school and enrolled himself in Sweden’s merchant navy. After his spell at sea, Mankell began living in Paris as an 18-year-old for a couple of years, before returning home where he worked as a stagehand and later as a playwright.

Apart from the Wallander novels, he wrote several other books and plays. Some of them include a trilogy about an African girl, Sofia, who loses her legs when she steps on a landmine. He was also a keen political activist. An outspoken member of the Swedish left, he was a vociferous critic of Israel and its policies vis-a-vis Palestine. In 2010, he was aboard the Gaza-bound aid ship that was attempting to break the Israeli embargo of the Gaza strip. He was arrested and subsequently deported by Israeli forces.

Early last year, he was diagnosed with cancer. And as he has through much of his writing life, converting what he experienced and observed into books, he began to chronicle the treatment and its effect on him in a series of newspaper columns.

crime fictionFaceless KillersHenning MankellSwedishThe Troubled Man