Wallander faceless killers ending series#

(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. When he's on a case, he'll often work halfway through the night and still be at work by seven the next morning. Wallander is not slow, but he's methodical. Probably no detective in literatureand certainly no other overweight detectivehas 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. 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. 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 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. 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. On the contrary, part of what makes them so easy to sink into is the relative leisureliness of their pace. The books are compulsively readable, but that is not because they pack one wallop after another.

Wallander faceless killers ending series#

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. 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. Part of the reason for reading Mankell obviously lies in his penetrating social and political vision. 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. 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 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. Whether the belief is well-founded is not the sole point. 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. 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.

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. 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. They have changed, as Kurt Wallander repeatedly complains, just since he started solving murders a little over a decade ago. (Whether it even remotely resembles the real Sweden is another question entirely.) Things in Sweden have changed, of course, since Martin Beck's time. It is a pleasure to find myself back in that small, orderly, easily violable, essentially humane culturea culture I've learned about mainly through reading these two detective series. The fact that the more recent series is also Swedish may have something to do with this appeal. 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.