Over the years, the author has had a string of affairs and has fathered four children by four different mothers, although he insists, emphatically, that his current marriage — to Ingmar Bergman’s daughter Eva — will be “the last.”
Bergman turns out to have been a fan of the Wallander books — as is just about every Swede on the planet, it seems. Mankell recalls walking down a street in Stockholm during a referendum about joining the EU and was approached politely by a man in his sixties, who asked whether Wallander would vote yes or no. “That was the moment I grasped the size of the character,” says the author.
His appeal is harder to assess, however. It is not simple travelogue, Evans insists. “I reject the argument that Wallander is popular here because there’s a kind of ‘northern’ fiction, particularly crime fiction,” says Evans. It is the mental landscape that he inhabits that gives him such appeal, he argues.
In addition, there is the simple issue of availability in key book buying markets. “I think it’s cyclical,” says Evans. “We’ve taken a long time away from European art, European fiction in particular. We had our eyes to the Americas. Part of the problem is simply the translation. There has been truly great stuff going on in European fiction for 15 years or more, and perhaps it’s only now we’re beginning to let it in.”
There is more to the issue than that, however. Many other novels about foreign detectives are now translated into English and none has had the impact of those involving the resolutely depressive Kurt Wallander.
In that sense, Mankell has bigger issues to address than the average detective novelist, which perhaps explains his elusive appeal. Mankell is, to repeat the description of his publisher, a child of 1968. “The fundamental driving force for me is to create a change in the world we live in ... It is about exploitation, plundering and degradation,” he says. “I have a small possibility to participate in the resistance. Most of the things that I do are part of a resistance, a form of solidarity work.”
His books, and the series made from them, are investigations of the failure of political promise, say critics. “All of Henning’s books are an elegy to the broken socialist dream of Sweden,” the publisher Christopher MacLehose remarked recently. “Henning still can’t get used to the idea that Sweden has failed to deliver its social democratic dream.”
Thus we get more than a mere who-dunnit with a Wallander story. We get edge, a sense that a good man is hunting through a landscape of broken dreams for signs that some decency has survived and who rarely succeeds in his quest. There is a resonance here that goes far beyond standard detective novels.
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