Swedish exercises in crime

Henning Mankell, the Swedish crimewriter who is the creator of Inspector Kurt Wallender, is being taken increasingly seriously: an international bestseller but also the subject of profiles in literary papers. He has already won the prestigious (British) Crimewriters’ Gold Dagger Award with Sidetracked. It seems the measure of the success of his dour, dispirited and diabetic Inspector that the last Mankell, The Return of the Dancing Master, made a feature of ignoring Wallender altogether — much as Agatha Christie created a middle-aged lady sleuth in Ariadne Oliver, sated perhaps with Poirotmania.

However, the latest Mankell offering is right back with Wallender and in my opinion all the better for it. The trouble with The Return of the Dancing Master was that the book itself was dispiriting, instead of assigning that burden to the detective himself, leaving the reader to revel in his personal crises at one remove. Wallender apart, Firewall is in fact a brilliant mystery because it plays to Mankell’s two great strengths: an uncanny ability to attack exactly the right contemporary horror story, while preserving many of the narrative techniques of earlier crimewriters.

To take the last strength first, Mankell has no hesitation in threatening the reader’s sense of security with dark figures lurking in even deeper murkiness. Unnoticed by the Inspector or potential victims, such presences simmer in the reader’s mind, sometimes for a chapter or two, as one is uneasily aware of at least one shadow unaccounted for. Not all these unseen stalkers are Swedish since the plot — as often with Mankell — has a global, specifically African, dimension and one at least is an Oriental. Passages like this therefore sent my mind irresistibly back to the 1930s works of E. Phillips Oppenheim and that menacing ‘Lascar’ who always seemed to be slinking about at dusk:

Wallender did not think to look around as he got out of his car.