Henning Mankell: the last Wallander | Books | The Guardian Henning Mankell Henning Mankell: the last Wallander Forget the 40 plays, the Gaza flotilla arrest and the good work in Africa, what Henning Mankell is really famous for is the anguished detective he created 22 years ago. Now, with the final Wallander novel published this week, he tells Jon Henley why he is happy to say farewell Henning Mankell. Photograph: Murdo Macleod Tuesday 22 March 2011 16.29 EDT First published on Tuesday 22 March 2011 16.29 EDT Share on Messenger Close That's it then; the end. Twenty-two years after his first appearance and more than a decade since the one everybody - even his creator - had assumed would be his last, Inspector Kurt Wallander is working his last case. The lugubrious, all too human but ultimately decent Swedish cop with the never-ending health problems and the terrible family life has sold 30m books in 45 different languages. This will be a sad day for a lot of people.

But not, on balance, for Henning Mankell . "Hand on heart," he says, "I thought I'd written his last adventure a long time ago. I don't even particularly like the man. We have certain things in common: we enjoy the same kind of music, we have a similarly conscientious approach to work. We wouldn't be enemies if we knew each other, but he wouldn't be a close friend. He's not someone I'd invite to dinner." We're in the sunlit kitchen of the house Mankell owns with his wife Eva in old Antibes, in the south of France. Coffee and cakes from the local patisserie are on the table. Eva, a successful theatre director in Sweden and daughter of Ingmar Bergman, disappears upstairs to work. Mankell, rumpled and relaxed in T-shirt and black tracksuit of uncertain vintage and indiscriminate design, listens gravely and answers precisely. The Troubled Man, his 10th and final Wallander novel, is published here this week.

There was, he says, another one, many years ago: it would have been the fifth in the series, but it was about child abuse and was too depressing; he burned it after 100 pages. This one started to germinate four or five years ago, with the idea "not that Wallander would solve a case, but that he would himself be the case, as it were". The trigger, really, was turning 60 (Mankell is now 63). It makes a man think. "When you reach your 60s, you realise certain things," he says. "First, that you've lived well over half your life. Second, that you've pretty much made all your really big decisions; people very rarely change direction after that. And that leads you to look back. It's quite a . . . scary moment. So I asked: am I afraid of anything? I'm not afraid of dying. Nor of pain; we can control most pain these days. But there is one thing I'm scared of." The thing Mankell is scared of is the reason this is Wallander's last case, so obviously I'm not going to tell you what it is.

But thinking about that, and about the whole business of looking back on a life, and the idea of Wallander realising how all along he had been so resolutely non-political, then wondering what might happen if you confronted him with perhaps the biggest political scandal in Sweden's postwar history – thinking about all those things, Mankell says, "I began to think I really might have a story for Wallander. One last one." In The Troubled Man, Wallander – familiar these days not just to readers but TV viewers too, through both Kenneth Branagh's crumpled, world-worn interpretation and the even more morose and fallible vision offered by Krister Henriksson in the Swedish original - is, indeed, 60, nearing his career's end. He has a dog and a house in the country and becomes, to his delight, a grandfather: his daughter Linda has a baby.

But when the child's other grand-father, a retired senior naval officer, disappears, the detective, dogged now by increasingly worrying lapses of concentration and memory, is dragged into perhaps his most far-reaching case: an investigation that will take him back to the dark days of the cold war and a string of unexplained incursions into Swedish waters that could yet sink a few big political careers. The case forces Wallander to reassess his life, and to revisit – often with upsetting consequences - some of the characters who have featured in it. The Troubled Man is a first-rate whodunnit. But it's also a quiet, considered and respectful farewell; a meditation on a life honestly if imperfectly lived. Don't, though, get the wrong idea. "Wallander and I share the same age, more or less," Mankell concedes, "and we have some of the same traits – I too now feel an urge to find out what's happened to my friends of 40 years ago, for example. See what's become of them.

It's true, I suppose, that I have never been as close as I am in this book to certain of the ideas and thoughts and worries that Wallander has." But there are some significant differences. "I have no problem turning round and looking back," he says, firmly. "Wallander does. He has certain things to fear and to regret; I don't. There's honestly very little in my life I regret; maybe three or four years, when I foolishly accepted an invitation to be general manager of a theatre in Sweden. It stopped me writing. But that's all. Not bad in nearly 65 years, I think." Mankell was born in Stockholm in February 1948. His mother left when he was barely one; he was brought up by his elder sister and his father, a judge, in the remote village of Sveg in the far north. His grandmother taught him to read and write: "I can still remember," he says, "putting one word after another, for the first time, and making a sentence. And then another. And then making a story.

I have never really thought of doing anything else." He realised intuitively and quite soon, he says, that he had a talent for storytelling. "The powers of imagination are without limit, especially as a child," he says. "We are created in such a way that the only thing we don't need is our appendix: if we didn't need an imagination, we wouldn't have one." Mankell's imagination was so powerful that by the time he met his mother again, as a teenager in Stockholm, "I preferred the one I'd created in my mind. She was tough, mind you. Not a pushover. But I preferred her to the real one." School bored him and at 15 he was a merchant seaman, "a wonderful year of hard work and learning how to live. My university. The only disappointment was that I'd dreamed of sailing to Liberia, Rhode Island, even Rotterdam, but somehow it was always Middlesbrough. Fifteen times." Then there was Paris, where he arrived one January afternoon, "with 200 francs and a terrible toothache.

I still remember it, the pain, knowing no one, having nowhere to go." He survived by cleaning and repairing clarinets, a job he reckons he could still do blindfold. At 17 he was back in Sweden, working in the theatre. "I realised what I was writing wasn't very good," he says, "so I got a job as a director's assistant, to learn what made a story work." It didn't take long: his first play was bought when he was 19. Mankell asked if he could direct it, and was given a fortnight to try. The management liked what they saw; at any rate, they kept him on. "I discovered," Mankell says, "that writing and directing for the theatre was quite well paid: I could do a play, then spend seven months writing a book." His first novel was published four years later. It's a balance he has maintained ever since: 40 plays, nearly as many novels and children's books. "It's a very . . . complete life," he says. "I close the door, I sit in an empty room, I write.

Then I open the door, and suddenly there are people, in a theatre." If he had to choose, writing rather than directing would win the day – but plays, not novels. "In a book, you have to say everything," he says. "In a play, you have to leave space for the actors; write as little as possible. It's a challenge." Books, he says, he writes on the computer. Plays he writes by hand; the computer "goes too fast". There's another important source of equilibrium in Mankell's carefully counterpoised life: Africa. Six months of the year, most years, he lives in Maputo, where he writes and directs for Mozambique's first professional theatre, Teatro Avenida, a thriving institution he has helped build from scratch over a quarter of a century. Mankell first pitched up in Africa, in Guinea-Bissau, aged barely 20, seeking simply "to see the world". (He'd been dreaming of Africa ever since he'd first read of it, in books as a small child: "There was this frozen river in the far north of Sweden," he says, "with a few logs stuck in it.

For me it was the Congo, and they were crocodiles.") Besides the theatre, Mankell does a lot of charity work in Africa, including a project called Memory Books, which helps parents dying of Aids to record something of themselves in a book, to be passed to their children when they go. "I was in a small village outside Kampala, Uganda, years ago now," Mankell says. "It had only very young and very old. Everyone in between had died. There was a small girl who showed me a folded scrap of paper in her hand, and in it was pressed a dead blue butterfly. She said her mother had loved blue butterflies. That was one of the most important books I've ever read." So every year he goes back to Africa, and he's convinced it has made him a better European, certainly a better writer, perhaps even a better person. "One foot in the snow, one foot in the dust," he says. "I've learned a lot, seeing the world from outside this European egocentricity. It's taught me so much about the human condition.

It's been difficult, dangerous sometimes, but it has helped me understand a lot more about the world." Inspector Kurt Wallander, as it happens, was born after one such African sojourn. It was 1987, and Mankell was returning to Sweden after a long time away. "I sensed there was something happening," he says. "A danger of racism, xenophobia. And since those would be criminal acts, I realised I needed to write a crime novel. And since it was a crime novel, it needed a policeman. I took his name from the phone book. But the impulse, the inspiration, was always the question: the issue at hand. Not the character." Crime writing, he came to realise, was not – as everyone had always told him – a literary genre that was invented by Poe or Hammett or even by Shakespeare. "It was around in classical drama," he says. "Even then, we were holding up a mirror to crime to observe society. Look at Medea: a woman murders her kids because she's jealous of her husband. If that's not a crime story, I don't know what is.

And if the ancient Greeks had had a police force, you can be damn sure a detective inspector would have had a part in Medea. Society and its contradictions become clear when you write about crime." Wallander took off almost instantly in Scandinavia, and nearly as fast in continental Europe. Britain, after a slower start, is catching up, carried on a wave of Scandi-crime enthusiasm that also features the likes of Stieg Larsson, Jo Nesbø and Detective Sarah Lund. Wallander, though, retains a special appeal. What is it? Partly, Mankell reckons, that he has never instrumentalised the detective. "Everything has always started from a big question, not from within Wallander," he says. "I did sometimes use him, of course. But I never held him between my fingers and looked at him and said: So, what can I find out with you today? I'd written three novels with him before I realised this was . . . like a cello, that I could play." It's also important that Wallander is real. "No one could imagine James Bond stopping to inject himself with insulin," Mankell says. "That's because James Bond isn't real.

So it's important that Wallander has diabetes, he's ill, his ideas progress, he has relationship problems. He changes, like we all do." It helps, too, that he thinks: "It's challenging to have him enter a room and think for 10 pages. But that's what I'm interested in – how he reads facts, traces, situations. Running around and shooting people is easy. And it isn't normal. Normally you solve problems by thinking." He isn't, though, gloomy: "He's a passionate man. His problem with women is that he still loves his wife, passionately. And he has humour, and irony. Yes, he's sometimes down. But I think we'd all be down if we had to face what he has to face. And there's something in the setting, plainly: the bleak landscapes of Skåne, on the outermost edge of Sweden, "our Rio Grande; closest to the continent, where people are different". And in the fact that Ystad, Wallander's beat, is a neat, well-ordered provincial town.

He's dismissive, though, of one frequent foreign explanation for Wallander's success: violent crime erupting in what the rest of us like to think of as a social-democratic paradise. "It was you who built up that image of Sweden, not us," he says. "Just like you built up an image of blonde Scandinavian girls. Look, Sweden is a very decent society. But you outside Sweden have created a sort of myth of it as a perfect society, paradise on earth. We never believed that. For us, yes, mistakes have been made in the past 20 years. But this idea that the murder of [former prime minister] Olof Palme, in 1986, was somehow the beginning of the end for Sweden . . . We didn't lose our innocence with his death. Politics would have followed the same course. Market liberalism would have happened." But now Wallander has reached the end of his road. Would Mankell, prolific and hugely successful for over 40 years, be happy for the rumpled detective to be his greatest legacy? He thinks. "I believe," he says, "the most important thing you do in your life, you may not even know what it is.

It may be that one day you sat down on a bench to comfort someone who is crying. That could be the most important thing you ever do. So no, I would like to be thought of as a good, and quite generous man, who tried to make life a little better for others through what he did. And the things he wrote." Because doing is what really matters. That's why Mankell was on board the Sophia, part of the convoy of Gaza-bound aid boats stormed by Israeli commandos last May; nine activists were killed. But he prefers, he says, to call himself an intellectual, not an activist, because "an intellectual's job is to take responsibility, and actions prove the word". He's quite prepared to go on a new flotilla: "You have to act, not just by writing, but by standing up and doing. For me, you cannot call yourself an intellectual if all you use your intellectual gifts for is to find excuses not to do anything.

Which, sadly, is what I think a lot of intellectuals do." Henning Mankell Books In Order - Mystery Sequels Mystery Sequels About Henning Mankell Books In Order The Henning Mankell books in order for the translated Kurt wallander series are different from the actual order of the original published Swedish series. But then again, it’s interesting that the same thing happened with the Jo Nesbo books – the translations are totally out of order compared to the original ones. It is a pity though because there is usually a continuity to the character that doesn’t translate well when books are picked in seemingly random order, so when you get to read the books, make sure you do read them in the proper timeline order, well worth the small effort. To make it easier to find them, here is the list of the Kurt Wallander books in the original order of publication in Swedish. Next to each book I will list the year it was originally published, and the year it was translated into English). Like I said, It is worth reading them in proper chronological order since all Wallander books have been translated to English at some point. 1.

Faceless Killers (Mördare utan ansikte) – published 1991, translated 1997 2. The Dogs of Riga (Hundarna i Riga) – published 1992, translated 2001 3. The White Lioness (Den vita lejoninnan) – published 1993, translated 1998 4. The Man Who Smiled (Mannen som log) – published 1994, translated 2005 5. Sidetracked (Villospår) – published 1995, translated 1999 6. The Fifth Woman (Den femte kvinnan) – published 1996, translated 2000 7. One Step Behind (Steget efter) – published 1997, translated 2002 8. Firewall (Brandvägg) – published 1998, translated 2002 9. The Pyramid (Pyramiden) – published 1999, translated 2008 10.

An Event in Autumn /The Hand (Handen) – published in Dutch in 2004, in Swedish in 2013 and translated to English in 2014. It is a shorter novella in the series 11. The Troubled Man (Den orolige mannen) – published 2009, translated 2011 Before the Frost – published 2002, translated 2005 – this is not entirely part of the Wallander series, as the main character is his daughter Linda, with Kurt having a rather supportive, secondary role. Since there is only one book in the Linda Wallander series, there is no point in listing it separately. A book well worth reading as well. The Wallander series by Henning Mankell has been made into a successful series of Swedish films and TV series, and the books have also been adapted to the British screen in 9 episodes/3 seasons for the BBC with the title Wallander, starting Kenneth Branagh.

Who Is Kurt Wallander If you are not familiar with the Kurt Wallander series by the Swedish author Henning Mankell, and arrived here – hm, not quite sure how did you get here then – can you please let me know what search terms you used to land on my blog? – here is a short description of what us, the fans of this popular series, are talking about. Henning Mankell is a Swedish crime author, famous for his Wallander series. While the mystery series is extremely popular back at home, he really got well known when his novels have been brought to the TV screen. Then more people started going back and read his books to catch up to the original work that the TV episodes were made from. Kurt Wallander is a police officer in Ystad, a small town in Sweden, a great cop with a load of personal baggage. He is divorcer, he has a troubled relationship with his teen daughter who tried to commit suicide at the age of 15, and his relationship with his late father was also quite tough. While his personal life is not exactly stellar, he makes up for it in his works quite well.

Started out as a young police officer and now he is an inspector, who takes his works very seriously. Sadly his personal life affected him so much that he’s drinking more than he should, his lifestyle is not the healthiest either, and lately he is even wondering what the heck he’s doing at the police. Towards the series his health deteriorates quite a lot, with the onset of diabetes and the early signs of Alzheimers, something that he apparently inherited from his dad. However as often the story goes, these tormented souls make the best killer catchers ever, and he proves it on the field in every novel written by Henning Mankell. Other Works by Henning Mankell While he is best known by his Kurt Wallander book series, Henning Mankell has also written additional works, with over 40 books under his pen, including several children stories. Not all standalone novels have been published into English. Where the translation has been done, it is mentioned along with the translation year.

As I mentioned above, he started a new series with Wallander’s daughter as main protagonist, in the book Before the Frost, which I did list it within the Wallander series, at least until a second book in the new daughter series is published, when it will really be a separate series on its own.

His standalone crime novels in order of publication (can be read in any order you want, though) are: Vettvillingen – published 1977, not translated into English Fångvårdskolonin som försvann – published 1979, not translated Dödsbrickan – published 1980, not translated En seglares död – published 1981, not translated Daisy Sisters – published 1982, not translated Sagan om Isidor – published 1984, not translated The Man from Beijing (Kinesen) – published 2007, translated 2010 Italian Shoes (Italienska skor) – published 2006, translated 2009 A Treacherous Paradise (Minnet av en Smutsig Ängel) – published 2011, translated 2013 His children’s novels are best known for his 3 parts series Sofia and the 4 part Joel Gustaffson series. The author also wrote a book for small kids called The Cat Who Liked Rain, and several plays, many of which have been translated into English.

The popular author of the Kurt Wallander series, Henning Mankell passed away October 5 2015 in Goteborg, Sweden at the age of 67, 3 years after having been diagnosed with throat and lung cancer. RIP Henning Mankell! Order of Henning Mankell Books - OrderOfBooks.com Home | Characters | Authors Order of Henning Mankell Books Henning Mankell is a Swedish author of crime fiction and children’s books. He is best known for his mystery series of novels featuring Kurt Wallander. Aside from being an author, Mankell is well-known for his left-wing political activism. His grandfather, who he shares a name with, was a piano composer. He is married to Eva Bergman, the daughter of Ingmar Bergman. His first novel was entitled Vettvillingen and was published in 1977, although it’s never been translated into English. His books have been translated into English since 1990.

Below is a list of Henning Mankell’s books in order of publication, which is also their chronological order: Publication Order of Joel Gustafsson Books A Bridge to the Stars (1990) Henning Mankell's Last Wallander Novel Arrives : NPR Henning Mankell's Last Wallander Novel Arrives Embed Embed Henning Mankell's Last Wallander Novel Arrives Henning Mankell's Last Wallander Novel Arrives Embed Embed Commentary heard on Morning Edition Read An Excerpt The Swedish writer Henning Mankell's new novel, The Troubled Man, is another installment of his long-running series about Kurt Wallander, a police detective who works in the southernmost part of Sweden. It's been about 10 years since the last Wallander novel, and this one arrives with a sad announcement — it is likely to be the last. Mankell is one of Sweden's most popular writers, and his moody police detective is another of Sweden's most popular exports. As to why this will be the end of the series, Mankell tells Morning Edition guest host Linda Wertheimer, "Maybe I'm a little old-fashioned.

In the times where everyone is talking about how everything is a process, I am keen on dots ... you call them a period. I believe in periods. I really thought that now is the ending, to make the final period in the stories of Wallander." The book is about a Cold War incident involving Sweden and the Soviet Union, and one of the characters is a retired submariner. Mankell describes the real-life inspiration for the story: "During my lifetime, one of the worst political scandals in Sweden was absolutely what happened surrounding the submarines in Swedish waters in 1982, where there were supposed to be Russian submarines close to Stockholm, and the Swedish army never got one up. And what we know today is that there were no Russian submarines; if there were [any], they were probably American submarines. This is still one of the worst scandals, politically, we have seen." Article continues after sponsorship In the book, the Swedish submariner who is also the father-in-law of Wallander's daughter goes missing, and then his wife goes missing. "That is the sort of plot that starts everything in this book," Mankell says.

"And then I tried to tell the story about all the hypocrisy and all the lying concerning the Swedish neutrality during the 1950s and '60s and even up to today. That is the basic story of this book." Complicating that basic story is Wallander's age; as the detective is trying to solve the crime, his health is slowly worsening. Henning Mankell was born in Stockholm, Sweden, and later lived in Maputo, Mozambique. He is the author of 10 Kurt Wallander books, in addition to numerous other novels and plays. Michael Lionstar hide caption toggle caption Michael Lionstar "Well, I believe that life is very complicated," Mankell says. "And the only way you can show life in a truthful way is to show how complicated it is, as an individual, but also your relation between a complicated life and the complications you have inside you. So in that sense, I'm happy that I dared to write this rather complicated novel, as you say." Mankell has said many times that he is nothing like Kurt Wallander, and he denies having similarly bleak visions of life as compared to those of his protagonist. "I don't believe that I'm scared of dying," he says.

"What really scares me, if one day, physically fit, I am told by my wife, 'Henning, you are losing your head, you don't know what you're saying, you're forgetting everything.' That is a sort of fear that many people have, and I wanted to talk a little about that fear. We have to accept that this is a real, real scary thing that can happen when you get old." And as for whether there may be any hope for a new Wallander book in the future, Mankell has this to say to his fans: "At least I did not make the same mistake as Conan Doyle, who killed off Sherlock Holmes and had to bring him back again. [Wallander's] daughter is also a police officer so, who knows? That's the best answer I can give you." Excerpt: 'The Troubled Man' March 25, 201112:13 PM ET Henning Mankell Knopf List Price: $26.95 The year Kurt Wallander celebrated his fifty-fifth birthday, he fulfilled a long-held dream.

Ever since his divorce from Mona fifteen years earlier, he had intended to leave his apartment in Mariagatan, where so many unpleasant memories were etched into the walls, and move out to the country. Every time he came home in the evening after a stressful and depressing workday, he was reminded that once upon a time he had lived there with a family. Now the furniture stared at him as if accusing him of desertion. He could never reconcile himself to living there until he became so old that he might not be able to look after himself anymore. Although he had not yet reached the age of sixty, he reminded himself over and over again of his father's lonely old age, and he knew he had no desire to follow in his footsteps. He needed only to look into the bathroom mirror in the morning when he was shaving to see that he was growing more and more like his father. When he was young, his face had resembled his mother's. But now it seemed as if his father was taking him over-like a runner who has been lagging a long way behind but is slowly catching up the closer he gets to the invisible finish line. Wallander's worldview was fairly simple.

He did not want to become a bitter hermit growing old in isolation, being visited only by his daughter and perhaps now and then by a former colleague who had suddenly remembered that Wallander was still alive. He had no religious hopes of there being something in store for him on the other side of the black River Styx. There would be nothing but the same darkness that he had once emerged from. Until his fiftieth birthday, he had harbored a vague fear of death, something that had become his own personal mantra-that he would be dead for such a long time. He had seen far too many dead bodies in his life. There was nothing in their expressionless faces to suggest that their souls had been absorbed into some kind of heaven. Like so many other police officers, he had experienced every possible variation of death. Just after his fiftieth birthday had been celebrated with a party and cake at the police station, marked by a speech full of empty phrases by the former chief of police, Liza Holgersson, he had bought a new notebook and tried to record his memories of all the dead people he had come across. It had been a macabre exercise and he had no idea why he had been tempted to pursue it.

When he got as far as the tenth suicide, a man in his forties, a drug addict with more or less every problem it was possible to imagine, he gave up. The man had hanged himself in the attic of the condemned apartment building where he lived, hanging in such a way that he was guaranteed to break his neck and hence avoid being slowly choked to death. His name was Welin. The pathologist had told Wallander that the man had been successful-he had proved to be a skillful executioner. At that point Wallander had abandoned his suicide cases and instead stupidly devoted several hours to an attempt to recall the young people or children he had found dead. But he soon gave that up as well. It was too repugnant. Then he felt ashamed of what he had been trying to do and burned the notebook, as if his efforts were both perverted and illegal. In fact, he was basically a cheerful person-it was just that he had allowed another side of his personality to take over. Death had been his constant companion. He had killed people in the line of duty-but after the obligatory investigation he had never been accused of unnecessary violence. Having killed two people was the cross he had to bear.

If he rarely laughed, it was because of what he had been forced to endure. But one day he made a critical decision. He had been out near Löderup, not far from the house where his father used to live, to talk to a farmer who had been the target of a very nasty robbery. On the way back to Ystad he noticed a real estate agent's sign picturing a little dirt road where there was a house for sale. He reacted automatically, stopped the car, turned around, and found his way to the address. Even before he got out of the car it was obvious to him that the property was in need of repair. It had originally been a U-shaped building, the bottom half clad in wood. But now one of the wings was missing-perhaps it had burned down. He walked around the house. It was a day in early fall. He could still remember seeing a skein of geese migrating south, flying directly above his head. He peered in through the windows and soon established that only the roof badly needed to be fixed. The view was enchanting; he could just make out the sea in the far distance, and possibly even one of the ferries on the way to Ystad from Poland.

That afternoon in September 2003 marked the beginning of a love story with this remote house. Excerpted from The Troubled Man by Henning Mankell. Copyright 2011 by Henning Mankell. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. Wallander | Henning Mankell Bibliography Wallander In 1989 Henning Mankell returned to Sweden after an extended period in Africa. Upon his return in Sweden, Henning Mankell was astounded by the xenophobia he seemed to have started to grow in Swedish society and decided to write about it. Since racism, according to Mankell, is a crime he needed a police officer. After a few searches through the local phone book Mankell had found his inspector. Kurt Wallander was born. In 1991, the first novel in the Wallander series, Faceless killers, was published in Sweden.

Since then ten novels about the hard working inspector have been published and the last novel in the series, The Troubled Man, was published in Sweden in 2009. All in all, the Wallander novels have been translated into more than 40 languages and have sold more than 30 million copies worldwide. Henning Mankell obituary | Books | The Guardian Henning Mankell obituary Swedish crime writer best known for his Kurt Wallander books who was a dedicated political activist Henning Mankell in Visby, Sweden, in 2003. ‘I work best when imagination is as valuable as reality,’ he once said. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe Monday 5 October 2015 07.37 EDT Last modified on Tuesday 19 July 2016 09.08 EDT Share on Messenger Close Henning Mankell, who has died aged 67, after being diagnosed with cancer last year , established almost single-handedly the global picture of Sweden as a crime writer’s ideal dystopia.

He took the existing Swedish tradition of crime writing as a form of leftwing social criticism and gave it international recognition, capturing in his melancholy, drunken, bullish detective Kurt Wallander a sense of struggle in bewildered defeat that echoed round the world. His tone is perfectly captured in the first Wallander novel, Faceless Killers (1991), when the detective comes across a murder scene: “Wallander thought of his own wife, who had left him, and wondered where to begin. A bestial murder, he thought. And if we’re really unlucky, it’ll be a double murder.” There were other, contemporary figures of middle-aged male detectives being dragged through their future backwards as if it were a briar hedge – most obviously Ian Rankin ’s Inspector Rebus – but Wallander was the purest example and probably the most successful one. He first appeared when Sweden was in the middle of a precipitate retreat from the optimistic utopianism of the 1960s and 70s, so that the corruption and decay of the hero found an echo in the corruption and decay of the society around him.

Henning Mankell, Swedish author of Wallander, dies at 67 Read more Rebus’s Edinburgh had never been a shining city, but Wallander picked his melancholy way like Eeyore through the thistly ruins of the New Jerusalem. It proved a remarkably popular journey. After a slow start, the 10 Wallander novels (plus a volume of short stories and a novel centred on Wallander’s daughter, Linda, in which he also featured) sold millions of copies in various languages. Two separate Swedish television series were made featuring the character, who took on a life of his own within them: both were sold around the world, as was a BBC adaptation, featuring Kenneth Branagh. As the series progressed, Wallander seemed to become more miserable: “Every time he came home in the evening after a stressful and depressing work day, he was reminded that once upon a time he had lived there with a family. Now the furniture stared at him as if accusing him of desertion,” he reflected in the last novel ( The Troubled Man , 2009), where he is also losing his memory to dementia.

Pinterest Kenneth Branagh as Inspector Kurt Wallander in the BBC’s drama series based on Henning Mankell’s bestselling books. Photograph: BBC/Left Bank Pictures/Yellow Bird The extraordinary global success of Swedish and later Norwegian crime fiction as a form of escapist literature for men had several causes. One is that police work is one of the last wholly unionised jobs in the world, so that our hero will never be sacked for anything other than gross misconduct – of which he, being the hero, is never really guilty. In the optimistic 60s, James Bond was distinguished from other middle-aged men by his licence to kill but by the 90s the policeman as a fantasy hero had a licence to keep his job. In the economic whirlwind of globalisation, this was something that a lot of frustrated middle-aged men could only dream of. Mankell himself had never been a frustrated middle-aged man. His life was distinguished by a restless energy from the moment he went to sea as a teenager. He was born in Stockholm, the son of a lawyer, Ivar, whose wife, Ingrid, left him the next year.

“It is only what many men do,” Mankell said later, about his mother’s decision to walk out. Ivar moved with his children to Sveg, a small town in the backwoods, where they lived above the courthouse until Mankell was 13, when they moved to Borås, a possibly less dull town outside Gothenburg, a few hundred miles to the south. In those years he read voraciously. He also constructed an imaginary mother to replace the one who had left him. “I work best when imagination is as valuable as reality,” he said later. He remembered his childhood as extremely happy, and Sweden in the late 50s and early 60s as one of the best places in the world to be a child. Henning Mankell: how it feels to be diagnosed with cancer Read more After three years in Borås he dropped out of school and left home, going first to Paris, and then to sea, where he worked on a freighter and loved it. In 1966 he returned to Paris and lived a bohemian life, determined to become a writer.

He took part in the agitations there that led to the student uprising of 1968 but returned to work as a stagehand in Stockholm. There he wrote his first play, about Swedish colonialism. In 1973, he published a novel about the Swedish labour movement and flew to Africa on the proceeds. The continent became a second home to him, and he spent a great deal of his life there after his success made it possible, founding and then running a theatre in Mozambique from 1986 onwards. Africa deepened and sharpened his outrage at the inequalities of the world. He campaigned against Aids and landmines; where drugs against Aids could not be afforded, he encouraged an oral history project, so that the lives and struggles of those who died might be remembered – he dreamed this would be read in a new library of Alexandria in centuries to come. “Africa has taught me that there is so much needless suffering in the world. We could stop it tomorrow: to teach every child in the world to read and write would cost no more than we in the west spend on dog food,” he said. Most of his working life was split between novel writing and theatre work.

He was extraordinarily prolific, publishing as many as three novels a year, and his sales figures eventually topped 40m. The quality might have been uneven but there was no mistaking the passion and generosity behind them. He wrote, always, about subjects he thought really mattered. Wallander was born after Mankell’s return from a long stay in Mozambique, when he saw that Sweden had become a much more racist country than it had seemed in the 60s, when there were hardly any immigrants from outside Scandinavia there. The third in the series, The White Lioness (1993), led to his breakout success from Scandinavia. Mankell had earlier thrown himself wholeheartedly into the leftwing politics of optimism. After returning from Paris he had taken part in the 1968 demonstrations in Stockholm against the Vietnam war and the university system, and spent much of the 70s in Norway on the fringe of a Maoist group to which his then partner belonged. So he was perfectly placed to experience and to articulate the shock and disappointment that arrived with the end of the postwar bubble of hope and prosperity.

That came earlier and more violently to Sweden than to most of western Europe , just as the bubble had inflated earlier and further there in the good years. For the most part his books stayed closely aligned to the conventions of the 20th-century Swedish progressive aesthetic: chiefly that the rich are always morally repulsive; that Christianity is wicked, but the common decency of ordinary people is to be trusted; and that conventional respectability must always conceal and corrupt the real nature beneath, like a plaster beneath which an ulcer is silently growing. There is often some more open and honest society abroad – in the novels of Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö this was eastern Europe under Soviet rule – and the books are also marked by a profound sexual pessimism: a sense that you will find greater happiness and truer friendship among the people with whom you share an office than among those with whom you share your bed. Yet cheerfulness keeps breaking through. There is little nihilism in Swedish noir: good and bad are always clearly distinguished all the way through to the cartoonish culmination of the genre in Stieg Larsson ’s trilogy about Lisbeth Salander: the problem for the heroes is that good no longer corresponds neatly with the Swedish state.

There is still no doubt that good is somewhere to be found. Evil is firmly located in reassuringly wicked villains. This is what allows the genre to perform its traditional function of reassurance despite the horror of the crimes. Henning Mankell in quotes: 10 of the best Read more The extraordinary global success of Wallander did not slow Mankell down much, nor diminish his engagement in global causes. He wrote a trilogy about an African girl who lost both legs after stepping on a landmine, and her struggles as she grows up. He wrote one novel in which a Chinese man massacres an entire family in a remote Swedish village as revenge for the treatment meted out by their ancestors to his in the US in the 19th century. He took a strongly pro-Palestinian position, repeatedly comparing Israel to South Africa and asserting that it was building a new apartheid society, and he sailed on one of the ships that attempted to break the blockade of Gaza in 2010 and was seized by Israeli commandos. In later years he worried about the surveillance state, and warned that digital technologies were being used to make the individual transparent while governments and corporations could operate in secrecy.

He used some of his fortune for charities, endowing a children’s village in Mozambique , a prize for political theatre in Sweden, and another for writing about the north of the country, where he had spent much of his childhood. In Sveg, a museum was built in his honour in his lifetime. He bought a house outside the town and donated it for the use of writers and playwrights who needed a quiet and peaceful place to work. His personal life showed something of the restlessness of his professional activities: he was married four times and had four sons, Thomas, Marius, Morten and Jon, by various relationships. In 1998 he married Eva Bergman, a daughter of the film director Ingmar . She survives him. • Henning Mankell , writer, born 3 February 1948; died 5 October 2015 'Wallander' Author Henning Mankell On The Catastrophe Of Cancer : NPR 'Wallander' Author Henning Mankell On The Catastrophe Of Cancer January 17, 20159:10 PM ET Martin Scholz Enlarge this image "I have had a fantastic life.

And I would very much like for it to continue," author Henning Mankell says. "But there is a difference whether you are afflicted when you are over 60 or whether it happens when you are only 30." Pep Bonet/NOOR/Redux hide caption toggle caption Pep Bonet/NOOR/Redux "I have had a fantastic life. And I would very much like for it to continue," author Henning Mankell says. "But there is a difference whether you are afflicted when you are over 60 or whether it happens when you are only 30." Pep Bonet/NOOR/Redux Henning Mankell stands on the patio of his house, hands in his pockets, enjoying the view. The writer lives on a hillside village about 40 minutes' drive south of Gothenburg. The view across the sea is breathtaking, even on this cloudy fall day. In the evening Mankell can see the lights of the ships going from Oslo to Copenhagen, he says. In spring, he sat here for hours, listening to the song of a blackbird.

A few weeks ago, when he had just started feeling better, the rock singer Patti Smith came to visit her Swedish friend to play a private concert on the patio. Henning Mankell's Last Wallander Novel Arrives The 66-year-old, best known for his best-selling mystery novels that follow policeman Kurt Wallander through Sweden and Mozambique, is speaking more about cancer than forensics these days. Since his diagnosis last January, he has taken to his blog to write about his fear, his pain, and his determination to live. His outlook is sunnier than it once was: Only one small tumor in his left lung remains, and the doctors say they can contain it. He hasn't abandoned his fiction amid the struggle. He's working on a new novel, and he just directed Shakespeare's Hamlet in his adopted country of Mozambique — in his version, the play was set in South Africa. And another new novel — just released in Sweden — is making its debut in the rest of Europe. The title, significantly, is Quicksand — referring to his creeping feeling of descent following the diagnosis. Mankell spoke with Martin Scholz, cover story editor at Welt am Sonntag, a German Sunday newspaper.

Article continues after sponsorship Well, the obvious question: How are you? I am feeling well. I am not in pain. I am feeling normal to a certain extent. Do I look ill to you? No. A year after his cancer diagnosis, Henning Mankell is working on a new novel, and he just directed Shakespeare's Hamlet in his adopted country of Mozambique. Pep Bonet/NOOR/Redux hide caption toggle caption Pep Bonet/NOOR/Redux A year after his cancer diagnosis, Henning Mankell is working on a new novel, and he just directed Shakespeare's Hamlet in his adopted country of Mozambique. Pep Bonet/NOOR/Redux That is what most people say. Yes, I'm pretty much OK. Chemotherapy was very, very hard on me. Luckily I reacted quite well to it. I did not lose my hair, for instance. When I got the diagnosis in January of 2014, it was a catastrophe for me. Everything that was normal to me up to that point was gone all of a sudden. No one had died of cancer in my family. I had always assumed I'd die of something else.

Did you free yourself from the "quicksand," despite the uncertain outcomes you were facing? I am 66 now. I have been alive for longer now than many people can ever dream of. I have had a fantastic life. And I would very much like for it to continue. But there is a difference whether you are afflicted when you are over 60 or whether it happens when you are only 30. I am very grateful to have lived this fulfilled a life. You've written about a number of other diseases before this, including your frustration at the media's perception of Africa as a dark, disease-ridden place. What's your latest thinking on that? 'Man From Beijing' Takes Mystery Fans Across Globe Ebola is a threat that for a long time was not taken seriously enough. What angers me is that there is so much scandalizing and so much generalizing, that Africa is being portrayed once again as the continent of deadly disease. We are always very interested in how Africans die, but we do not care enough about how they live. What I'm trying to say is: We are not being fair if we only look at Africa this way. Africa is not a unit. There are many Africas.

All my life I have tried to tell stories about how people live in Africa, how they love — they are like you and me. I wanted to broadcast a different image. But I am confident the way people look at the continent will change. The economy is growing at a staggering pace in many African countries. This development will change the way the rich countries are looking at Africa. Africa was a place of yearning to me even. As a child, whenever I watched the logs swim down the Ljusnan towards the ocean, I imagined they were crocodiles. This is the luxury of childhood — children trust their fantasy unconditionally. In school, reality becomes more important. If, later in your life, you decide to become an artist, you have to regain this lost skill. At least that is how it was for me. A few years ago I was in Sveg again — and you know what? No. » Mankell, Henning A Bridge to the Stars By: Henning Mankell One of the world’s best-selling authors has written a moving story about a teenager’s life in Northern Sweden. 12-year-old Joel lives with his father in the cold northern part of Sweden. At night...

Before the Frost By: Henning Mankell Sweden’s bestselling and award-winning author Henning Mankell joins Vintage Canada with the first Kurt and Linda Wallander Mystery. Linda Wallander is bored. Having just graduated from the... Chronicler of the Winds By: Henning Mankell Translaetd by Tiina Nunnally A haunting and powerful story about war-torn Africa, a mystical orphan boy, and the power of narrative to give a chaotic world order. In the hot African night a single gunshot cracks the silence.... Depths By: Henning Mankell Internationally acclaimed and bestselling author Henning Mankell will be published for the first time in Canada by Knopf Canada with Depths. October 1914: the destroyer Svea emerged from the Stockholm archipelago bearing south-southeast.... Faceless Killers By: Henning Mankell From the dean of Scandinavian noir, the first riveting installment in the internationally bestselling and universally acclaimed Kurt Wallander series, the basis for the PBS series staring Kenneth Branagh. It...

Firewall By: Henning Mankell From the dean of Scandinavian noir, the seventh riveting installment in the internationally bestselling and universally acclaimed Kurt Wallander series, the basis for the PBS series staring Kenneth... I Die, But the Memory Lives On By: Henning Mankell Translated from the Swedish by Laurie Thompson A powerful, moving and tragic account of the families shattered and children abandoned as a result of the spread of HIV and, through the Memory Books project, a hope for the future. Henning Mankell is not... Journey to the End of the World By: Henning Mankell Now that he's getting older, Joel Gustafson has a lot to consider. His birthday is next month. He'll be fifteen, and he can't stop thinking about the new liberties that come with being fifteen: he'll be allowed... Kennedy's Brain By: Henning Mankell Translated from the Swedish by Laurie Thompson An original and breathtaking thriller surrounding one of the most important issues of our time, from internationally acclaimed and bestselling author Henning Mankell. When archaeologist Louise Cantor’s son Henrik is...

One Step Behind By: Henning Mankell From the dean of Scandinavian noir, the sixth riveting installment in the internationally bestselling and universally acclaimed Kurt Wallander series, the basis for the PBS series staring Kenneth Branagh. On... Shadows in the Twilight By: Henning Mankell JOEL WILL SOON be 12, and he thinks nothing is going on in the small community where he lives. But he’s wrong. One day, an incident that could easily have been a catastrophe turns into a miracle. Now... Sidetracked By: Henning Mankell From the dean of Scandinavian noir, the fourth riveting installment in the internationally bestselling and universally acclaimed Kurt Wallander series, the basis for the PBS series staring Kenneth Branagh. In... Daniel By: Henning Mankell In 1878, aspiring entomologist Hans Bengler travels to the Kalahari Desert in hopes of making a name for himself by discovering a previously unknown insect or two. There he encounters a boy named Molo,... The Shadow Girls By: Henning Mankell From the dean of Scandinavian noirand the internationally bestselling and universally acclaimed Kurt Wallander series, comes this moving and profound literary novel about three refugee women and the poet they...

The Cat Who Liked Rain By: Henning Mankell Translated by Laurie Thompson Mankell’s only book for younger readers tells the story of 7-year old Lucas who is given a beautiful black cat for his birthday. He becomes very fond of it and is devastated when it disappears one... The Dogs of Riga By: Henning Mankell From the dean of Scandinavian noir, the second riveting installment in the internationally bestselling and universally acclaimed Kurt Wallander series, the basis for the PBS series staring Kenneth... The Eye of the Leopard By: Henning Mankell Interweaving past and present, Sweden and Zambia, The Eye of the Leopard draws on bestselling author Henning Mankell's deep understanding of the two worlds he has inhabited for over twenty years. Hans Olofson lived... The Fifth Woman By: Henning Mankell From the dean of Scandinavian noir, the fifth riveting installment in the internationally bestselling and universally acclaimed Kurt Wallander series, the basis for the PBS series staring Kenneth Branagh. In...

The Journey to the End of the World By: Henning Mankell Continuing Mankell’s magical account of a boyhood spent in northern Sweden, Joel is fifteen and has left school, wanting to become a merchant sailor and travel far away from his home town in the... The Man from Beijing By: Henning Mankell The acclaimed author of the Kurt Wallander mysteries, writing at the height of his powers, now gives us an electrifying stand-alone global thriller. January 2006. In the Swedish hamlet of Hesjövallen, nineteen... The Man Who Smiled By: Henning Mankell In this riveting Henning Mankell thriller, a disillusioned Inspector Kurt Wallander finds himself in a deep personal and professional crisis after killing a man in the line of duty. After almost a year... The Pyramid By: Henning Mankell Now available for the first time in paperback from Vintage Canada, this international bestseller is the missing piece of the critically acclaimed Kurt Wallander mystery series: the story of Wallander's beginnings. The... By: Henning Mankell From the dean of Scandinavian noir, come s a riveting mystery set in frozen north of Sweden. .

When retired policeman Herbert Molin is found brutally slaughtered on his remote farm in the northern... The White Lioness By: Henning Mankell From the dean of Scandinavian noir, the third riveting installment in the internationally bestselling and universally acclaimed Kurt Wallander series, the basis for the PBS series staring Kenneth... By: Henning Mankell Joel Gustafson’s journey toward becoming a man continues. As it has in the past, the first snow of the year signifies to Joel Gustafson his very own New Year’s Eve. So when the snow begins to fall on a cold November... The Troubled Man By: Henning Mankell From the author most recently of the bestselling, internationally acclaimed thriller The Man from Beijing — comes the first Kurt Wallander mystery in more than a decade: the much-anticipated return of the... Italian Shoes By: Henning Mankell From the bestselling author of the Kurt Wallander series comes a touching and intimate story about an embattled man’s unexpected chance at redemption.

A Treacherous Paradise By: Henning Mankell From the internationally acclaimed author of the Wallander crime series, a dramatic new standalone novel set in turn-of-the-century Sweden and Mozambique, whose indomitable female protagonist is awoken from naiveté... Henning Mankell Wallander Bundle: Faceless Killers, The Dogs of Riga, The White By: Henning Mankell The first three novels in Henning Manning's Kurt Wallander series are now available in a trade paperback set. An Event in Autumn By: Henning Mankell An Inspector Kurt Wallander short novel by the bestselling author Henning Mankell, available in English for the first time. A Vintage Canada Original. Soon after Inspector... Quicksand By: Henning Mankell A stunning and poignant autobiographical look at the myriad experiences that shape a meaningful life, by the bestselling author of the Kurt Wallander mysteries.

Question: What is the name of the Swedish policeman in the series of novels by Henning Mankel?
Answer: (Kurt) WALLANDER