The Wallander mystery
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The Sydney Morning Herald
Mankell cites John le Carre as another key influence and admires the way he developed George Smiley with each book. "If you can call le Carre a crime writer, he investigates the contradictions inside man, between men, and between man and society; and I hope to do the same. Sooner or later a crime writer will get the Nobel prize (not me - I'm Swedish) because the old snobbery against the genre is fast vanishing."

In Sweden, the Wallander mysteries are reportedly read by the Prime Minister and half his cabinet, as well as by the judiciary.

Now 55, Mankell divides his time between Sweden and Mozambique, where he runs a theatre company. As well as thrillers, he has written children's books and novels on African themes. In Sweden one of his most faithful admirers is Ingmar Bergman; Mankell is married to the film director's daughter Eva.

Detective fiction from Scandinavia has been fashionable in Britain for some time. The trend was set in 1994 with Peter Hoeg's Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow. This Danish thriller radiated an unfamiliar polar chill, but it was Mankell who truly opened the door for Nordic crime.

Kurt Wallander remains one of the most impressive and credible creations of crime fiction today. Mankell portrays him as a sternly pensive slogger with health problems. From his first appearance in Faceless Killers, published in Sweden in 1991, the fortysomething detective is in a bad way. He eats too much takeaway food and has put on seven kilograms in the three months since his wife, Mona, left him. He has been stopped by his colleagues for drink-driving, and his daughter, Linda, has attempted suicide. If that is not enough, Wallander's 80-year-old father (a landscape painter with "7000 sunsets" to his name) appears to be declining into dementia.

Miserably divorced, Inspector Wallander contemplates a spell in a health spa but prefers to drink more whisky and falls into lugubrious talk of his (and humanity's) demise. Often he wonders if he should be a policeman at all, but he stoically pushes on with his investigations into murder, child abuse, drug smuggling and racial violence. By the eighth novel, Firewall (1998), the stress and strain of detective work have taken their toll. Earlier in his career, Wallander had been sued for police brutality and accidentally shot a man dead in the fog. Five years on, he retains a degree of disabused integrity but is no longer Kurt the good-humoured gumshoe: he is diabetic, alcoholic and more pessimistic than ever about Sweden's uncertain future. "We're living in the age of the noose," he despairs, "fear will be on the rise."

Wallander is a loveable sleuth in his dour way, and his investigations have a mordant comedy of their own. "No one I know who has discovered him can resist him," says Alexandra Shulman, editor of Vogue in Britain and a fan. The novelist Maggie Gee is similarly entranced. "I'm seduced by the leisurely, layered craft with which Mankell establishes the humanity of his policemen - not just Wallander, but his supporting cast of shambolic squad members - through their colds and stomach aches, their cheap cars which break down when they need them, their failing eyesight and needy families."

For others, what makes Mankell such a compelling writer is his political edge. Wallander's Sweden is a country whose time has passed; behind the roseate flush of its social-democratic prosperity lies a deepening corruption, where justice may not prevail. The books are haunted by the murder in 1986 of Sweden's prime minister, Olof Palme. The failure of the authorities to find Palme's killer has created a "dangerous scepticism" about the Swedish justice system and state institutions in general, says Mankell. As a "humanitarian socialist", he believes passionately in "solidarity" among people, and the Wallander books are an expression of that belief. Yet even Mankell could not have foreseen the catastrophe of September 10 last year, when Sweden's foreign minister, Anna Lindh, was murdered while shopping in Stockholm. Sweden's vaunted open society appeared to have taken another telling blow, but as Mankell told the London Observer newspaper afterwards: "Maybe to keep an open society, we have forgotten that you need to lock some doors."

Mankell can appear self-important in person, even prickly. He has an imposingly dry manner and fields questions professionally. "Henning has a ruthless quality," his Stockholm publisher of 30 years, Dan Israel, concedes. "If you ask any Swede living in Mozambique if they ever see him there, they say no, because Mankell's always, always writing. His writing is all that matters to him." But others have been favourably impressed by Mankell in person, among them the British crime writer Minette Walters. "He was thoughtful, dedicated, charming," she recalls.

Mankell was born in Stockholm in 1948, into a stolid bourgeois household. A year after his birth, however, the family broke up. "My mother did what many men do," Mankell says. "She left." So Mankell was brought up, with his older sister Helena, by his father. In 1950, soon after his divorce, Judge Ivar Mankell moved his family north to Harjedalen province in central Sweden, once part of Norway. It was a provincial backwater, with bears and "Christmas tree forests". Mankell did not see his mother regularly until he was 15.

Though cold and remote, in many ways Harjedalen was a "wonderful place" in which to grow up, says Mankell, and he looks back on those dark winter days as among the happiest of his childhood. His latest book, The Return of the Dancing Master (not a Wallander procedural), is set in Harjedalen's vast pine forests. The Mankell siblings lived in an apartment above the law courts where their father was judge. One day an orderly hurried upstairs to ask little Henning if he could borrow his toy cars to demonstrate how a traffic accident had occurred. Mankell was thrilled to be able to help. "Ever since I was a child I have been interested in the justice system and how it works," Mankell remarks.

During his 10 years in Harjeladen, Mankell read voraciously. Mungo Park and the African explorers were a "revelation"; the logs that floated down the river behind the Mankell house, he told himself, were crocodiles in the Congo. Today he comments: "Africa was the most exotic place I could conceive of - the end of the world - and I knew I would go there one day."

He learned the imagination could be an instrument, not just of creativity, but of survival. "In my mind I created another mother for myself to replace the one who had gone." This imaginary mother, he says, helped him overcome the "crisis of life" and his sense of isolation. "And I think that was me at my best, when the forces of the imagination had the same value as the real world."

In 1961, Judge Mankell moved his family south to Boras, near Gothenburg. Bored with secondary school, Henning left at 16 to become a merchant seaman. His father, though disappointed, was sympathetic to his son's restless spirit. It was 1964, and for two years Mankell worked as a stevedore on a Swedish ship ferrying coal and iron ore to Europe and America. He considers his time at sea his "real university". He says now: "It was a romantic, Conradian dream of escape, though there were long, boring times, too."

After his spell at sea, he settled in Paris in 1966, but had little money and returned to Sweden in 1968, to embark on a career in the theatre. By the time he was 20, working in Stockholm as a stagehand, Mankell had written his first play, The Amusement Park. It was about Swedish colonial interests in 19th-century South America and not very good, he says, though it was well received.

Ivar Mankell died in 1972 days before his son published his debut novel, The Stone-Blaster, at 24. Mankell is proud of the book. "It concerns an old man looking back on his life and on Swedish society and the need for solidarity." The novel is still in print in Sweden, though it has not been translated into English. Mankell says his father always believed he would have success as a writer.

Meanwhile, Mankell had not forgotten his dream of Africa. By the winter of 1972 he had saved enough money to go to Guinea-Bissau (then a Portuguese colony). "I don't know why, but when I got off the aeroplane in Africa I had a curious feeling of coming home." Mankell continued to visit Africa and in 1987, after settling briefly in Zambia, he was invited to run the Teatro Avenida in Mozambique's capital Maputo. His personal life had become fairly complicated by now. Over the 15 years since he first visited Africa, Mankell had had several affairs in Sweden. Today he is reluctant to talk about this period of his personal life, though he is happy to admit to the existence of four sons - Thomas, Marius, Morten and Jon - by "previous relationships".

Mankell has now spent more than 20 years in Africa and says the continent has made him a "better European"; it gives him a perspective and literary distance. Inspector Wallander's debut, Faceless Killers (1991), was written in response to the social chaos Mankell encountered on his return to Sweden in early 1989. Neo-fascist attacks on immigrants had increased during his two years in Mozambique. "Racism is a crime, and I thought: OK, I'll use the crime story. Then I realised I needed a police officer." He plucked the name "Wallander" out of the phone book.

All nine Wallander mysteries are set in the flat farming landscape of Skane, on the southernmost tip of Sweden. Mankell has kept a farm there since the early '80s and likes the blustery, treeless landscape. "It makes a change from Harjedalen. Skane is the place where Sweden ends - a sort of Baltic Texas." He adds: "Border areas have a dynamism all their own: they set off a reflex of unease." Inspector Wallander's home town of Ystad stands in windswept grassland, where buzzards and other raptors circle. According to Rendell, the Wallander stories are, among other things, "landscape novels", bleakly fixed in Baltic geography. "I don't think [foreign] readers realise just how important landscape and natural history are to Swedes: I mean, spring's an almost ecstatic event to them."

To Mankell's faint embarrassment, Ystad now offers guided tours of Wallander country. German tourists descend on the Ystad police headquarters and photograph each other standing in the long corridors. One policeman there, Inspector Kurt-Ingvar Wald, is routinely approached for his autograph: his name is a homonymous near-miss to Kurt Wallander's. ("Yes, I've heard about him," Mankell says wearily.) The entire Ystad police force has read the Wallander books, says Chief Inspector Kent Persson.

Until recently, Wallander was more famous than his creator. "Henning didn't like to participate in TV debates or do book signings," says Israel, "therefore he just wasn't in the public eye." The third Wallander novel, The White Lioness (1993), changed all that. Set partly in South Africa, the book was published in several countries simultaneously. The author began to receive letters addressed to Inspector Wallander and was even asked how his detective would vote in the European Union referendum. "It is like in London, you still get letters to Baker Street, Number 221B." Mankell's sleuth, like Sherlock Holmes, has assumed a life of his own. To the annoyance of some readers, the Wallander books have been published in English out of sequence, though Mankell says it doesn't matter. "Yes, they were written in chronological order, but each one stands on its own, I think."

In Sweden, the nine-book Wallander series is now complete. Mankell says he does not want his readers to feel he is "bored" with his creation, so he has decided to retire his detective. "I did this out of respect for myself and my readers." Mankell has embarked on a new crime series in which Wallander's wayward daughter Linda joins the Ystad force. The first of these, Before the Frost (2002), concerns a religious doomsday cult and has sold 450,000 copies in Sweden.

Mankell married Eva Bergman in 1998, when he was 50. She is one of two daughters from Ingmar Bergman's second marriage, to the dancer Ellen Lundstrom, and is a choreographer and theatre director. So far she has directed two of her husband's plays. The first, Tale on the Beach of Time (1997), is an African drama about "man and the origins of man"; Mankell had worked on the play, off and on, for 25 years since he arrived in Africa. He and Eva spend summers together on Ingmar Bergman's island retreat of Faro in the Baltic Sea, where Hour of the Wolf and Persona were filmed. The landscape there, with its flat, stony heaths, reminds Mankell of Africa.

In Africa, Mankell is passionately committed to the fight against AIDS and devotes much of his spare time to his "memory books" project. Parents with AIDS are encouraged to record their life stories not just for their children, but as a human chronicle as well. "Maybe in 500 years these books will be a great record of African times," says Mankell, who hopes to store them eventually in the new Alexandrian library in Egypt. Among Mankell's African books published in English are two powerful short novels for teenage children, Secrets in the Fire (1995) and Playing with Fire (2001). These chart an African girl's survival after a landmine blast, and to Mankell's great pride are now on the Swedish school syllabus. Henning Mankell, the most internationally famous Swedish writer since Strindberg, is now part of the canon.

The Guardian