Wallander winding down
Staff , The Columbus Dispatch
PHILADELPHIA - Henning Mankell has given his latest - and maybe his last - Wallander novel the tantalizing title The Troubled Man.
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The Columbus Dispatch
PHILADELPHIA - Henning Mankell has given his latest - and maybe his last - Wallander novel the tantalizing title The Troubled Man.

Who is the troubled man?

"I can think of at least three candidates," Mankell said.

Kurt Wallander - the rumpled, harried, imperfect protagonist of the novels - is a perennial candidate. In this book, he faces age, mortality - and a huge, ever-unraveling mystery involving him, his family and the recent political history of Sweden.

The troubled man could also be Hekan von Enke, a retired Navy commander and the father of the man living with Wallander's daughter, Linda. He is also a pursued man, always looking over his shoulder.

When first Hekan and then his wife, Louise, disappear, the fatal machine starts moving. Although Wallander is suspended from police duty, he gets drawn into the investigation.

Hekan might be paranoid, but sometimes paranoia is reasonable. Sometimes the bad guys are coming to get you. This truth plays out in the larger scheme of The Troubled Man as it takes on two shadows over Swedish history and politics.

The first is the scandal of Russian submarines supposedly sighted off the coast of Sweden in the 1980s.

"There were no subs - or, if there were, they were American, not Russian," Mankell said from his home near Gothenburg, Sweden. In his view, "We were told something that wasn't true - this charade of neutrality, when Sweden was never neutral. We have always been complicit."

After finishing The Troubled Man, some readers have felt that the United States comes off as worse than the Soviet Union. But what hurts Mankell most, he said, is the lie Sweden told its people. The scandal still reverberates in Swedish politics today.

"Only now are we facing it in our social discussion," he said.

The second shadow is the still-unexplained 1986 assassination of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme.

"We most probably will never find out what really happened," Mankell said, "as with Kennedy in the United States."

The Troubled Man begins in Palme's office. Palme is, indeed, troubled over what he discovers about his government. Cold War anxiety will come to bear on Wallander's quest.

Can this really be the last Wallander book?

"Well, I didn't make the mistake Arthur Conan Doyle did - a very stupid thing - of killing off Sherlock Holmes and then having to bring him back," Mankell said. "But it would be difficult to write any more about Wallander, in the sense of writing about a man doing work as a detective. In that way, it's the end."

But if Wallander's daughter, Linda, comes back, maybe he would, too, in the background. Mankell has focused whole novels on Linda alone, as in Before the Frost (2005), and, he said, "I might do that again."