HENNING MANKELL: IN MEMORIAM

Henning Mankell was important as a crime writer because his Wallander books sparked what had become an explosion of Scandinavian crime fiction which went nuclear after The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, and I find it hard to believe that Steig Larsson wasn't inspired in some way by The Fifth Woman one of the best of the Wallander series.

Otherwise, Mankell's influence was more in terms of marketing than style, though you can see a good bit of him in the best of the Nordic writers, Iceland's Arnaldur Indridason. But Mankell himself was influenced by the godfathers of modern Scandinavian crime fiction, Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo and their ten Martin Beck books. Like Beck, Wallander is a dour detective with a depressing private life, and functions within an ensemble cast that both complements and contrasts with him. Mankell spends more time on Wallander himself, perhaps, which reflects the changing times to some extent (our literary cult of fictional personality) but also reflects Sjowall and Wahloo's own influences, especially Ed McBain's 87^th Precinct.

Mankell was often dismissive of the label 'crime writer', but he was very generous to Sjowall and Wahloo, and wrote the introduction to the Harper Perennial reissue of the first Beck novel, Roseanna. When I wrote the introduction to Murder At The Savoy in the same series, I noted that its basic premise, the death of an industrial with fingers in many shady multi-national deals, is mirrored in Mankell's The Man Who Smiled (a very Martin Beck sort of title), and noted a few other parallels in the series. I also quoted the description of Beck's colleague Fredrik Melander, logical, calm, dull, with a 'modest' sense of humour, an excellent memory, and a propensity for being in the toiler whenever he was needed. As Sjowall and Wahloo wrote: 'briefly, he was a first-class policeman'. The one time I interviewed Mankell, appropriately enough at the Savoy (but in London, not Malmo) I asked if Wallander were in some ways an hommage to Melander. 'Oh, did they write that?' he replied. He also had little false modesty; I asked him who the man was who had greeted him just before we sat down. 'Oh, he's Sweden's second greatest novelist,' he said.

What also links Mankell to Sjowall and Wahloo was their dissection of the failures of Sweden's experiment in Social Democracy from a perspective often noted to be left-wing, but more accurately described as true to the ideals of that experiment. Mankell's political commitment is strong throughout his work, both in Sweden and Mozambique, and strongly consistent to a sense of rational help for those who need help and justice, and a society based on those principles. It was no surprise he chose to sail on the flotilla of ships trying to bring humanitarian aid to Gaza, it was even less of a surprise that he reported the summary murder of 10 activists by masked Israeli commandos, and refuted very simply and strongly allegations that the killings were self-defense. He had a field day with the fact that he was captured in international waters, brought to Israel, and then charged by the Orwellian government with entering the country illegally.

Wallander was well-served by television. Rolf Lassgard nailed his character, but Krister Henriksson was justifiably more popular, because he brought some humour to Wallender, just through his quick smile and twinkle in his eye; it made his interactions with the rest of the ensemble less confrontational. Kenneth Branagh's Wallander virtually eliminated the ensemble, concentrating on the superficial problems of Wallander's life, most notably drinking and shaving. It's good that the series has not been continued, like the Beck which for all its strengths has little of Sjowall and Wahloo left to recommend it. And it should be noted that Henriksson's performance in the final Wallander story, The Troubled Man, is every bit as touching as Mankell's own conclusion to the series (and it's one of the most overtly political of the series as well).

There isn't much humour in the books; Mankell wrote a comic novel, Tea Bag, about literary types and immigration—the humane portion about the life of immigrants in Sweden works muich better than the literary comedy. But his work for children is surprisingly good, including Chronicler Of The Winds, an adult story based on a play written to be performed in Portugese, in his adopted Maputo.

Faceless Killers, the first Wallander book, is a good place to start. One Step Behind and Fifth Woman are my idea of the series' best. I'd also recommend his 2006 novel Depths, (you can read my review of that book here), set on bleak islands in the archipelago during World War I; it is to my mind the most Bergmanesque bit of Swedish writing I've encountered (reminiscent of Strindberg as well) and deeply moving. Of course Mankell was married to Eva Bergman, Ingmar's daughter, which may or may not mean anything.

We discuss Mankell in the second episode of The Crime Vault Live; I could not do the same on BBC Front Row that night because we were recording CVL at the same time. I might have said that sometime in the future people will look at Mankell as a transitory figure, between the trail-blazing of Sjowall and Wahloo and the worldwide phenomenon of Steig Larsson. But he's more important than that, and the consistency of his vision for both his iconic character, his other work, and beyond fiction to his country and the world; in many ways he represents the moral focus of the Swedish character. This should make him a major figure no matter from what distance literary critics are looking back.

ARNE DAHL'S BLINDED MAN

I haven't yet watched BBC4's broadcasts of the TV adaptation of Arne Dahl's novel, but when I read the book a few months ago I was struck by how firmly it was anchored in what I consider the classic Swedish tradition, which flows from Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo's Martin Beck, and how consciously it seems to address modern society, while still maintaining its suspense as a police procedural.

The Blinded Man begins with two seemingly unconnected events—a well-planned bank robbery and a hostage situation in an immigration office. The first is unexplained. In the second, we follow Paul Hjelm, whose day begins with yet another instance of missed communicaton with his wife. Hjelm then has to deal with the Kosovar Albanian who's been let down by the system in the only way he can figure out how, by shooting him, non-fatally. For that, he is suspended and investigated for misconduct, but in the meantime he is recruited to join a new elite task force being assembled to deal with the murders of two of Sweden's leading businessmen.

You can see familiar elements already: while Hjelm is not quite as depressive as the popular image of Scandinavian detectives dictates, he is serious, inward, and finds communicating a challenge. Most of the best Scandinavian detectives function within a team—which serves as a microcosm of the society and its ethos in which they function. In Hjelm's case, this microcosm is a sort of rainbow coalition: an almost equally serious woman; an aggressive body-builder, who once in roid-rage turned wife beater; a Finnish intellectual (which plays on some Swedish ethnic stereotypes); a plodding Norrlander called Norlander (which plays on others of the same) and a 'new Swede' of Latin American decent. What is particularly interesting is the way Dahl plays, within the group, on generational differences in traditional Swedish values—particularly racism, and not only in regard to immigration. Perceiving minute differences in their own native society, Swedes have been both open to immigration and felt swamped by it, and this is an important side issue throughout the novel.

Meanwhile, the hunt for the serial killer has a somewhat clockwork feel to it—there is actually an Agatha Christie reference which seems somewhat self-conscious. There are secret societies and a clue built around an obscure jazz tape, Monk recorded live, that would be worthy of Michael Connelly or John Harvey had they ever worked in that fashion. Slightly less self-conscious is the analysis Arto Soderstedt, the braniac left-wing Finn, presents of what makes serial killers in the first place. It's worth quoting: 

'Plenty of magazines in the United States make heroes out of serial killers and mass murderers. It's related to the fact that their society is on the verge of collapse. A widespread feeling of general frustration makes it possible for an entire nation to empathise with extremists and sick outsiders...their disregard for all social rules exerts a strong fascination...we need to ask ourselves what sort of effect this sort of mess could have on the national soul of the Swedish people. There's no such thing as a simple act.'

This resonates within the book's approach to Swedish society, if you go back to Beck the whole idea of serial killing hasn't occured, while in Wallander it is a particularly bizarre crime. But it's also crucial

that both Beck (in Murder At The Savoy, to which I wrote the introduction to the Harper Collins edition) and Henning Mankell's Wallander (in The Man Who Smiled) were brought face to face in confrontation with Sweden's upper crust businessmen—Hjelm faces the same challenges, made more intriguing because the businessmen themselves are the targets.

Hjelm reminds me a bit of Leif Persson's Lars Martin Johnsson (who is a Norrlander himself) in that he's not, as previously suggested, as depressive as a Beck or Wallander or Harry Hole. Hjelm is decent, relatively good with people, but, as with most good Nordic detectives, finds his real battles come within the bureaucracy he faces—and that, again, echoes the society the police are supposedly serving.

Hjelm's relationship with his wife Cilla, however, is pure Beck, though Dahl writes it with more emotion than Sjowall and Wahloo. Here's their marriage, and their lives, in a nutshell: 'Did those few moments in the kitchen draw them closer together? Or had the final chasm opened up between them? It was impossible to say, but something decisive had taken place; they had looked right into each other's naked loneliness.'

These are the things television would find hard to adapt. In some ways, I expected The Blinded Man would find its way to television—more along the lines of the Danish Those Who Kill. The ensemble playing can be managed, and the plot itself works well. As with all police procedurals, the question of reveals, and thus managing tension, becomes crucial. But what made the novel most interesting was the inward-looking part, as with the above, and that would be the hardest to transfer to the small screen. I found The Blinded Man a worthy, if unspectacular addition to the line of Scandinavian police procedurals, and Hjelm potentially a major figure. I will turn to the adaptation with keen interest.

The Blinded Man by Arne Dahl, translated by Tiina Nunnally
Vintage £7.99 ISBN 9780999575689 

Note: This review will also appear at Shots (www.shotsmag.co.uk)

PER WAHLOO'S STEEL SPRING

After discovering Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo's Martin Beck in the early Seventies in Sweden, I remember searching around for Per Wahloo's early novels, and finding all of them except The Steel Spring (1968). In fact, I had forgotten about the book, until Vintage's reissue of it along with the other Chief Inspector Jensen novel, Murder On The 31st Floor, in new translations by Sarah Death, whose work here seems to catch the bleakness perfectly.

It's fascinating to read Wahloo in retrospect. The Steel Spring is a dystopian sf novel, in which Jensen, having gone abroad for a liver transplant, receives a message from his government telling him to return home. He soon discovers that his country is closed off to the outside world, but his doggedness gets him back home, where he finds an epidemic has struck, and his familiar surroundings are almost deserted.

Wahloo's concerns are the failure of social democracy, with a specific eye toward the way social improvement leads to social control, and democracy edges into totalitarianism. The urge to control is what has led to the epidemic, a case of society destroying itself from within. That the government under which this tragedy has happened is a nominal coalition makes the story shiveringly relevant to today's Britain, if not as much Sweden. The nameless country in which Jensen works seems to be a mix of Sweden with some proto-Iron Curtain eastern European state, sort of Albania or Romania thrown in.

Jensen is the perfect protagonist for such a setting, and in him it's easy to discern the prototype Beck. He has no personal life, appears to have no opinions or preferences, very little individual feeling, apart from doing his job to the best of his ability, which implies a sort of blind faith in the laws, the social contract, he enforces.

That was always the main conflict in the Beck books: the contrast between the world the policeman is protecting, and the laws he is enforcing—the way they are applied selectively, or not at all, depending on circumstances beyond his control. If The Steel Spring has a flaw, it's that most of the realisations seem to come from Wahloo, because although they are presented via Jensen, Jensen doesn't seem to share the criticisms which are obviously implied. Or maybe it's because he can't see them as criticisms, whereas we can. Which is the mark of good dystopian fiction. Wahloo's solo work deserves to be considered in the same context as Zamyatin, Capek, Orwell, or Durrenmatt...high praise indeed. I will probably revisit Murder On The 31st Floor soon, and if you haven't got to the Martin Beck books, please start now—and be aware I wrote the introduction to the sixth volume in the Harper Perennial reissues, Murder At The Savoy.

The Steel Spring by Per Wahloo
Vintage £7.99 ISBN 9780099554752

This review will also appear at Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)

WALLANDER: THE MAN WHO SMILED

Kudos to BBC4, who are showing some of the original Swedish Wallander series, nine movies made by Swedish television (SVT) between 1994 and 2007, adapting all Henning Mankell's novels, and starring Rolf Lassgard as Wallander. BBC4, being English at heart, began in the middle, with The Man Who Smiled (2003) the sixth of the nine. It's a fascinating adaptation, both for the way it follows the novel and for the changes it makes.

The core, of course, is Lassgard as Wallander, and he plays the character much closer to his written persona, seeking no sympathy apart from the odd moment of comic appeal. He's a little too sharp-featured, perhaps;  Krister Hendriksson, who starred in the Swedish TV series, comes close too, but often has a bit too much twinkle and empathy, while Kenneth Branagh in the British version is far too jaw-grindingly existentially tormented, and far too dependent on his designer stubble to render the character with nuance. The BBC recently compared Wallander to a Bergman character (an easy assumption to make, since Mankell is married to Bergman's daughter) but there is a difference, in that Wallander's existence is totally wound up in his personal battle to put the world right. In that sense, he's post-Bergman, less concern with questions of why we are here as to what we do finding ourselves in this milieu. Lassgard's performance suggests someone swept up by the overwhelming pressures of his work, the Martin Beck influence coming through clearly. He looks a bit less solid than I imagine Wallander should, somewhat too soft around the edges, especially with his hair parted in the middle, but he makes up for it with the fiery temper that seems unware of who it might be offending, and the highly visible disdain for authority.

The adapters (Klas Abrahamsson and Michael Hjorth, who also did the screenplays immediate before and after this one) have changed the colleague with whom he has an ill-fated affair; now called Maya and played by the excellent Marie Richardson, she's perfect as the exasperated foil trying to balance the private Kurt with the police Wallander. In that sense, The Man Who Smiled was a good place to start, as it shows the relationship running almost full circle. The rest of the supporting cast is good, but not necessarily foregrounded as they are in the TV series. The first series of television shows benefitted from Johanna Sallstrom as Linda Wallander, and a strong ensemble with Mats Bergman seeming to absorb Wallander's dour side from Henriksson as Nyberg. The Branagh version keeps the supporting cast much more in the background, apart from the huge plus of David Warner as Wallander's father, who doesn't appear in the Swedish TV version, and not in this film. The adaptations are similar in style to the second and third Girl Who movies, obviously shot with the smaller screen in mind, but without too many concessions, and even, as we'll see below, eschewing the opportunity for a car chase of sorts!

Here Kerstin Andersson gets the school-mistress role as Wallander's boss, and handles it very well, while Christer Fant is brilliant as Svedberg, playing him something like a Gunvald Larsson from the Beck series, but a tremendous foil for Lassgard. Lars Melin, as Martinsson, plays the cop who'd rather be somewhere else, and Melin reminds me more than a little of John Pankow (best as William Peterson's partner in To Live And Die In LA).

The big changes to the book involve both the tycoon Harderberg and Wallander's pursuit of him. There is a sub-plot added with Harderberg's adopted daughter (and his IVF impregnation of her), and, more significantly, the ending is changed (if you don't want it spoiled stop reading now). In the book Wallander captures Harderberg after an airport runway chase and he is charged with crimes. In the film, Harderberg apparently escapes, but Wallander passes on his files to an investigative reporter. In a way, this is more Wallander than Mankell; the book highlights his obsessive pursuit of the wealthy industrialist who's beyond the law (a real nod to Sjowall and Wahloo's Murder At The Savoy, as I mentioned in my introduction to the Harper Perennial edition of that book) but the film also shows the limitations of his efforts, held back the influence of wealth and the politics of power, and how he goes outside the rule-book in order to get what British crime dramas would call 'a result'. And thus it ends, with Wallander celebrating with a little rock and roll, the one false note in the entire enterprise. Driving away in the car pounding the roof is more Baretta than Wallander; perhaps driving away slowly with opera rising to a crescendo? BBC4 is already showing a two-part version of Firewall and I'm hoping they go back to the earliest adaptations, because it's a well-done series with an intriguing Wallander.

WHO PUT THE 'NO' IN NORDIC? SCANDINAVIAN CRIME CREATES BRITISH CRITICAL CONUNDRUM

Seems like Open Book got in ahead of the wave (see here). Friday was a big day for Scandinavian Crime in the broadsheet arts sections, with the Independent featuring this piece by Boyd Tonkin on Stieg Larsson's success and the Guardian running 'Move Over Ian Rankin' by John Crace here.

Tonkin had already discussed the Nordic crime wave back in December (here) when he noted that 'many gifted (Scandinavian) novelists had chosen to adopt the form (crime novel) and push its boundaries'. Contrast that to the Guardian's sidebar to Crace's piece, which presented a roster of writers and informed us with some condescension that Mankell wrote 'serious plays and novels' before he 'hit it big time' with Wallender, and that Peter Hoeg 'started out as a serious writer before Miss Smilla'. It's the Guardian's 'Telegraph Crossword' theory of crime fiction rearing its head again, see here for an explantion. They also described Wallender as a 'hard-drinking...angry everyman,' ...there is a difference between heavy drinking and hard drinking (and I'm not sure Wallender qualifies on either count--Jo Nesbo's Harry Hole, now he's hard-drinking!) just as there is between angry and morose.

I doubt Crace actually wrote the sidebar, especially since he wondered, quite rightly, why Britain lagged behind Europe in appreciating Nordic crime in translation, and put it down to that 'old national weakness for effortless superiority combined with instinctive parochialism.' But it was nice to see his paper's sidebar immediately prove his point, plus they'd already trumpeted the same prejudice in their '1,000 novels everyone must read' supplements that very week (see my take here, or scroll down to the previous post on IT). The sidebar on the 'husband and wife' team of Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo (actually, of course, wife and husband, that's Maj on the right) mentioned that their Martin Beck series is still in print, but 'almost certainly overdue a revivial'. In fact, the series has just been reissued over the past two years, in uniform editions, by Harper Collins. I wrote the introduction to Murder At The Savoy, other introductions were by the likes of Michael Connelly, Michael Ondaatje, and Val McDermid.

The key introduction was provided by Henning Mankell himself for the first novel in the series, Roseanna, and gave a good background to the whole Scandinavian crime phenomenon. It's important, because Martin Beck lies at the centre of a cross-fertilization which helps understand both where Nordic crime comes from and why it's so popular here. Mankell noted how British cozies, and their Swedish imitations, were immensely popular before, in the 1960s, influenced by Ed McBain's 87th Precinct, Sjowall and Wahloo decided to do something new, and dissect Swedish society while they were doing it. Beck's own sombre character was in marked contrast to McBain's Steve Carella, though like McBain they populated the supporting cast with colourful characters. This is the field in which Mankell, and many of the others of this new wave (Fossum and Indridasson in particular) plow.

The Beck novels had a huge influence in both American and British crime fiction; it's evident in John Harvey, Ian Rankin, Connelly and many others, crucially, it provided a way for British writers in particular to move into a more hard-boiled territory without adopting American-style private dick heroes. If Inspector Morse indicated a breaching of the cozy puzzle by the police procedural (Morse of course is both hard drinking and angry when he's not listening to opera), Rebus, Resnick, Mark Bellingham's Tom Thorne and Graham Hurley's Joe Faraday all reflected with a keen eye on British society and it made all of them as morose as Beck.

Tonkin noted that where Larsson follows Mankell (and Beck) is in starting with the idea that the 'welfare state has been corrupted from the top'. But it's surprising that he then asks 'where are the native stars of crime who might expose the broken parts of this society and convert them into electrifying entertainment? Let's hope, and search, for a home-grown Larsson'. It's an interesting question, because in answer to the first part, there are, as noted, many British writers dissecting their society with the same sort of acuity as Mankell. But it's the second part of the equation, the 'electrifying entertainment', where Larsson is slightly different, and more difficult to follow, in two ways.

First is the unique interplay of his two heroes. One is a cynical, but not disillusioned journalist, whom you might argue is based as much on Per Wahloo as on Larsson himself. The other is a young woman almost completely disaffected and at odds with Swedish society, abused by it, yet able to manipulate it in ways the older, powerful generation can't quite imagine. Sarah Weinman perceptively suggested (here) Martyn Waites as a British writer who's done something similar, and Waites' books do feature a cynical ex-journo, diaffected youngsters, and hackers, though his scope might be more limited than Larssons, not least because of the Newcastle setting (though that's as close to Scandinavia as England gets!).

But the other thing Larsson does is work with narrative space, in multiple points of view; I compared him to Dumas in this essay. His books may be over-long, but his talent resembles someone like Richard North Patterson, whose approach to issues is somewhat more simplistic, but who within the omnisicient narration manages to assume multiple viewpoints, and keep his characters and story moving at great and involving length. This is something which is not uncommon in the 'mainstream', or what the Guardian might call 'serious' writers, and its the ability to draw the big picture without inflicting authorial taste on the audience that is Larsson's real gift. His authorial aims sneak in while his characters move in their own worlds.

The question of translation in general is an interesting one. Of course one reason so many fewer translations are published here is that the English-language market is so large, and books written by Americans don't require extensive translation. The predominance of Scandinavian crime is partly because Mankell is so good, partly because Scandinavian society has many of the same reserves and divisions as British, and partly because Scandinavian prose translates so well into English. Remember too that there are lots of good writers because the Nordic countries are the world's great readers: proportionately selling many times what books sell here, and keeping far more newspapers and magazines alive.

The current wave is a case of follow the leader, without Mankell, no Larsson (or Fossum, or Indridasson, or Theorin, or Jungstedt) and Larsson's success has made publishers search twice as hard for the next marketable Nordic. In this, the market has changed in 40 years; Martin Beck's success led to publication in English for the Dane, Anders Bodelsen, but I can't think of many others, and the most popular and critically successful Swedish crime books, the spy novels of Jan Guillou, remain strangely under-published here. Harvill, over the years, have been an outstanding publisher of fiction (not just crime) in translation, and in the crime fiction, smaller publishers like Bitter Lemon and Gallic struggle to make an impact, even in the same review sections that wonder why we don't read more foreign fiction.

It's great to see such good fiction being translated into English, and ever better that it is attracting so much attention. But it remains puzzling to me why, when contemporary British crime writers have done so much to move their genre into more challenging territory, it takes two Swedes to get British critics to notice.