HENNING MANKELL'S AN EVENT IN AUTUMN

My copy of the book was sitting in the pile, waiting to be read, and then Henning Mankell died, and I wrote my piece (you can read that here) and said my bit on The Crime Vault Live (follow the link you'll find here), and the very next day after that I read the story but found I couldn't write about it right away.

Although it's billed as a 'never-before published' novella, An Event In Autumn was not actually Mankell's final Wallander book; it was originally published in 2004 in the Netherlands, as a give away for people who bought books. It was the basis of one of the BBC Wallander TV shows, and finally Mankell took it back and published it in 2013. It is set, as Mankell explains in a brief afterword, just before The Troubled Man, which ended the series (you can read my review here), and it is very much an autumnal book, the metaphor as pure and shining as snow. Not only for the autumn of the character's life, but the autumn of the character in the author's mind, echoing his own autumn (Wallander was 'born' in Mankell's own birth year, 1948).

Wallander is thinking about buying an old house that belongs to his colleague Martinsson's wife's cousin. He's pretty much convinced himself to buy when a nagging thought forces him to look one more time. He returns and finds a skeleton hand poking up from the ground. The skeleton is of a middle-aged woman, and it's been in the ground some 60 years. Wallander no longer wants to buy the house.

The investigation is classic Wallander; slow, somewhat plodding, but complete; always asking the next question and leaving nothing unanswered. The mystery is solved through this plodding work, but the story ends with a somewhat deus ex machina twist. But that isn't really the point.

'It was getting colder' is how one early chapter ends, and like a long poem lines similar to that recur at the end of many other stanzas. At the same time, we are presented with Swedishness, people who only speak when they have something to say, neighbours being neighbours, not friends, and with the prospect of life in old-age homes, where the inner silence and the outer silence merge. It may be what Mankell has called 'the Swedish anxiety'.

In its own quiet way, this is a powerful piece of writing. It's as if its setting the stage for the last Wallander book, and it even recalls 'Wallander's First Case', which appeared in the collection The Pyramid. (You can read my review of that here). It makes an interesting bookend to that fascinating career. Mankell himself writes about Wallander in an essay appended to the story, dated 2013. It's interesting as much for what is left out as for what is included, but it's good for putting the character into the place in which the author would like him to rest. May he rest in that place, and in the ones many of us have made for him in our own imaginations.

An Event In Autumn by Henning Mankell

Vintage, £6.99, ISBN 9781784700843

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

HENNING MANKELL'S PYRAMID

Reading Henning Mankell's Wallander in shorter stories provides an interesting perspective into what makes the detective work—and more importantly into how Manning himself approaches writing about him. Two of the stories in this collection are long: the opener, here titled 'Wallander's First Case', is a good-sized novella, and the title story, 'The Pyramid', which ends the book, could have easily been published alone as a short novel. Mankell wrote all these stories to answer questions about what happened to Wallander before he debuted in 1990's Faceless Killers, and they were originally collected in Swedish in 1998. He explains in an introduction that is typically precise but somewhat less reticent than his interviews, that it wasn't until after those eight years had passed that he came up with the phrase which he would have used retrospectively to subtitle the Wallander series: 'Novels About The Swedish Anxiety'.

Without using the A word, this confirms what many of us have thought, and the link which Mankell has also explained between his books and the Sjowall/Wahloo Martin Beck series.
At times in these stories he tries to make the sense of collective angst rather too clear: at one point commenting on the fractured walls of society, and in another at the way, a generation before, Ystad would have been free of the effects of crime from the cities. There's a reflection of the novels too, since Mankell has always had fun with the sense of Ystad as a crime capital: remember the cash machine in the town square that was about to cue world wide armageddon? 'The Pyramid' is a classic case in point: an international drug cartel run by two spinster sisters who otherwise sell buttons and thread? But Mankell balances the unreal nature of that situation with the tale of Wallander having to rush to Egypt to get his father out of jail: the cantankerous old Swede has tried to fulfill his dream of climbing a pyramid, and been arrested. It's as surreal a scene as I can recall in any crime novel, and it helps put this Christmas tale into perspective.

'Wallander's First Case' is the best of the lot, in part because knowing much of the story to follow, one can see the seeds planted carefully. His new romance with Mona is already suffering from his devotion to his job, a devotion which will pay off in his promotion to detective. And it will also stoke her fears; because he is seriously wounded—the original title of the story was 'The Stab'-- and that personal anxiety will later be magnified as their relationship flounders on its lack of communication.

In his shorter stories, Mankell is often making a character point. This is signalled particularly strongly by the original title of 'The Man With The Mask', which was called 'The Divide' and emphases not only the relationship between Wallander and the man who holds him hostage in a convenience store robbery, but also between Mona and him, she being the outsider who can never understand what he has gone through. A couple of stories end in suicides, which is a particularly Swedish way of dealing with things (Americans tend to prefer taking people with them) and a couple require epilogues to explain the complications of plots that are creaky, but which Mankell is not taking too seriously; less police procedural than Swedish psychological. It's a riveting book, that to anyone familiar with Wallander hangs together like an episodic novel, doing exactly what Mankell planned.

The Pyramid by Henning Mankell
Vintage 2009 £7.99 ISBN 978009951297
This review also appears at www.crimetime.co.uk