The Troubled Man is the first new Wallander novel in a decade, and quite possibly the final novel in Henning Mankell’s outstanding crime fiction series about the introverted and intriguing detective from Ystad, Sweden. The eleventh book in this bestselling series is every bit as good as the previous ten books. The return of Kurt Wallander, for his final case, has caused a sensation around the globe.

The action in The Troubled Man takes place many years after the end of the series (Before the Frost). We meet an older and worried Kurt Wallander. He now lives in a house by the sea with a dog as his company, and he spends a lot of his time pondering his life and the state of affairs in Ystad and Sweden. He feels tired and spent, and he is very worried about how his memory seems to be failing him more and more often.

Wallander’s daughter Linda is now married. The ageing detective has become a grandfather. And now he meets – for the first time – the family of Linda’s husband Hans von Enke. The meeting is strange and somewhat disconcerting. The older von Enke, Hans’ father Håkon, brings Kurt into his home office, he wants to talk to him, get to know him. He tells him a little about his past – as a submarine commander in the Swedish Navy. But he is a worried man, a troubled man:

“I’m a worried man,” Håkan said. “I was a submarine commander during the Cold War and I believe there were spies in the Swedish navy who have never been unmasked.” “Whom do you suspect?” Wallander asked. “I cannot say right now because that would spoil the story.” Wallander remained silent. He had the feeling Håkan had been trying to tell him something. But what?

Then, later, Håkan von Enke disappears mysteriously, without a trace. And even though Kurt Wallander is now out of active duty, he gets engaged in the case – he wants to help the widow and his son-in-law. However, soon the widow, Louise von Enke, disappears as well. Did Håkan von Enke know that something was going to happen to him; that the secrets from the past he knew and kept quiet about could somehow still be dangerous and cost him his life? What was he trying to tell Wallander that evening when they met and talked in von Enke’s office? What about the secret of the troubled man did Wallander not grasp?

As Wallander digs into the commander’s life and the mystery he alluded to, he learns about a Cold War scandal that was covered-up, but that could even so severely harm the current government. And Kurt Wallander still excels in deductive reasoning, is still as persistent as ever, and still has his intuition intact. His investigation takes him into dark and unexpected avenues involving espionage and betrayal , and as he gets closer to the solution of this intricate mystery, he finds deeply hidden secrets about prominent people in Sweden and uncovers facts about his son-in-law’s family that he would have preferred not to know.

The Troubled Man is a very fitting finale to a marvelous crime fiction series that has entertained the whole world and which continues to do so – both the books and the excellent Kurt Wallander TV series (both the original Swedish series and the new one by BBC) have a huge international following. Fans of Henning Mankell will probably, like me, feel sad that it is over, that this is the end of the series (I strongly believe it is), yet most likely also feel that the ending is just right and very befitting of the likeable and fascinating detective from Ystad.

I enjoyed The Troubled Man tremendously. It is a melancholy novel, at times sad, but also graceful, entertaining and excellently told. The book held me, captivated me, and on reflection feels like a deep, well thought-out study that perhaps more than any other book in the series lets us into the character of Wallander. If there ever was a crime fiction “must read”, this must be it. It is a crowning achievement by Henning Mankell, and a wonderful “adieu” to Kurt Wallander.

Links to books by Henning Mankell at amazon US, amazon UK, and amazon CAN.

Swedish police inspector Kurt Wallander, the world famous detective created by Henning Mankell, played by Kenneth Branagh, will soon be back on American televisions screens. While the Swedish original Wallander-series has been running for a while, Branagh has had a lot of success with his interpretation of Wallander,  and has been Emmy and Golden Globe-nominated for his role as the soul-searching, introvert Swedish cop. Wallander I, the first installment of the series, included Sidetracked, Firewall, and One Step Behind.

Wallander II has three gripping new Kurt Wallander cases based on Mankell’s books. In Faceless Killers (October 3), The Man Who Smiled (October 10) and The Fifth Woman (October 17), the down-at-the-heels sleuth is having a very hard time. He is nearing the end of his emotional rope. He is now at odds with the people important to him – his daughter, his father – at the same time as his blood sugar is gyrating and he has to come to terms with having killed a man. That’s a lot to handle, even for a stoic Swede!

I am very much looking forward to seeing this series!

This is not a crime fiction book by Henning Mankell, and not about Kurt Wallander. Italian Shoes is a novel – a book describing a voyage deep into the soul of an elderly man. Sixty-six-year-old Frederick Welin has been a surgeon. For the past 12 years he has lived alone in his little cottage on an isolated island outside Stockholm. His stay on the island is a self-imposed exile. He was guilty, and this is what he deserves; the punishment he has prescribed for himself. But why is he hiding? Will he ever be able to return from exile?

One day, in January, one cold, bleak mid-winter day, a lone figure is slowly coming towards him out there on the ice, an old lady on a walker. When she is close enough, he recognizes Harriet Hörnfeldt, the woman he had loved intensely in the summer of 1966 and then abandoned – 30 years ago. Finally she has tracked him down.

Now Harriet is dying of cancer. Ever since he left her, she has loved and hated him. The reason for her visit is that she wants Frederick to honor the beautiful promise he once made her – to take her to a pool deep in the forests of northern Sweden; to a place where he once, as a child, spent a wonderful day with his father.

This is the start of a long journey through the Swedish winter and, at the same time, deep into old, almost forgotten, perhaps even repressed memories of events far in the past and of love, intimacy and betrayal. The journey is strenuous and eventful – with accidents and problems, and with the past moving forward into the present. It provides him with an opportunity to take responsibility and face his past, to ponder who he really is, and forces him to recognize his own lack of consideration both for himself and for others.

Gradually Frederick realizes the extreme futility of his attempt to abandon himself and others. His questions about himself and his life get increasingly urgent: “Before I die,” Fredrik says, “I must know why I’ve lived.” But can he make up for what has been lost?

Italian Shoes is a wonderful novel, outstandingly translated by Laurie Thompson. Having read most of the books Henning Mankell has written, I consider this to be among his three best books, and I enjoyed it tremendously. It is tender and reminiscing, profoundly sad, and tells a rich story in a way that in many ways remind me of the writing of Norwegian author Per Petterson in his Out Stealing Horses. It is quietly told, yet rich in all manner of emotions. The story is one that will make you pause to reflect and consider. Italian Shoes is a deep, timeless, very impressive tale of redemption and renewal, about a man imprisoned by fear and pride.

Praise for Italian Shoes:

“a fine meditation on love and loss.” –Sunday Telegraph

“stark” — Sunday Times

“Mankell carefully maps the changing seasons in beautifully stark prose”
–FT

Links to books by Henning Mankell at amazon US, amazon UK, and amazon CAN.

This book introduces Kurt Wallander’s daughter Linda as a main character. Many authors have tried similar solutions to the problem of continuation and failed miserably. Henning Mankell, on the other hand, makes it seem very easy and succeeds. In this crime fiction book, often labeled as a “Linda Wallander mystery”, but really a Kurt and Linda Wallander book (just as his most recent Wallander-mystery Den uroliga mannen, published in Swedish in 2009), Linda starts working at the Ystad police and is – partly by courtesy of Kurt – let into the picture. And to make it very natural, Mankell lets Before the Frost deal with growing up, relations between fathers and daughters, and such. Those are very smart moves by Mankell. Impressive, actually.

As is common in Mankell’s books, this novel too opens with violence – two acts of violence in this case. And, of course, seemingly unrelated. The first is a massacre in Guyana. The second is a very sadistic killing of swans on a lake in Sweden.
Meanwhile, Linda has graduated from police college, and shares flat with the moody, sometimes over-drinking Kurt, and hangs out while waiting to start her new job with the Ystad police with Martinsson as her mentor. So Kurt allows her to tag along on one of his investigations. She is pretty frustrated, however, as one of her friends seems to have disappeared. So, on the side, and using somewhat unorthodox methods, Linda starts investigating the disappearance.

The plot is very exciting, to a large extent due to Mankell’s excellent writing, and it soon becomes clear that we are dealing with a dangerous mix of religious fanaticism, ritual murder, sacrifice, and such. Mankell shows how religion can be a most powerful tool for manipulating people, and can (also) be used for evil purposes.

Before the Frost is good – in my opinion not among the best in the series, but even so more than good enough. It is exciting and very entertaining. The plot is a little too far-fetched for my taste, but I still enjoyed the book a lot, and had a very hard time putting it down, especially towards the end.

Praise for Henning Mankell:

“Mankell is a master of the traditional arts of the crime novel, narrative pacing and suspense.”

–Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

“An arresting story by an arresting writer … [Mankell] understands and probes the underside of everyday living – in an elegant and artful way.… He is able to look loneliness square in the eye. The result is writing that walks a line between ephemeral and everlasting.”

–The Washington Post

“Powerful…. Thoroughly engaging…. Amazingly human characters…. It’s a testament to Mankell’s skill with plot that the story gets more and more urgent as he transforms a series of small mysteries into a much larger thriller…. Mankell [is] a master storyteller.”

–San Francisco Chronicle

Links to Henning Mankell’s books at amazon US, amazon UK, and amazon CAN.

It is strange how things are inter-related. Henning Mankell writes the Kurt Wallander series. The series became popular crime movies. And now the music from the Wallander movies has become popular as well. Nostalgia (Wallander Main Theme) by Emily Barker and The Red Clay Halo.

You can listen to the track below or purchase the song as an MP3 file for £0.80 GBP, €0.90 EUR or $1.30 USD. Click the image on the left for a link to amazon US. Here is a link to amazon UK: Nostalgia (Main Theme For Wallander)

And here is a scene from the Wallander movie The Woman in the Photograph from the BBS-series as well. The Brits have already seen it, here in the US we will just have to wait for it. Oh well.

In the movie clip Wallander turns to Isa to help shed light on the identity of the woman in the photograph, but the assassin is once again closing in. Contains some violent scenes.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkv2ITs4TrE

According to Swedish Newspaper Dagens Nyheter, these were the bestselling authors in Europe in 2009:

1. Stieg Larsson
2. Stephenie Meyer
3. Dan Brown
4. Paolo Giordano
5. Carlos Ruiz Zafón
6. Camilla Läckberg
7. Herman Koch
8. Tatiana de Rosnay
9. Henning Mankell
10. John Grisham

It is not very surprising that Stieg Larsson is on the top of the list. More surprising, to me at least, is that two other Swedes – Camilla Läckberg and Henning Mankell are also on the list. Quite a success for Swedish crime fiction!

The Man from Beijing is a large-scale, global thriller. It describes and links events across time and space. A mass murder in Sweden in 2006. Chinese railroad workers in America in the 1860’s. Chinese neo-colonialism in Africa. It is all here. And the dots are very properly connected in Mankell’s grandiose plot.

Henning Mankell, the author of the internationally renowned crime fiction series about Detective Kurt Wallander, recently featured on TV both in England and in the US in a BBC television series starring Kenneth Branagh as Wallander, is an exceptional writer. He has sold more than 30 million books in 39 languages. In this book, he is seemingly guided by an analysis of the future world role of the Chinese.

This is an electrifying stand-alone thriller that takes off into a sweeping international drama. It starts in January 2006. In the Swedish hamlet of Hesjövallen. First a savagely murdered man is found lying in the snow. As they begin their investigation the police notice that the village seems eerily quiet and deserted. Going from house to house, looking for witnesses, they uncover a crime unprecedented in Swedish history. Nineteen people have been massacred. In Sweden!

The only clues are a red ribbon and an old, nineteenth-century diary found at the scene. Judge Birgitta Roslin has particular reason to be shocked: her grandparents, the Andréns, are among the victims. The police insist that only a lunatic could have committed the murders.

But when Birgitta discovers the diary of another Andrén—a gang master on the American transcontinental railway in the nineteenth century—that describes the cruel treatment of Chinese slave-workers, she is determined to uncover what she suspects is a more complicated truth.

The investigation leads to modern-day Beijing and its highest echelons of power, to Zimbabwe and Mozambique. But the narrative also takes us back 150 years, into a history that will ensnare Birgitta as she draws ever closer to solving the Hesjövallen murders. Birgitta uncovers an international web of corruption and a story of vengeance that stretches back over a hundred years, linking China and the USA of the 1860s with modern-day Beijing, Zimbabwe and Mozambique, and coming to a shocking climax in London’s Chinatown.

The Man from Beijing is masterfully written. Mankell skillfully links together events and people into a coherent tale – a tale of something which could possibly have happened. And the book is very suspenseful and mostly moves fast. Here and there, however, Mankell breaks the pace a little because he has something he wants to tell. Even so, The Man from Beijing shows Henning Mankell at the height of his powers, handling a broad historical canvas and pressing international issues with his exceptional gifts for insight and chilling suspense.

I loved reading the book (in Swedish). I have not seen the translated version yet, so I don’t know anything about the quality of it in this case. In Swedish, the language was excellent, and it was clear that this was a tale Mankell was happy to tell. The images and symbolism are great and intelligent. There is a lot of tension and nerve in the book, and it is very exciting to read. To my mind, this is one of the best Mankell books of the last decade.

The Man from Beijing is a perceptive political thriller and a compelling detective story.

Links to Henning Mankell’s books at amazon US, amazon UK, and amazon CAN.

It is interesting to notice the role played by  literature in the world. The Swedish Embassy in London has recently become an important source for literary news about Swedish crime fiction writers. Good job guys! That’s the way it should be!

I guess it reflects both the fact that crime fiction now is a huge business and that fact that the success of Swedish crime fiction writers like Henning Mankell, Hakan Nesser, Stieg Larsson,  Ake Edwardson and the rest is a source of pride for Sweden. As it should be, of course.

Oh well, what I wanted to say was that it is nice to see Kenneth Branagh returning with three more episodes of Henning Mankells stories on BBC One. Hopefully we will get them in a not too distant future over here on the other side of the Atlantic as well. I really enjoyed the previous episodes a lot (if you are interested in other Scandinavian crime fiction movies as well, check our overview here).

The BAFTA award winning series starring Kenneth Branagh as the Swedish detective, returns to BBC One for 3 feature length investigations, starting with Faceless Killers on 3 January 2010.

‘I’m delighted to be back in Kurt Wallander’s shoes for three further adaptations,’ says Kenneth Branagh. ‘The character´s story becomes ever more complex in these next films. The entire team relished the privilege of bringing them to the screen for an audience who proved so loyal last time out.’Faceless Killers, The Man Who Smiled and The Fifth Woman were shot on location in Ystad, Southern Sweden during 2009.

The Wallander stories are based on the best selling novels by Henning Mankell which have sold more than 25 million copies across the globe.

I am envious of the guys who can tune in to BBC One!

PS: See also our reviews of the original Swedish Wallander movies on DVD!

(Warning:

Henning Mankell has written a new book about detective Kurt Wallander from Ystad. It is due out in Sweden in August 2009! The title translates into something like “The Worried Man” (Den orolige mannen) (the image is the Swedish book cover). Here is a little bit about its content:

A winter day in Sweden in 2008, a retired officer from the Swedish Navy, Håkan von Enke, disappears during his daily walk in the Lilljan forest. For Kurt Wallander this is a very personal affair – von Enke is the father in law of his daughter Linda and the grandfather of her little daughter.

And even though the case is handled by the police in Stockholm, Kurt Wallander finds himself unable to stay away from the case. And when von Enke’s widow, Louise, disappears as well, and like her husband without a trace and equally mysteriously, Wallander’s interest in the case increases even further.

As he moves back in time and starts connecting the dots, he finds that there are clues in the direction of the Cold War, political extremists on the far right, and a professional hitman from Eastern Europe. Wallander starts to suspect that he has stumbled upon a secret that lies at the core of the Swedish post World War II history. He may be onto something which may turn out to be much more important than the so called Wennerstrom-affair, the largest and most humiliating spy affair in the history of Sweden. Wallander finds himself in a situation where he is unable to see the possible consequences of his actions and findings.

And then, another, even darker threat appears on his radar ..

For more on Henning Mankell – we now have four Henning Mankell pages on ScandinavianBooks.com! See also our reviews of the Wallander movies.

PS: The book was published in English in 2011 as The Troubled Man (see review).

The Return of the Dancing Master by Mankell, very well translated by Laurie Thompson, is an extremely well written and suspenseful crime fiction book. Mankell is a master crime writer, and in this book he really shows it.

A retired policeman, Herbert Molin, is found brutally tortured and slaughtered in his home in Sveg, far north in Sweden. The police find strange footprints in blood in the living room. They indicate that somebody has been practicing the tango – the favorite dance of the victim – with the body.

One of Molin’s former colleagues from Borås, Stefan Lindman, a young police officer who has been diagnosed with mouth cancer and has some free time on his hands, decides to investigate the murder, and travels up to Sveg. It turns out to be a very strange case. There are no witnesses and no apparent motive. Neither do the police have any technical evidence. All they know is that somebody have attacked Molin’s house with tear gas, forced him out of the house, captured him, and killed him slowly and painfully. Somewhere, there must be a strong motive.

In Sveg, Lindman soon meets Giuseppe Larsson, who is in charge of the investigation. Eventually they discover that Molin left Sweden during WW2 to join with Hitler’s SS troops and harbored strong Nazi sentiments. There are strong reasons to believe that the murder has its explanation in Molin’s strange past, and that it may be an act of revenge.

Mankell also lets us meet the murderer – Aron Silberstein, a German Jew now living in Argentina. He has indeed killed Molin for revenge, but exactly why we do not learn until the end of the book.

Gradually the investigation uncovers a large network of neo-Nazis in Sweden. They seem to belong to an organization called the Strong Sweden Foundation. More and more plot revolves around the secret world of Nazis, both past and present.

The Return of the Dancing Master is a dark and intense book. It is a wonderful read. But even so, Mankell has written book with a sloppy plot, full of really improbable events – one after another. How likely is Lindman’s finding of the murderer’s camp? Or the murderer’s return to find the second murderer? Or Lindman’s find of Molin’s diary? And so on. Really, this is a thinly plotted book, where Mankell uses one unlikely twist after the other to move the investigation forward. However, because Henning Mankell is such a hugely talented writer he gets away with it, because he can spin a yarn and tell a tale in a way the entertains and fascinates.  So even though I view the plot as bad, I do not hesitate to recommend The Return of the Dancing Master. It is, simply, a great book!

Links to Henning Mankell’s books at amazon US, amazon UK, and amazon CAN.

See more reviews of books by Henning Mankell at ScandinavianBooks.com!