Faceless Killers by Henning Mankell

'Faceless Killers' was Henning Mankell’s first Kurt Wallander mystery but achieved international best seller status and was later the motivation for a BBC TV series and played on PBS Masterpiece Theater. While the storyline was very interesting and compelling, the writing was poor. I later learned it was translated from Swedish to English so perhaps it’s the translation that is lacking.

The mystery is set in Ystad, Sweden where the main character, Kurt Wallander is lead detective and interim Police Chief while his boss is away on a long holiday. Wallander is in his mid forties and disappointed where life has taken him. He struggles with loneliness because his wife unexpectedly left him and his close ties with his daughter have been severed. He has to deal with an aging, possibly senile, father and his attraction to the new female district attorney who happens to be married. Plus, he's drinking too much and putting on weight due to a steady diet of pizza and fast food.

The story begins with an elderly farmer’s discovery that his neighbors, also elderly, have been murdered. The husband has been gruesomely tortured and killed and his wife left for dead. Before she dies in the hospital, her last word is "foreign." With anti-immigrant sentiment running high already, the last thing the police need is for this to slip out to the media, but someone in the department leaks the information and suddenly refugee camps in the area are being firebombed. When a Somali refugee is killed, seemingly at random, Wallander and his staff have two highly charged cases to solve.

Yet Wallander has difficulty focusing on his work with all his personal problems. He spends much of his time brooding about the state of the world and the state of his society and he is sympathetic to the anti-immigrant mentality. He's concerned that just about anyone, even undesirable characters, can come to the country and request asylum. And, the system is ill equipped and underfunded to monitor and locate all the refugees. But tracking down the murderer of the Somali refugee is his job and he does it, even with all his personal distractions.

This book was given to me by my daughter’s friend who picked it up on the recommendation of a West Village boutique bookstore owner in NYC. As I read it I struggled with the writing and that overshadowed the message. (You know the feeling you get when two pages stick together and you are on the third or fourth line of the new page and you think, ‘I must have missed something’? Well, that kept happening…..but in the middle of the page.) But the longer it’s been since I finished this book, the more I find myself thinking about the substance of the story. From the few Europeans I know, I understand the immigration issue is a growing concern and is burdening their economies. I know holidays are very important in the European culture but are often resented by those left behind to cover. Mankell seems to point out several growing social issues but offers no solutions other than we are all in this together and must carry on. Perhaps that’s why the popularity. Now I’m sufficiently interested to try another Henning Mankell novel, hopefully a better translation next time.

The Dogs of Riga by Henning Mankell

As much as I’ve enjoyed two of Mankell’s books, this was not such a good read. The best part was that he got involved in an intrigue in Riga, Latvia, a place that I had never read about before. I don’t remember another international spy/crime scene intrigue novel that landed in Latvia. Beyond that, the book at little to offer. Kurt Wallander, the police detective from Ystad, Sweden, was called to the scene of a double murder. Two bodies had washed up on shore in a life raft, and it was eventually determined that the life raft had originated from a clandestine shipment to Riga. In the process of doing this investigation behind the still evolving political situation in Latvia, Wallander’s main contact in the police force there was murdered, and then he inexplicably fell in love with the wife of the murdered cop. There are good guys and bad guys in Latvia who are trying to manipulate the investigation because it involves the bigger matter of smuggling goods and drugs into the country, but it is almost impossible to know who the good guys are. The whole plot was loose and did not hold together well, did not make much sense, so it was not a gripping story. I’ll probably read Mankell again, but this story was a disappointment.

The Man Who Smiled by Henning Mankell

This is my second book by Mankell and the first I’ve read in his Kurt Wallander series, a detective chief inspector in Ystad, Sweden. At the outset, Wallander is coming off a year’s leave of absence following his killing of a bad guy. Even though the killing was justified and no charges were brought against Wallander, he was deeply troubled by having taken another man’s life. In fact, he has just reached the decision to take a disability retirement when an old acquaintance, a lawyer, asks him to investigate the murder of his father. Wallander is not moved to do so, until the lawyer ends up murdered, as well, only a few days after their meeting. The lawyer’s father, also a lawyer, had only one client, the man from Farnholm Castle, a remarkably successful international business tycoon who is well known for his philanthropic activities. He is also “The Man Who Smiled,” aka Alfred Harderberg. He’s a mysterious character who travels almost constantly from one of his business enterprises to the next, so it is hard to even gain an audience with the guy. Wallander figures out that Harderberg had to be behind the deaths, but the problem is figuring out the whys and hows, and then how to prove it. Mankell throws in some good subplots, like the integration of a woman detective into the Ystad police force, a first there, and a move that is resisted by all except Wallander who sees the budding talent in Ann-Britt Hoglund. Mostly, what this book has going for it is a great character study of Wallander, a very compelling figure, and I plan to read more Mankell books. Next up, “The Dogs of Riga.”

The Man From Beijing by Henning Mankell

Mankell is a Swedish author, and this has been translated to English. He’s a fairly prolific writer who I had not heard about before. I think I stumbled onto this murder mystery through an Amazon or New York Times recommendation. The author starts with a lone wolf wandering across the northern tundra from Norway to Sweden, always in the search of food, and the wolf comes across the body of a man that has recently been killed, one of the 19. The use of the wolf was an effective means of describing the austere desolation of the countryside of the tiny hamlet in northern Sweden where the murders have occurred. A woman detective, Vivi Sundland, becomes the primary investigator. As the murders are publicized, a woman judge, Birgitta Roslin, discovers that her mother’s foster parents, then in their 90s, are among those who were killed. She then begins her own investigation that is hardly parallel to Sundland’s efforts. Roslin finds a link to some mass murders that had just happened in Nevada, and that eventually takes her to China where laborers had been kidnapped to work on the formation of railroads across the U.S. in the 19^th century. The plot occurs across Europe, China, the U.S., Zambia, and Mozambique. The man from Beijing, Ya Ru, is not introduced until well into the book, and he is a classic psychopath, although a brilliant one. He is set on the revenge of his ancestors who were humiliated at the hands of the Swede who had been chosen to run railroad construction crews. One of Ya Ru’s main foils, his sister, Hong Qiu (every time I read her name, I could not help saying “honkie”) is an important figure. Unlike so many murder mysteries, most of the man characters in this book were women. Mankell used this format to write a treatise on the workings of the inner politics of China and its expected future colonization of Africa. I had a little trouble getting into this at the beginning, probably because the books is largely a narrative and not one that is carried by dialogue, as is the case with so many of the books we read. You should know that Mankell has a series of mysteries with the main character of Kurt Wallander, and he has written a number of other books as well. I’m going to read him again, and I recommend him.

West Coast Don