Just finished the first ‘Kurt Wallander’ mystery, FACELESS KILLERS by Henning Mankell. The series is highly recommended by mystery-loving friends, but I found it less mysterious and more a comedy of manners, in the dourest sense.
He felt uneasy. Under normal circumstances this unease would have spurred him to greater energy and activity. Since these were the prerequisites for all police work, he had imagined that he was a good policeman. But right now he felt uncertain and tired. He forced himself to shift into first gear. The car rolled a few metres. Then he stopped again. It was as if he only now realised what he had witnessed on that frozen winter morning. (p. 16, Vintage Crime edition, 2003)
Wallander is a rich, loamy character; already we can see all the troubles he’ll be battling throughout the series: alcoholism, estrangement from his ex-wife, his daughter and his hilariously prickly father, losing a friend to cancer, living through Swedish winters and, oh yeah, solving crimes. And who can’t empathize with a character who grows despondent just by noticing a spot on the lapel of his best suit?
Maybe the times require another kind of policeman, he thought. Policemen who aren’t distressed when they’re forced to go into a human slaughterhouse in the Swedish countryside early on a January morning. Policemen who don’t suffer from my uncertainty and anguish. (p. 18, Vintage Crime edition, 2003)
Another part of its appeal for me is Mankell’s descriptions of social issues in flux, such as immigration and illegal drugs. Not to mention his cop-characters’ reflexively bad-mouthing “my people.”
“I’ll be damned if some Finns might not be behind this.”
“When we don’t have a lead, we usually say it’s Finns,” said Wallander. “I haven’t time now.” (p. 66)
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