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Killing them in Europe
Scandinavian Review, Autumn 2003 by Dewey, Donald
Sweden's Henning Mankell has hit a nerve on the Continent with his Kurt Wallander mysteries. Why has he managed to sell more books than any contemporary novelist outside the United States?
WE ALL KNOW WHY WE READ MYSTERY STORIESprecisely because they won't leave us mystified. Unlike the straight novel's cavernous perspectives on character, the police procedural, the detective cozy and the private-eye yarn all set up the confounding only to gradually break it down to its logical-when not altogether mechanical-pieces. Ey the final page, the central mystery has been illuminated, the murderer unmasked and the reader reassured there is a plausible solution to the universe's most forbidding enigmas.
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Of course, there have been different approaches toward satisfying the genre's traditional rules. Especially in 20th-century Europe, numerous writers drove to their showdown appointment with the killer through layered character rather than through labyrinthian plot. The most influential of all was undoubtedly the Belgian-born Georges Simenon. Inheriting the respect for the generally derided potboiler shown by France's Honore de Balzac, the markedly objectivist Simenon sent his Paris detective Maigret through psychological complexities worthy of many world novelists who won Nobel Prizes for their literary efforts. A marginally less clinical sleuth cut from the same cloth was Nicolas Freeling's Dutch detective Van der Valk in such classics as Love in Amsterdam, Guns Before Butter and Because of the Cats. If Maigret was the sheet on an institutional bed, Van der Valk was a relatively wooly blanket. The Briton Freeling later invaded Simenon's plot territory with a series focused on the French policeman Henri Castang and then his widow. Although the books continued his commercial success, they never quite matched his creative excitement in trailing after Van der Valk through the Lowlands.
In Scandinavia, the major point of reference until a few years ago was the husband-wife team of Per Wahloo and Maj Sjowall, whose protagonist Martin Beck found little that wasn't seamy in mid-to-late 20th-century Stockholm and environs. As often as not in thrillers such as The Laughing Policeman, The Abominable Man, The Man on the Balcony and The Man Who Went up in Smoke, the phlegmatic Beck had his hands full with killers who appeared bent on decimating the Swedish population, and sometimes only as an afterthought to another original crime. Whatever else these tales suggested about the Sweden of the 1960s and 1970s, they didn't see too much good coming from a combination of the emotional stagnation of the welfare state, the cynicisms and exploitativeness of the American capitalist system, and the ready availability of machine guns from Czechoslovakia and other Soviet-controlled states. The Sjowall-Wahloo books centered around Beck proved popular enough to spark major motion pictures and TV films not only in Sweden, but also in the United States and Britain.
Of late, though, the Sjowall-Wahloo star has been very much eclipsed commercially, socially and dramatically by Henning Mankell. Where the husband-wife team sold hundreds of thousands, Mankell has sold millions. Compared to Mankell's police character of Kurt Wallander, Martin Beck was a slapstick comic. Operating out of the Baltic seaport of Ystad, the chief inspector in such creations as The Faceless Killers, The White Lioness and Sidetracked has always been in his mid-40s on his way to his mid-200s. His sparkling family life consists of an ex-wife, an estranged daughter who prefers dealing with him from across oceans and a father who may or may not be suffering from Alzheimer's, but who is definitely demented and who wouldn't mind a chance to go back to the hospital incubator and take home a different son. None of this has done much for Wallander's selfesteem; or, as he puts it in The Faceless Killers while considering the value of regular exercise and a better diet: "You flabby piece of shit! Do you really want to look like an old man?" And that's the inspector on a good day.
Mankell himself has been the first to admit he wouldn't enjoy Wallander's company for any extended period. "If we met, we'd never get on," he has been quoted as saying. "I'd prefer to meet Sherlock Holmes."
Millions disagree, as evidenced by the 30 languages (including Chinese and Hebrew) in which Wallander's grim adventures have appeared to date. Most remarkable of all has been the success of the series in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. In a phenomenon that would have made Erle Stanley Gardner envious in the United States, some 11 million hardcover and paperback copies of the procedurals have been sold in the three countries in merely five years. What this has added up to, according to many industry estimates, is the most widely purchased author in the German languageever.
The German translations have come from the Vienna-based Zsolnay subsidiary of the Hanser publishing house. Commenting on the phenomenon, Zsolnay editor-in-chief Herbert Ohrlinger admits that his company has spent more than one gab session trying to understand the immense popularity of the books. Ohrlinger's own conclusion?
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