Killing them in Europe

"The main thing is the more or less similar political situation in our countries and in Wallander's Sweden. . . . The so-called welfare state has come to an end. Full employment has, too. People have come down from the planet Utopia. The dark sides [of society] have surfaced. Readers have noticed that there will be no help from politics, nor from any kind of old or new economic plans. Nobody believes in heroes anymore. Depressing Wallander is a figure like you or me-too fat, divorced and lonely. But he is also totally convincing. Somebody like an Arnold Schwarzenegger in America is a fairy tale. A Wallander you can meet at the next comer."

The notion of Germans, Austrians and the Swiss being able to identify with Sweden's welfare state experiences socially or politically might be debatable, but at the very least the long Unes at bookstore cash registers in the three countries show a great deal of personal fascination with the Wallander-like miasmas left in the wake of that social model. Mankell's publishing partner in Sweden, Dan Israel, offers some of the same analysis. Israel, who edited the author for years as an employee of Ordfront before the pair decided to go partners in their own house, sees a direct line between Martin Beck and Wallander. "Beck was operating in a Sweden where the welfare state was at its peak, socially and politically, if not to great emotional liberation," he says. "What you can see in the Wahloo-Sjowall books is the dissatisfactions leading to the crumbling. Wallander is a character fully within the crumbling."

Mankell himself also insists the Wallander character was the creative outcome of larger social concerns, as much to do with his idiosyncratic background as with Sweden's social democratic traditions. In fact, for more than 30 years, the mid-50ish author has spent almost as much time in Africa, specifically Mozambique, as he has in Scandinavia. Speaking of his youthful dreams in Sweden, he told an interviewer: "I grew up near a river, and for me it was the Congo. The logs that were sent down that river were crocodiles. Africa was the strangest place I could imagine. It was the end of the world. And so I always wanted to go there, as if I had a genetic memory of being a nomad. I wanted to find out what is behind the wood, behind the mountain. When I was 22, I did go."

Since then, Mankell has regarded Maputo as much home as Sweden, and has entrenched himself deeply enough in the local cultural scene to head the Teatro Avenida-a venue for, among other things, productions of his own plays. But his African experiences also proved crucial to the development of Wallander during a trip to Europe in 1989.

"I had been away from Sweden for some time. When I returned, I became aware that racism was exploding, and I decided to write about that. Because, to me, the expression of racism is a crime, I decided I should write a crime story. So I needed a police officer. I came up with Wallander. It was that way round. I didn't invent Wallander and then search for a story to give him."