International man of mystery

BY LAURA C. MOSER
Laura C. Moser is the author of a biography of Bette Davis and co-author of "The Rise and Fall of a 10th Grade Social Climber," which will be published in May.

March 6, 2005

Not all great detectives tumble to their deaths over crashing waterfalls. Some simply retire. Swedish novelist Henning Mankell recently discussed the future of his Inspector Kurt Wallander over wine and double espressos at Manhattan's Cafe Sabarsky. Wallander, the protagonist of Mankell's police procedurals, is a brooding, beleaguered policeman in the Swedish port city of Ystad; his adventures have captivated readers across Europe, inviting comparisons to literary sleuths Philip Marlowe and Inspector Maigret. But despite his down-and-out detective's superstar status, Mankell still appreciates Wallander for his ordinariness.

"When I created this Wallander character," the 57-year-old novelist said, "I had one ambition, which was to make him a person like you and me, someone who's always changing. I dislike these so-called heroes who are the same on page one as on page 10,000."

Throughout the nine Wallander novels, the inspector is constantly balancing the demands of his job - serial murders, mutilations, globe-imperiling conspiracies - with more mundane personal difficulties: his declining health and expanding waistline; disagreements with colleagues; exhaustion, loneliness, incipient alcoholism; his departed wife, estranged daughter and semi-senile father.

"I never planned on writing a series," Mankell said, "and I wanted to stop writing about Wallander before I got fed up with him." Facing the same predicament Sherlock Holmes creator Arthur Conan Doyle described a century earlier, Mankell came up with an ingenious compromise: Rather than kill off Wallander, he decided to ease the inspector into retirement.

Mankell was visiting New York to promote the latest installment in the Wallander chronicles, "Before the Frost", his first novel billed as a "Linda Wallander mystery." "Before the Frost" follows Wallander's daughter through her first major case out of police academy, which involves the disappearance of Linda's childhood best friend and leads to the discovery of a nefarious religious cult.

Mankell, who is also an accomplished playwright and theater director, said he "became interested in the idea of putting the daughter in the foreground and the father in the background - of switching their positions on the stage." While Inspector Wallander collaborates with his daughter on the case, she is the undisputed star.

"It was very challenging to write about a woman who is only 30 years old," said Mankell, who is the father of four sons. While a young Swedish policewoman helped by keeping a detailed diary for him, Mankell learned as much about Wallander as about Linda in writing the novel. "Children always think they're the experts on their parents," Mankell said, "so Linda can tell us new things about her father that we didn't know - that even I didn't know." Mankell plans to write more Linda Wallander novels, but "only three or four. More than that" - he tossed back his bushy white hair - "I just don't have the time."

"Before the Frost" is a "story about terrorism," Mankell said. He started writing it a year before the attacks on the World Trade Center. "I was very worried," he said, "that if you go on the streets of Brooklyn or Stockholm, or wherever, and you ask 10 randomly chosen people what is a terrorist, 9.9 of them will say, 'A terrorist is an Arab or a Muslim.' While in one way this is obviously true, we must remember there are fanatics willing to kill in the name of God in all the main religions of the world, with the exception of Buddhism. We have terror networks even in Christianity - in this country, for example, people kill doctors in the name of God."

Mankell grew up in northern Sweden, in a "very cold, remote part of the world - I still remember going to school when it was below 35 degrees below Celsius." He has divided his time for the last 30 years between Europe and Mozambique, where he heads the national theater. "I was never interested in acting, only directing," he said, "because I see a similarity between writing and directing - you are creating a world." He has written as many plays as novels - "about 30 or 40," he estimates - as well as regular essays, newspaper articles and the occasional film or television script. "In my life I have been accused of many things," Mankell admitted, "but never of laziness."

Mankell uses all his stories to address the most urgent problems of civilization. "I am a man living in reality," he said, "and I'm trying to understand this horrible time that we're living through."

The crime novel seemed the ideal frame for his broader concerns. "The mirror of crime," Mankell said, "is a very good way of talking about contradictions: contradictions inside man, between men and in society. Some people believe crime fiction began with Edgar Allan Poe 150 years ago," he said, "but it is among the absolute oldest literary genres that exist. Take the Greeks - they write about a woman killing her children because she is jealous of her husband.

" And 'Macbeth' is the greatest crime story I have ever read - it could just as easily be about Nixon or Stalin. So I tried to work in this very old literary tradition, of taking people and situations on the edge of something, and seeing what they reveal about the contradictions in our society."

For all the changes of geography, regime and ideology he has observed, Mankell has pursued one dream since the age of 6, when his grandmother taught him how to read and write. "I cannot honestly remember ever wanting to do anything else with my life besides being a storyteller. I've never done anything else," he said, "and I've survived very well."

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