Sample Session Questions - e.g. Faceless Killers

1. In what ways is Faceless Killers surprising? What is unusual about its crimes and the manner in which they are solved? Why would Henning Mankell choose to make the novel about two apparently disconnected crimes, one motivated by greed and another by racial hatred? How do you think the refugees are portrayed? And why?

2. Rydberg describes the crime scene as being so grisly it was "like an American movie" [p. 21]. What does this comment suggest about the relationship between representations of violence for purposes of entertainment and real violence? What does it suggest about the differences between Sweden and America?

3. In what ways do the setting, an isolated area of rural Sweden, and the story's first victims, an elderly couple, make the murders seem especially horrifying?

4. Before a press conference, Wallander has an attack of self-doubt. "I'm searching for the slayers of the dead," he says, "and can't even pay attention to the living" [p. 97]. What aspects of his life is he neglecting? Why does Henning Mankell devote so much of the novel to Wallander's personal life: his strained relationships with his father, his daughter, and his soon to be ex-wife? What does this personal dimension add to the novel?

5. Wallander wonders why "almost every policeman was divorced. Why their wives left them. Sometimes, when he read a crime novel, he discovered with a sigh things were just as bad in fiction. Policemen were divorced. That's all there was to it" [p. 27]. What is it about being a cop that would make marriage unsustainable? How does Wallander feel about his estranged wife? What do their interactions reveal about why the marriage failed?

6. Within moments of meeting Ellen Magnusson, Wallander suddenly realizes that she is "the mystery woman with whom Johannes Lövgren had had a child. Wallander knew it without knowing how he knew" [p. 248]. To what extent is this kind of intuition responsible for solving crimes in Faceless Killers? Where else does a hunch or sudden insight play a role in leading the detectives in the right direction? How does it help him solve the murder of the Somali refugee?

7. Confronted by a case he cannot solve, Wallander is plunged into an existential crisis: "Somewhere in the dark a vast meaninglessness was beckoning. A sneering face that laughed scornfully at every attempt he made to manage his life" [p. 80]. In what way is Faceless Killers, and perhaps every mystery novel, about the need to assign meaning to a world that can appear random, chaotic, and meaningless? How does solving a crime restore, if only briefly, order to the world?

8. Much of Faceless Killers is concerned with the controversies surrounding refugees, asylum-seekers, and open borders in Sweden. What is Wallander's attitude toward these issues? What does the novel, as a whole, seem to suggest about the tensions between Sweden's liberal immigration policies and its growing racial tensions? How do Wallander's erotic dreams about a black woman, and his daughter's relationship with a black man, fit into this context?

9. What specifics does the novel reveal about how police investigations are conducted? About the strained relations between the police, the press, and the government? About the connection between sudden insight and the dogged search for clues?

10. How important is Wallander's relationship with Rydberg? What does Rydberg add both to the investigation and to the novel?

11. Wallander finds himself frequently knocked to the ground during the course of his investigations, nearly loses his job, gets slapped in the face, and refers to himself as both a "dubious cop" and a "pathetic cop." When a fellow officer calls him "the hero of the day," Wallander replies: "Piss off" [p. 107]. Is Wallander a hero? If so, how do his flaws and foibles fit into his heroism?

12. Looking back over the investigation with Rydberg, Wallander says, "I made a lot of mistakes," to which his partner replies, "You're a good policeman. . . . You never gave up. You wanted to catch whoever committed those murders in Lunnarp. That's the important thing" [p. 279]. What were Wallander's mistakes? Why did he make them? Is Rydberg right in suggesting that perseverance and will are more important than perfect police work?

13. At the very end of Faceless Killers, as Kurt Wallander reflects on the "senseless violence" he has seen, he thinks about "the new era, which demanded a different kind of policeman. We're living in the age of the noose. . . . Fear will be on the rise" [p. 280]. What does Wallander mean by "the age of the noose"? What changes and new fears does he envision? Have these fears been validated by the events of the decade since the book was first published?

14. Most Americans have a rather idyllic view of life in Sweden. In what ways does Faceless Killers contradict that view? Is it disconcerting to learn that Sweden suffers many of the same problems-drugs, crime, racism-that beset the United States?

Sample Session Question 2 - One Step Behind

1. One Step Behind begins with Inspector Kurt Wallander nearly being killed in a car accident after falling asleep at the wheel. What tone does this near-death experience set for the novel? What role does Wallander's fatigue play in the events that follow?

2. Early in the novel, Wallander thinks of his colleagues: "They don't know much about me and I don't know much about them. We work together, maybe over the course of an entire career, and what do we learn about each other? Nothing" [p. 29]. In what ways can the novel be read as a meditation on the limits of human knowledge? Where else in the story does this lack of knowledge play a significant role?

3. In trying to fathom the murderer's mindset, Wallander thinks, "I've never believed in pure evil. There are no evil people, no one with brutality in their genes. There are evil circumstances and environments, not evil per se. But here I sense the actions of a truly darkened mind" [p. 162]. Is he correct in thinking that brutal behavior is a result of one's environment rather than of one's character? What motivates the killer in One Step Behind to commit his crimes?

4. Wallander is often "struck by the feeling that something [isn't] quite right" [p. 65]. To what extent does he rely on feeling and intuition to guide him in solving the mystery in One Step Behind?

5. At various points throughout the novel, and especially after Isa is murdered, Wallander is accused of botching the investigation. Are the criticisms brought against him justified? What mistakes does he make? Should he have been able to foresee his errors?
6. Wallander is an unusually disheveled kind of detective. Far from being a self-confident tough-guy, he's forgetful, full of self-doubt, in poor health, prone to mistakes, and perpetually exhausted. Why do these characteristics tend to make him a more, rather than less, appealing protagonist? What would the novel lose if Wallander were more conventionally competent? What qualities make him a forceful figure, despite these weaknesses?

7. Wallander observes that there was a similarity between his murdered colleague Svedberg and the young people killed in the nature preserve: "They had all had secrets" [p. 210]. Who else in the novel has a secret? In what way is the novel really about keeping and uncovering secrets?

8. Martinsson observes that the killer "always manages to stay one step ahead of us and one step behind at the same time" [p. 394]. How does Mankell keep the reader also one step ahead and one step behind the actions of the murderer? Why does Mankell often allow the reader to know more than the detectives? What kind of suspense does this knowledge create?

9. Late in the novel, as Wallander and the other detectives come close to despair, Martinsson argues that the killer has no motive, that he kills simply "for the sake of killing." When Wallander disagrees, Martinsson says, "Until a few years ago, I would have agreed with you: there's an explanation for all violence. But that just isn't the case any more" [p. 331]. Does this particular killer have an understandable motive? Or is he right in suggesting that violence in our time is increasingly senseless?

10. How is Wallander able to solve this mystery? What are the major turning points in his investigation? What qualities of character and intelligence enable Wallander to apprehend the killer?

11. What picture of Swedish society emerges from One Step Behind? How do the novel's minor characters-Isa Edengren and her wealthy parents, the bank director Bror Sundelius, Svedberg's cousin Sture Bjorklund, the mailman Westin, and others-contribute to the overall social reality of the novel? Are Martinsson and Wallander right in thinking that Swedish society is unraveling?

12. One Step Behind is preceded by an epigraph from the Second Law of Thermodynamics: "There are always more disordered than ordered systems" [p. vii]. And Wallander thinks to himself, "reality was rarely reasonable" [p. 98]. How is this disordered sense of reality conveyed in the novel? Which plays a greater role in solving the murder mystery in the novel: the use of reason or the reliance on spontaneous, irrational hunches?

13. Of the gawkers who come to look at a crime scene, Wallander says, "They probably get a thrill from being in the presence of the unthinkable. . . . Knowing that they themselves are safe" [p. 315]. Is this, at least in part, the reason why people read thrillers?

14. How does One Step Behind differ from American thrillers? What qualities distinguish the novel, and its hero, Kurt Wallander, as distinctly European?