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Mankell Fills In Inspector's Background

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By Al HUTCHISON

The Tampa Tribune

Published: December 21, 2008

"The Pyramid" (and four other Kurt Wallander mysteries), by Henning Mankell (The New Press, $26.95)

In contemporary detective fiction, there are few characters more interesting than Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander, Sweden's answer to Scotland's Jim Rebus (invented by Ian Rankin) and England's Andrew Dalziel (invented by Reginald Hill). Unlike the thoroughly upstanding and admirable heroes of a P. D. James or a Ruth Rendell mystery, Wallander suffers from introspection, self-doubt and even rejection, and he's all the more likeable for that.

There have been eight full-length Wallander novels, but this newest volume consists of five short stories, all of them describing cases that he investigated when he was a younger man, on his way up to his final rank of detective inspector in a small Swedish city, one that for its size seems to attract an inordinate number of criminals.

"When Wallander appeared on the scene," Mankell explains, "he was forty-two, going on forty-three. But by then he had been a policeman for many years, he had been married and divorced, had a child, and, once upon a time, left Malmo for Ystad ... I realized I had started to write stories in my head that took place long before the start of the series."

The stories in this superb collection are the ones that Mankell had been writing in his head. In them, he grows, in a natural progression, from an ordinary but reasonably ambitious policeman into a rank-and-file detective and finally into the chief of detectives in Ystad, where he lives, alone, in a small apartment. He occasionally pines for his former wife, has an unsatisfactory relationship with a nurse, tries to cope with his eccentric (and not very likeable) father and cherishes his too-infrequent contacts with his daughter, Linda. He also has his eyes on an attractive young woman in a travel agency, but if that ever develops, it will be in a future book.

The title story, "The Pyramid," is the last and the best in this collection. It begins with the crash of a small airplane that, according to all records, does not exist. The two men onboard are killed, but nobody knows who they are or where they came from. Then two sisters who run a modest sewing shop are executed, gangland style, and their shop burns to the ground. Finally, a local man long suspected of involvement in drug trafficking is also found executed.

Then Wallander's father decides to fly to Egypt. Once there, he is arrested for attempting to climb one of the pyramids. Wallander has just borrowed enough money to replace his old car, but now he uses the proceeds of the loan to buy an airplane ticket to Cairo so he can extract his father from the jail cell where he's being kept.

It seems like a waste of time and money, but seeing the pyramids up close gives Wallander the idea that eventually enables him to solve the crime back home. It's a twist that adds spice to a well-told tale. And it's typical of Mankell's writing. He has mastered his craft.

Al Hutchison of Citrus County is a freelance writer.

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