One Step Behind - Henning Mankell

Considering his eminence and key role - second only, perhaps, to Stieg Larsson -  in the popularisation of Nordic crime thrillers, Mankell is oddly under-published in Britain. Consider, for example, the dreary cover and offensive bodytext typeface in this edition from Vintage. Those issues notwithstanding, One Step Behind is a reminder of just how great Mankell's Wallander novels are and how much he contributed to the genre.

The highly fallible lead detective - Wallander himself doesn't think he's fit to lead the investigation; the dense character backstories; the empathetic psychology of the killer, no matter how evil his or her actions... All of these Mankell  either brought to the table or developed from the great pioneers Sjowall and Wahloo, co-creators of the peerless Martin Beck.

Here, it seems, we have two mysteries - who killed and then resurrected a bunch of young party people, and the murder of Ystad detective Svedberg. It will come as no surprise that the cases turn out to be linked, but the perpetrator is very unusual if not unique. I certainly have never come across a fictional serial killer with this particular quirk - and I would have noticed, given that it is one I have thought about using in my own writing. It's a measure of how skilful Mankell's writing is that I didn't guess the twist until the second or third heavy hint.

A masterpiece of its type. Henning Mankell and Kurt Wallander at their mutual best.

The Abominable Man - Sjowall and Wahloo

Maj Sjowall (b. 1935) and Per Wahloo (1926-1975) are the Adam and Eve of Scandanavian crime fiction.  Without them, and their breakthrough in the Anglophone world, The Laughing Policeman (1971), there may not have been any Larssen or Nesbo, both of whom share some of S&W's tropes and preoccupations.

Sjowall and Wahloo are Marxists, unabashed about commenting on the society that forms the backdrop of their fiction.  Cops can be, and often are, corrupt.  None of this was evident in British and American crime fiction of the early Sixties when S&W began.

The Abominable Man, the seventh of the ten Martin Beck novels, is all about corruption - or rather, one corrupt Chief Inspector and the superiors, peers and subordinates who are all complicit in covering up his brutality.  There is a particularly memorable sequence in which Beck's team goes through a sample of the complaints brushed under the carpet by the Justice Ombudsman.  Only one honest patrolman persists in reporting Stig Nyman - and where does that get him?

The action is compressed into a single extended night, which alone generates enough tension to keep the reader hooked.  50 of 185 pages concern the final showdown, at the end of which we don't know if Martin Beck lives or dies.  Just 13 lines after the bad guy is downed the novel simply stops.  Such confidence from the writers - and that is not the only technique of theirs which remains cutting edge to this day.

In summary, short, sharp and downright brilliant.

The Inspector and Silence - Hakan Nesser

This is marketed as Nordic Noir (see the essential comparison to Mankell and Larsson on the front cover).  Nesser is Swedish but his fictional world certainly isn't.  In fact, it isn't really anywhere other than Northern Europe, albeit the series detective, Inspector Van Veeteren, has a Dutch name as do most of the other characters and places.  But it's not Holland.  It's an imaginary amalgam.  And that makes it ever so slightly odd.

The story is a cracker.  Pubescent girls in a loony religious retreat are raped and murdered.  Obviously the pseudo Messiah in charge is suspect number one, but then---

Nesser is clearly highly intelligent - the pages crackle with it and you know that here is a writer who has long, meaningful conversations with his characters.  He handles story structure brilliantly, but this isn't really Noir, more a police procedural.  Even though this predates the Nordic boom (1997) and is well on in the series, Nesser manages to avoid cliche.   Instead of a drink problem, one of his secondary policemen has an artificial leg.  Far from dreading retirement, Van Veeteren can't wait for it.  Indeed, I understand the series continues with him as a private citizen.

OK, I figured out the killer by two-thirds of the way through, but it doesn't really matter because it isn't that kind of novel.  A discovery - I will definitely read more.