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.

A Question of Belief - Donna Leon

A Question of Belief is the 19th Commissario Brunetti novel but the first to swim into my ken.  It is very different to much contemporary Eurocrime - there is nothing noir about it, nor is it particularly a police procedural.  It certainly isn't a thriller - we're virtually a third of the way through before anybody dies.  Yet it is compelling, the compulsion to continue arising from the recognition that you are in the presence of extremely developed characters created by a writer utterly immersed in her world.

In some senses it is old fashioned, certainly more Wallander than Harry Hole.  Venice is baking in the summer heat.  Everybody at the Questura is either on holiday already or imminently about to go on holiday.  Ispettore Vianello is worried about his aunt who has fallen under the thrall of a dodgy fortune-teller.  Toni Brusca from the Commune has uncovered worrying procedural errors at the Tribunale de Vezetia.  Cases are being ludicrously and unnecessarily delayed.  One name keeps appearing on the court documents, the usher Araldo Fortuna, a career civil servant well on his way to retirement who leaves quietly at home with his mother.  Then Fortuna is found dead, his head bashed in and semen in his rectum.  Holidays abandoned, Brunetti, Vianello and the indispensable Signorina Elettra investigate.

The plotting is so defly done it pretty much constitutes slieght of hand.  There is never a hint of the manipulation you so often get with traditional detective fiction.

I shall certainly be investigating others in the series.

The Troubled Man - Henning Mankell

I'd seen the TV dramatisations (English and both Swedish) but I had only read one of the Wallander books, the less-than-satisafactory The Pyramid.  Essentially, I concluded that Mankell was a pioneer of Nordic Noir, noteworthy but a little staid.  Then I laid hands on this, his latest and very definitely the last of Wallander.

This novel transcends genre.  A crime novel in which the crime is never fully solved, with an espionage background in which nothing is as it seems.  More than anything it is a novel of character, with the sixty-year-old Wallander running up against the dying of the light.

The story itself is nothing much but the character development is the work of a master.  And no author has ever disposed of the character who made him world-famous in so sudden, so devastating a manner.  Reichenbach Falls?  Pah - hooey!  Check out the last page of this beauty.