The Mankell effect

Henning Mankell is not very popular in India. I discovered him recently, thanks to one of my oldest friends, Arun Kakar. He is a voracious reader and told me, when I complained that I was running out of Anglo-Saxon crime books, that I should try the Scandinavian ones. He gave me a book by Mankell and said if I liked it, he had several more.

That was five years ago and since then I have read quite a few Scandinavian crime writers. In my opinion, Mankell is the best of the lot. I am a fan. Mankell, by the way, died quite young at the age of 63 in 2015. He had visited India in 2014.

There’s the characteristic Scandinavian austereness in his writing and an obsession with short sentences that makes for a strikingly simple way of storytelling. I am not sure, though, if it’s the translators who have done that, or the original Swedish is also like that.

The hero, if that’s the right word, is Inspector Kurt Wallander. He is a cross between Inspector Morse (Colin Dexter, Oxford) and George Smiley (John le Carre, Europe including England).

Like Morse, he has a fondness for whiskey and like Smiley his wife has left him. Like Morse he likes classical music, Maria Callas to be precise. Indeed, he bears an uncanny resemblance to John Thaw who played Morse in the TV series.

Like Smiley, he is withdrawn and coldly calculating. And like both of them he is a loner who can’t get along with his superiors who can’t do without him.

That’s not all. Like Le Carre Mankell was a left wing intellectual but given to activism. Wikipedia tells me “he constantly highlighted social inequality issues and injustices in Sweden and abroad.” His activism caused him to get into a couple of very bad situations. He focused mainly on Africa and its problems but the Middle East, too.

Wikipedia says: “In 2010, Mankell was on board one of the ships in the Gaza Freedom Flotilla that was boarded by Israeli commandos. He was below deck on the MV Mavi Marmara when nine civilians were killed in international waters.”

Wiki also says that he once said, “We refuse to understand the significance of Islamic culture in Europe’s history. We are characterized by intense ignorance. What would Europe have been without Islamic culture? Nothing.”

He didn’t deny the right of Israel to exist but he did question its methods. About Palestinians, in shades of le Carre’s Little Drummer Girl, he had this to say: “Is it strange that some of them, in pure desperation, when they cannot see any other way out, decide to become suicide bombers? Not really? Maybe it is strange that there are not more of them.”

In one of his books published in 1992, Wallander has to go to Latvia. He encounters a country that’s adrift and at odds with itself after the collapse of the USSR. Mankell treats the reader to short lectures on freedom and its discontents. These have a universal application in the same way as Le Carre’s did. Basically, people are irrational beings.

These brief interludes into what has been called the “human condition” is what makes him so eminently readable. His books are not just the “follow-the-clues” kind of detective fiction. His characters are human.

Later, as I discovered, Mankell belongs to a long list of Swedish crime writers. Sadly, they haven’t quite caught on in the mass market India — such as it is — and have only a cult following.

The best known amongst them is Stig Larsson who wrote that trilogy with an emotionally maladjusted girl who is also a computer wizard. It was called Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. This one was later turned into a film.

There’s also Maj Sjöwall, who along with Per Wahlöö, has written the novels about the exploits of Martin Beck, a policeman in Stockholm. I am told these books are also very good and I fully intend to read all 10.

A lot of people in the West have wondered why Swedish crime writers are so popular. There’s no easily identifiable reason, although there are various theories.

My theory is based on the Occam’s Razor principle: The simplest explanation is the best. And that is that these writers are like a good chutney. They strike the perfect balance of the ingredients of crime fiction— the mystery, the macabre and the mundane.