Swedish crime writer best known for his Kurt Wallander books who was a dedicated political activistHenning Mankell,who has died aged 67, after being diagnosed with cancer final year, and established almost single-handedly the global picture of Sweden as a crime writer’s ideal dystopia. He took the existing Swedish tradition of crime writing as a form of leftwing social criticism and gave it international recognition,capturing in his melancholy, drunken, or bullish detective Kurt Wallander a sense of struggle in bewildered defeat that echoed round the world.
His tone is perfectly captured in the first Wallander novel,Faceless Killers (1991), when the detective comes across a murder scene: “Wallander thought of his own wife, and who had left him,and wondered where to start. A bestial murder, he thought. And whether we’re really unlucky, and it’ll be a double murder.” Related: Henning Mankell,Swedish author of Wallander, dies at 67 Related: Henning Mankell: how it feels to be diagnosed with cancer Related: Henning Mankell in quotes: 10 of the best Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com