The Man Who Smiled - Henning Mankell

 

Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander has to be the gloomiest and grumpiest series detective I've ever run into. Sure, I could name a lot of other unhappy fictional detectives like Kurt Wallander, but unlike Wallander, the others manage to experience really good and happy times on occasion. Wallander...not so much. He wakes up gloomy and depressed about his current life - and his past life - and he stays that way until he manages to close his eyes again long enough to recycle his problems into a series of depressing or scary dreams. I bet you can't wait to read about him now, can you?

So why do I enjoy reading the Wallander series so much? After all, it's not as if I didn't already know what I was getting into when I started reading The Man Who Smiled. I've watched two multi-season television series based on the Wallander books (one in English and one in Swedish), and I'm still hoping someday to get a look at the movies based on the character. Wallander is not exactly a bundle of joy in any of those either. But he's a good man despite his many faults, especially a temper he can barely control sometimes, who gets up every morning and goes to work putting some really bad people where they belong - behind bars. You have to admire his determination.

As The Man Who Smiled opens, Wallander is still reeling from having had to shoot to death a suspect in the last case he worked on. He's all alone, walking an isolated beach in Denmark every day, and doubting that he will ever return to the job. Then a lawyer friend surprises Wallander during one of his walks and asks him to come back to Sweden to investigate the supposed suicide of that man's elderly father. Wallander refuses to do so - until he learns that the young lawyer died in an automobile accident within hours of their conversation. Kurt Wallander does not believe in coincidence. Now he has two murders to investigate - and he can do that best as a cop. He's back.

Mankell's Wallander books fit squarely into the police procedural genre, novels in which the reader follows an investigation step-by-step from its earliest days to identification and capture of the culprits. The beauty of Mankell's novels is how he presents the procedural process to the reader by letting Wallander think "out loud" while explaining his reasoning and decisions from one step to the next. This leaves room for lots of self-doubt to creep in and exposes departmental politics, Wallander's past experiences, personal relationships, and even Sweden's national psyche to readers. I've only read two of the ten Wallander novels, both written in the early nineties, but I've been surprised that both address issues that dominate the news today: mass immigration, asylum requests, borders, drugs, extremism, etc. Maybe that's why Wallander is so gloomy...no one was listening to him.

The Man Who Smiled is a solid mystery with a satisfying result. It is atmospheric, includes an almost super-villain and enough red herrings to satisfy the most avid mystery fan, and ends with a rousing climax that's sure to keep you turning pages. I'm circling back now to the first novel in the series, Faceless Killers.