Mankell wrote crime novels to ask what was going wrong in Sweden, and handed the asking to a tired policeman in a small coastal town. On screen the policeman has lasted better than the questions, and that is why the adaptations are good rather than important.
Fi1m perspective
Kurt Wallander does not sleep. He eats standing up, when he eats, his daughter rings to check he is alive, and his father is losing his memory in a farmhouse full of his own paintings. Henning Mankell gave him all of that before he gave him a case, and every adaptation has kept it, because it is the part that works. The cases change. The man with the bad diet and the worse conscience does not.
Mankell came to crime late and sideways. He published his first novel in 1973, spent most of the next two decades in the theatre, and only sat down to Faceless Killers (1991) because he wanted to write about racism and decided a murder was the plainest way to do it. He then wrote roughly a Wallander a year until The Pyramid (1999), a collection of early cases, stopped, and came back once for The Troubled Man (2009), which is about ageing and memory more than about a crime. The prose is direct and unshowy, mostly procedure and daily detail, and Sidetracked (1995) is the one where the town and the weather come through strongest. Readers who find him plodding are not wrong. The pace is the point; Wallander gets there by going through the files.
On screen he has had two lives. Krister Henriksson played him in Sweden from 2005 to 2013, and Kenneth Branagh in the BBC's Wallander (2008), which kept the Swedish names and the Swedish light and gave him an English voice. It is a good series carried by one performance. Branagh plays him as a man held together by coffee and guilt, and that carries stretches the writing cannot. Mankell's plots run on grudges decades deep and killers with rituals, and on television the rituals arrive long before the grudges. We flinched at the arranged bodies and then, more than once, felt cheated, because nobody had yet told us why the body was there. The Sweden Anthony Dod Mantle shot for the BBC is also a little too pretty to be true, and prettiness was never what Mankell was selling.
The man survives the move to the screen. The argument mostly does not. In the novels the detective's decline runs alongside the country's, and the point is that they are the same story. On television the country is scenery and the decline is only mood, so that by the third BBC series the pattern is set: Wallander is sad, something terrible happens, Wallander is sadder. Some readers find the books wearying for the same reason, and the politics can be too plainly signposted. But the books know why the man is miserable. Mankell said he would not miss Wallander, that it was the reader who would. The reader has, and so have the cameras, which keep going back for the sleepless policeman and leave most of the questions behind.
Biography
Henning Mankell was a Swedish crime writer, playwright and children's author. He was born in Stockholm in 1948 and died in Gothenburg in 2015.
He is best known for his series of novels featuring Inspector Kurt Wallander, beginning with Faceless Killers (1991). The books were adapted into several television series, including the British Wallander (2008), on which Mankell was credited as creator and writer. He co-founded the production company Yellow Bird in 2003.
