The Troubled Man

Scandinavians have a great affinity for the mystery and detective genre. In addition to Stieg Larsson and Jo Nesbo, whose novels I've reviewed on this blog, there is Henning Mankell, who created Kurt Wallander, a very popular Swedish sleuth. The Troubled Man is the first book I've read, though it seems it will be the last featuring Wallander.

Wallander is a police detective from the city of Ystad (I have almost no knowledge of Swedish geography, so this is largely meaningless to me, and I was surprised that he needed to take a plane to Stockholm. But I digress.) Like many detectives of fiction, he's a loner and, sixty years old, thinking about mortality, especially since his memory has started to slip. As the novel begins, he gets in trouble for leaving behind his service revolver in a restaurant.

Wallander is single, with a dog, an alcoholic ex-wife, and a daughter who is also in the police. She has just had a baby with a financial expert, and early in the book he attends his grandchild's father's birthday party. Hakan Von Else, the birthday boy, (and the troubled man of the title) is a retired Swedish submarine captain. He gets Wallander alone and discusses an incident concerning a Russian submarine that was identified in Swedish waters, but somehow escaped. Soon afterward, Von Else disappears. Then his wife does.

Though not in his jurisdiction, family ties prompt Wallader to investigate, with the cooperation of the Stockholm police. His trail leads him to learn much about the Swedish navy, espionage, and the islands of the Stockholm archipelago. Wallander is the type of detective who is ruled by intuition and a sense when something is amiss, and eventually he solves the case by looking at the situation from a diametrically opposing view.

The novel, translated by Laurie Thompson, is of fairly straightforward prose. As I mentioned in my review of The Girl Who Played With Fire, Stieg Larsson was one of those mystery writers who spent too much on meaningless detail. I get infuriated when writers think it's important describing what their characters are eating or what is in the refrigerator. Mankell is occasional guilty of this: "When she smiled she displayed a beautiful set of teeth that made Wallander jealous. His own teeth had begun to need filling when he was twelve, and since then he had been fighting a constant battle with dental hygiene and dentists who seemed always to be tearing a strip off him. He still had most of his own teeth, but his dentist had warned him that they would soon start to fall out if he didn't brush them more often and more efficiently." I can't think of a passage that is more extraneous, unless it was about the frequency of his bowel movements.

But for the most part, these type of details are skimmed over. The book has an interesting look at politics, especially since I am an American, as the book questions the age-old Swedish attitude of fearing Russia and loving America. Mostly, it hearkens back to the legacy of the old masters like Raymond Chandler, in passages like this one: "I can't cope with any more death and misery, any more wives drinking themselves to death, any more mothers being murdered."

As I said, it looks like Wallander has been mothballed. The last few paragraphs, which seem to have been written by Mankell as if he were late for an appointment, close the book on his creation. I'm not sure if I'll get around to reading any more in the series, but on the whole it was a decent, if not outstanding, read.