The Secret Life of Wallander

The Secret Life of Wallander, by Stafford Hildred, is sub-titled ‘An unofficial guide to the Swedish detective taking the literary world by storm’. To anyone of a slightly cynical turn of mind (like me) the key word there is probably ‘unofficial’. The author is a successful journalist, whose other books have featured the likes of David Beckham, Rod Stewart and Jamie Oliver, and he writes as an enthusiast rather than as a crime fiction specialist.

The book seems to have been quite hastily written, and I spotted a few oddities and errors, plus a regrettable absence of a detailed list of sources and an index, that one tends to associate with quickly produced ‘scissors and paste’ books. I do miss an index in a non-fiction book - though when, years ago, I had to compile my own index to a legal book I'd written, I did not enjoy the task at all!

Despite the shortcomings of this project, Wallander, and his creator Henning Mankell, are interesting subjects, and Stafford Hildred’s obvious enjoyment of the books featuring the gloomy cop carries the reader through. There are introductory chapters about Mankell, and about the Branagh tv series (the Swedish tv series, which I prefer, is mentioned only in passing) but the meat of the book is to be found in the detailed accounts of the nine Wallander books published in the UK to date.

A final chapter sweeps up related books, such as the one in which Linda Wallander is the central figure. This is not, to my mind, the definitive book on either Mankell or Wallander, but nevertheless it provides a readable overview of a notable crime series.

Thorne: Sleepyhead and Wallander: The Joker

Thorne: Sleepyhead reached a very grim conclusion in the third and final episode. I thought this was a very good new series, with David Morrissey leading a dynamic cast. The pace seldom faltered, even if there were occasional over the top moments. The finale wss deeply depressing, not my idea of cheery Sunday evening viewing, but even so, I'd guess Mark Billingham will be very pleased with the outcome, and so would I be in his shoes.

I've been catching up on one or two episodes from the first Swedish TV version of Wallander, the one featuring his daughter Linda, very well played by the late Johanna Salstrom. Ola Rapace is also excellent as her colleague Stefan. I'd missed The Joker the first time around, but I read good things about it, and they were certainly justified.

The story is cleverly plotted. I thought I'd figured out the twist early on, but the script had a good trick in store. This was a story about the murder of a woman outside her failing restaurant. The reason for her death can be traced back to events some years before at another restaurant, called The Joker.

Again this was a bleak story, if not quite as dark as Thorne. Much as I enjoyed both shows, I found myself longing for a bit of light relief by the end of them, so I may delve back into the Golden Age now. Apologies, by the way, for delays in responding to comments etc. I'm experiencing a few pc problems which are slowing me down at present.

Wallander: The Collector - and Teamwork

The second long series from Swedish TV of Wallander came to an end with an excellent episode, The Collector. Again, Krister Henriksson was excellent as the eponymous cop, but this was another show which showed the strength of the whole team of cops at Ystad, and that strength is a key reason for the success of the series.

In this story, the young trainees, Pontus and Isabelle, have reached the end of their apprenticeship and are faced with decisions about the future. Isabelle wants to travel, and upsets Pontus by making it clear that she wants to do so on her own. But when a woman who is murdered by masked robbers in her own home turns out to be someone Isabelle knows from her gym, the young woman finds herself drawn into the enquiry.

At a boxing match, Isabelle is recognised by one of the fighters, and it turns out that this is Patrik, who along with his brother is not only a hardened criminal with psychopathic tendencies, but also a former lover of Isabelle. This part of the story stretched credulity, but was done just about convincingly enough to be believable. Isabelle is reluctant to admit her past misdemeanours to Wallander, but inevitably things start to turn nasty. Very nasty.

The Wallander stories are, of course, far from the first to highlight cop teams rather than focusing exclusively on a single character. Ed McBain was an early exponent of this kind of story; I have vague memories of watching a few 87th Precinct tv shows when I was very young, though I’m not sure how they would hold up today. The McBain books, however, have lasted pretty well, and I expect that Henning Mankell’s novels will achieve similar longevity. Meanwhile, I’m not sure if there will be any more Wallanders from Swedish TV, but this series at least will stay in my memory for a long time. It has been excellent.

Wallander - The Priest: review

I’ve watched another episode in the second series of the Swedish TV version of Wallander. This was The Priest, and it was based on a book by Henning Mankell which I have not read.

The opening, as so often in Wallander, is dramatic and arresting. A couple are having a secret assignation in a hostel. The man is promising to tell his wife about the affair and to make a new life with his lover. When the couple part, someone outside the building shoots the man, and although the victim does not die immediately, his life-support is eventually turned off.

It emerges that the victim is a priest, and the prime suspects are the spouses of the two lovers. The priest was also involved with a rather controversial organisation that ships medical supplies and drugs to Africa. While Wallander (Krister Henriksson) and his team investigate, the detective’s attempts to develop a relationship with a female prosecutor are stymied by her interest in a younger man.

The notion of jealousy as a possible motive for murder is a compelling one, and here it is given added resonance by the sub-plot. I must admit that I found the eventual solution (and the means by which it was revealed) less interesting than what had gone before, but this was another watchable programme, if not by any means the best in the series.

Wallander - The Revenge: review

I’ve just caught up with the first episode of the second series of Wallander, in its Swedish incarnation, with Krister Henriksson as the weary detective. The Revenge is a story which begins slowly, as the plot is unveiled in a slightly predictable fashion, but the second half is gripping and impressive.

The story begins with a black-out of the power system in Ystad. This rudely interrupts a crayfish party in which Kurt Wallander is enjoying himself, having just bought a nice house by the sea. The black-out coincides with a brutal machine gun murder, and since the victim had authorised an exhibition about the prophet Mohammed, fundamentalists top the list of suspects.

Seasoned watchers of crime shows know, however, that a terrorist explanation would be, in a very real sense, a cop-out. And so it proves here – the title of this episode is a rather large clue to the motivation behind the crime. As Wallander chums up with a nice lady prosecutor (who conveniently buys a house next door to his) further murders occur.

A minister visits Ystad, providing the opportunity for a very tense sequence when the culprit is revealed. The latter stages of this episode were strong and memorable. Wallander’s team may be somewhat depleted in this series, but the man himself is still in very good form.

Wallander - The Secret

I have caught up with the final episode of the Swedish TV series about Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallander. This was The Secret, and it has to rank as about the darkest episode in a television cop series that I’ve ever seen. Not easy viewing, but impressively done.

The story involves the abduction and murder of an 11 year old boy. Early scenes also detail the abuse of another young boy. Wallander and his team soon identify a prime suspect, but he is found murdered. By this time, Stefan (brilliantly played by Ola Rapace) has become very personally involved in the case. He knows the dead boy’s father, but this does not seem to explain the depth of his rage about the crime.

A retired cop who was associated with the dead suspect comes into the frame. He appears to be a sinister character, but it turns out that he has a track record of pursuing paedophiles with considerable success. However, there are further twists in the story before the traumatic final moments of the story.

I found this series – and I watched almost all of the 13 episodes, something I don’t often manage to do – exceptionally good viewing. At its best, it was outstanding, and even the weaker story-lines were competently done. Krister Henriksson was superb as Wallander, but part of the strength of the series lay in the quality of the supporting cast, notably Rapace and Johanna Sallstrom as Linda Wallander. Others have written about the sad death of Sallstrom after the series was filmed. Suffice to say that hers is a tragic story, and a great loss.

Bloodline

BBC 4 has resumed its series of the Swedish version of Wallander, starring gruff but appealing Krister Henriksson as the detective, and Johanna Sallstrom as his daughter. I’m not sure why the series, shown to considerable acclaim (not least among crime bloggers!) earlier this year, was interrupted – but then, the scheduling of television programmes is an arcane process, as difficult to fathom as the Duckworth-Lewis method of calculating victory targets in a rain-affected cricket match.

The latest episode, Bloodline, opens with a man and a woman quarrelling on board a boat. The man storms off, but some time later, a masked individual comes on board, and brutally murders the woman. It’s a dramatic beginning, very much in the style we associate with Wallander.

When the police investigate, their inquiries soon take them to a group of people at a farm commune. Needless to say, there are various secrets to be uncovered, and the mystery is satisfyingly done. As always, however, the interplay of the characters is the great strength of the show. The relationship between Wallander and his daughter is very well done indeed. In fact, I’m not sure if I can think of any detective-and-daughter relationship in the genre that is more compelling.

Suspects

When I watched an episode of Wallander, ‘The Castle Ruins’, the other day, I mused again on the tricky question of how many suspects a whodunit requires. It’s a question that occupies my mind quite a bit when writing a mystery, but it is also something that matters to me as a reader or viewer.

In this episode, the Swedish cop was investigating the murder of a scruffy chap who had just withdrawn a huge sum of money from his bank account. The victim had made his loot from selling land to be turned into a luxurious beach development. But not all the residents appreciated the unlovely bloke, especially since he hung around, along with his dogs, instead of doing the decent thing and leaving them to their upwardly mobile existences.

Further murders quickly occurred, and unfortunately they served only to confirm my initial suspicion about the culprit’s identity. But this was due to no great brilliance on my part – very few other viable suspects were left.

This is the challenge, then, for the writer. To include enough potential killers in the story to retain an element of surprise, but not so many that it becomes impossible to give them clearly differentiated characters. Agatha Christie had lots of suspects in many of her books, but Cards on the Table shows that she could still ring the changes cleverly even when she confined herself to a handful. This is a topic that fascinates me, and I’m sure that it provokes a range of opinions. What is the secret – if any – to getting the right number of suspects in a mystery?

Lewis and Wallander

I don’t watch many television series these days, but I’ve seen quite a few episodes of both ‘Lewis’ and ‘Wallander’ (originally the Branagh series, now the rather different Swedish series) and this caused me to muse on the merits of both.

The episodes of ‘Lewis’ that I saw came from the last series. ‘The Allegory of Love’ was first rate, and up to the standard of all but the very best episodes of ‘Inspector Morse’. The story starts briefly with shots of a beautiful and mysterious young woman (Katia Winter) before moving to a book launch attended by Inspector Lewis. The book in question is a fantasy novel by handsome Dorian Crane (Tom Milsom) and it soon becomes apparent that his good looks, charm and all-round brilliance have attracted several admirers, and prompted much jealousy. At a regrettably early point, the beautiful young woman is murdered – but was she the killer’s intended victim?

As ever, the casting was excellent. The suspects included such fine actors as Art Malik and James Fox, and for a while I thought Lewis might find himself a new lady, but it was not to be. The plot was pleasingly convoluted, and though credibility was stretched, this was a price worth paying for a thoroughly entertaining story.

I’ve also just seen ‘The Great and the Good’ – this Lewis story benefited from a screenplay by Paul Rutman, who has written the script for the televised version of Ann Cleeves’ Vera Stanhope novel Hidden Depths. Again, it was very enjoyable stuff, the excellence of the acting and the twists of the story-line compensating for the rather unlikely plot.

Across the North Sea, ‘The Tricksters’ also saw the hero-detective contemplating the possibility of an improvement to his love life, though Kurt Wallander enjoyed rather more amorous success than poor old Lewis after picking up a woman on a lonely forest road. For once, though, I thought that the story was not especially gripping. Two young girls discover the body of an apparently pleasant man with a love of horses. But he turns out not to have been pleasant after all. In theory, I prefer the length of the Wallander series (an hour and a half rather than the two hours allocated to Lewis’s investigations) but the simple truth is that the strength of each episode depends above all on the quality of the story.

Wallander - The Village Idiot

I'm just back from my holidays, about which more soon. One of the many good things about getting away was the chance to catch up with a bit of reading - in fact, I was reminded of how hard it has become to carve out enough time to read novels. But I've devoured four good ones, while soaking up the sun, and will have a bit to say about each of them.

Meanwhile, I raved recently about the excellence of the Swedish TV interpretation of Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallander series. ‘Mastermind’ was superb. Just before going away, I watched ‘The Village Idiot’, again with Krister Henriksson in the lead role, world-weary as ever, and my good impression has been confirmed, even though I didn’t think this story was in the same street as ‘Mastermind’.

On reflection, I think the brilliantly enigmatic feel of the early scenes of ‘Mastermind’ reminded me, subtly, of the appeal of early episodes of ‘Taggart’, more than twenty years ago. In the days when Mark McManus starred as Jim Taggart, and Glenn Chandler wrote most of the scripts, the Glaswegian cop series was unmissable, as far as I was concerned. Now, sadly, it is pretty routine, and the current run of stories rarely sets my pulse racing.

Perhaps the mistake with ‘Taggart’ has been to go on for too long. I hope that the same fate does not befall ‘Wallander’. In ‘The Village Idiot’, a troubled man strapped to a home-made bomb holds bank workers, and a woman customer, hostage, but the resolution of the siege is not the end of the story by a long chalk.

Interestingly, the script writer broke one of the ‘commandments’ for detective stories laid down in the 1920s by Father Ronald Knox. I won’t say which one, for fear of spoiling the story, but I think the script just about got away with it.. .

Wallander - Mastermind

Good as the Kenneth Branagh series for BBC TV was, I’m starting to think that the Swedish television take on Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallander is even better. Thanks to Karen Meek of the excellent Eurocrime blog, I learned that the programmes are going out on BBC 4 and I have just watched ‘Mastermind’.

Needless to say, ‘Mastermind’ has nothing to do with either the television quiz show or its Crimefest equivalent! But it is an outstanding story, which I found gripping from start to finish. I’m not wildly enthusiastic about sub-titles, but on this occasion they proved no obstacle at all to my enjoyment.

Kirster Henriksson is very good as Wallander. It’s a more subdued performance than Branagh’s, but highly effective. In this story (which is original, not based on a Mankell novel) a middle-aged woman’s body is found hanging from her apartment ceiling, and drained of blood. Soon, the daughter of one of Mankell’s colleagues is snatched from her blood-spattered bedroom, and it turns out that the blood is not hers, but belongs to the murdered woman. Mankell’s daughter is then injured, and it emerges that someone is targeting the police. But why?

The climax is very tense. All in all, this is first-rate viewing. Strongly recommended.