Henning Mankell, who died earlier this week at the age of 67, was a complex figure whose extraordinary life was matched by his body of writing. He was just out of his teens when he started work in a theatre in Stockholm, eventually travelling through Africa and landing the role of artistic director at the Teatro Avenida in Maputo. In all, he would pen more than 40 plays, though these remain little-known outside Mozambique and Sweden. Most of us know Mankell for the series of novels he wrote featuring the detective Kurt Wallander. Like Per Wahlöö and Maj Sjöwall’s before him, Mankell used the crime genre as a means of critiquing politics, big business, social unrest and corruption.
The first Wallander novel, Faceless Killers, took on the issues of immigration and racial tension. Published in Swedish in 1991, it had to wait until 1997 for an English translation, but success came soon after, when Sidetracked, which addressed child prostitution, won the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger in 2001. Always politically active, Mankell was deported after taking part in an attempt to breach the Israeli embargo of the Gaza Strip. He also set up a publishing house to help Swedish and African writers, and gave huge amounts to charity, while of an evening he might sit down to watch a film with his father-in-law, Ingmar Bergman – something I quizzed him on during our session at the Edinburgh book festival in 2002.
In a Guardian interview in 2013, Mankell said: “I learn more about the human condition by living with one foot in the snow and one foot in the sand”, a reference to his peripatetic life. He showed us the human condition, warts and all, as seen through the eyes of an engagingly flawed but deeply humane central character, and paved the way for every Scandinavian detective who came after him.
