Henning Mankell - "The White Lioness"

Before I really get started with the first review here, I should probably make two quick points.

The first is that while I'm going to be reviewing novels which are frequently part of a series, I won't necessarily be starting from the beginning of the series, just because I read the earlier ones ages ago. I will at some point go back and review the earlier ones, too, so don't worry about that.
The second is that I absolutely love Scandinavian crime fiction. Expect to see a lot of it here.

So, with that in mind, let's look at Henning Mankell's third "Wallander" novel, The White Lioness or Den vita lejoninnan in its original Swedish.

While Scandi-Crime has - justifiably - become stratospherically famous in the years since Stieg Larsson's Millennium Series hit the shelves and the cinema screens, the style was bubbling away for a good couple of decades beforehand in Sweden, Denmark and Norway. Iceland and Finland have been slightly later arrivals on the stage, but they've achieved their own successes more recently. The late Henning Mankell, for example, released his first "Wallander" novel in Sweden in 1991, although it was only translated into English in 1997.
The White Lioness is, as mentioned above, the third in the series featuring the idiosyncratic Chief Inspector Kurt Wallander, and was originally published in 1993, with the first English translation turning up in 1998. It is important to keep the publication date in mind here, as the plot turns on things like telex machines, typewriters and Apartheid South Africa, rather than their more modern equivalents.

Lioness is described on the cover of my copy as a "Kurt Wallander thriller", and it fits squarely in that genre rather than any of the other types of crime fiction out there. The focus, although it takes a short while to get there, is on a countdown to a planned assassination in South Africa, the preparations of which cause a murder in Sweden. The reader is privy to the parallel investigations by South African and Swedish police, but it's only in the final quarter of the novel that Wallander puts at least enough of the pieces together to achieve success.
The concept of the countdown is quite strong, in fact, with a lot of dialogue between the group planning the assassination focusing on the date and how many days it will be until the plan can go into effect, and the scenes in Sweden often containing lines to the effect that it was early April and so on. I often think of these as being films or TV shows waiting to happen, as Mankell is almost writing instructions for establishing shots of clocks or calendars in order to build the tension further.
Of course, the Wallanders have been filmed both in Swedish and in English since. The Swedish edition dates from 1996, while Kenneth Branagh's performance in English was filmed two decades later. I'm yet to get my hands on either series, although I suspect that Branagh would be one of the few actors who could seem authentic as Wallander.

Strangely, certainly in comparison to the first two novels in the series, I wouldn't quite say that this is as much a "Kurt Wallander" novel as it is a novel which involves Wallander. Yes, Wallander and his colleagues in the Ystad police in southern Sweden play a role in the resolution of the plot, but as half the action occurs on another continent and without any input from Sweden at all, it feels as though Mankell - who had considerable interests in the post-Apartheid society in southern Africa overall - was perhaps keener to write a novel set in the Republic but included Wallander and Sweden in order to sell more copies.
A lot of the enjoyment of good Scandi-Crime is to be had in the rough-around-the-edges main characters (Wallander himself, but also such figures as Jo Nesbø's Harry Hole and Arnaldur Indriðason's Inspector Erlendur are all good examples here), but Wallander seems to pale into the background here. There's an amusing scene with his elderly father in the early chapters, as well as some interaction with his daughter, but a lot of the rich characterisation that introduced all three Wallanders to the audience in Faceless Killers and The Dogs of Riga just doesn't quite seem to be there, which is rather a shame.

Another concern I have with Lioness is the reliance on real-world figures. In the South African chapters, key scenes focus on FW de Klerk and Pik Botha, with Nelson Mandela a more peripheral figure for much of the novel.
Obviously it's difficult to write about planning an assassination in early-90s South Africa without at least making reference to the central players in the drama of that country at that time, but Mankell has considerable difficulties making these men seem authentic. Some of this may be due to the fact that the events he was writing about were still happening at the time - de Klerk spends a lot of his time wondering about his legacy, which is slightly ironic given that he and Mandela won the Nobel Peace Prize in the same year the novel was written - but some of it just feels heavy-handed. Of course, we can't fault Mankell for having Mandela think at one point that he may not have much time left, having reached the age of 70. I doubt that anyone would have imagined he would reach the age of 95, as he did.
All of this, though, points to the difficulty in writing about real people and events in medias res as it were. Something as dramatic and dynamic as the early 1990s in South Africa could easily have made Mankell's plot either irrelevant or scarily prescient in a moment, so he's forced to play it very safe, with the real characters feeling like two-dimensional extensions of their public personae.
Don't get me wrong, it's possible to write a fictionalised extension of real-world events. Even if nothing else, Frederick Forsyth produced a masterclass in this in The Day of the Jackal (to which Lioness clearly owes a considerable debt). The key difference, though, is that Jackal was published in 1971 and set in 1963, as well as featuring predominantly fictional characters, rather than real ones.

On a more positive note, Lioness does show Swedish society at what - in retrospect - was the cusp of several important changes. Having the murder victim as a real estate agent, as well as having a witness lament the job opportunities in provincial Ystad in 1993, is a clear nod to the Swedish economic crisis of the early 1990s. Additionally, the inclusion of three Russian characters, two of whom are ex-KGB operatives, points towards the effects of immigration from the former Soviet Union (something which Mankell touches on in the earlier Dogs of Riga). Interestingly, one of these KGB operatives is burned quite horribly in his car, in what I can't help feeling is an inspiration for Zalachenko in the Millennium series more than a decade later.
Also of note is a throwaway line while the Ystad team are attempting to track the assassin, who is by now flying back to Africa. One of the policemen remarks that there couldn't be many Africans going through Swedish border controls over a given day, a comment which may have been true then but surely not now in light of the vibrantly multicultural Sweden of the 2010s.

Overall, The White Lioness is decently-plotted and shows Mankell's willingness to experiment beyond the confines of his "natural" Swedish setting - something he would do increasingly in later novels. Taken purely as a Kurt Wallander novel, it is a slight disappointment, and I do wonder if I would have been as "sold" on the series had this been my first exposure to it. I would suggest starting with Faceless Killers, as there are some references to earlier events, and the overall effect is better.

Three stars.