As with many of his Scandinavian brethren, Henning Mankell's novels were translated to English out of order. In contrast to many others, Mankell's passing in 2015 means that readers at least know that there's a finite number of these novels and can therefore re-assemble the "full story" of Inspector Kurt Wallander, one of the more well-rounded series characters in contemporary crime fiction.
The Man Who Smiled is chronologically the fourth Wallander, having appeared in the original Swedish as Mannen som log in 1994. It was, eccentrically, the seventh translated to English, not seeing an Anglophone publication until 2005. I say "eccentrically", as Wallander's personal life is a key theme in the series, and while it's complicated enough as it is, there seems little reason to mix things up further.
Speaking of Wallander's personal life, that's precisely where this novel opens. Wallander ended The White Lioness in dramatic fashion, fatally shooting a suspect in a tense chase over foggy terrain and doubting his choice even though his colleagues felt that it was entirely justified. The intervening time before the opening of The Man Who Smiled seems to have been tough on him, as he's spent nearly 18 months on sick leave from the Ystad police and actively considering retirement.
In fact, he's been doing more than just "considering" it, having come to the conclusion that it's time to retire, when he's visited by a lawyer he knows. Sten Torstensson, the visitor, explains that he is concerned about the investigation into the death of his father Gustaf - another lawyer - who was killed recently in a traffic accident. Wallander suggests he approach an active policeman, and believes this to be the end of the matter, only for Sten himself to be found dead a few days later.
This double tragedy galvanises Wallander to reverse his decision to retire, as well as spurring him to resolve not to ignore approaches like this in the future (in typical Wallander style, he blames himself for Sten's death), and he's soon back in his familiar office in the Ystad police. His colleagues seem not to have changed much, although the department has gained the highly-regarded young recruit Ann-Britt Höglund, who appears to have arrived with some emotional baggage as well as new ideas about the role of the police in the rapidly-changing Swedish society.
Wallander's investigation - and it really is Wallander's investigation, Mankell is happy to relegate the rest of the department to the background, and really only draws Höglund in three dimensions for most of the novel - takes a series of dramatic turns and rapidly enters Mankell's customary page-turning territory. Financial chicanery, black-market dealings in the developing world, car bombings, suspicious suicides and even a landmine are the order of the day, and the tension ratchets up to a very high level.
Overlaid on this is Wallander's personal life. He's still a workaholic and an alcoholic, and his relationships with his daughter and father are as complex as ever. In the latter case, Lioness saw his father announce his intention to marry his home-help, and this marriage has taken place by the start of the present novel, which of course only serves to complicate things. In addition, having spent 18 months on leave, Wallander feels that his instincts can't always be trusted in certain respects, which presents additional challenges for a policeman more than happy to go it alone in pursuit of a solution.
Perhaps the strangest aspect of The Man Who Smiled is the opening, which reveals at least some of the identity of the killer and a portion of the motive. Little vignettes like these are of course entirely common in crime fiction, but in this instance it has the odd result of moving the novel from standard "whodunit" territory into an unusual attempt at the "whydunit".
This may not be a fair claim, to be honest. The strictest definition of the "whydunit" is one in which we see the crime committed at the outset, but the challenge is to work out the motive (the works of R Austin Freeman, among others, are the landmarks of this style), and we are given at least part of that motive to begin with. The other possibility is to see this as an attempt at the "howcatchem", a style of novel which connects to many of the procedural TV shows (think of the assorted Law and Order spin-offs here) in which we as viewers know exactly how everything went down, but we're still cheering for the police as they painstakingly put the pieces together. Whether it works all the time to translate this to the novel is somewhat up for debate, but I feel it does here, as there's more than enough tension and plenty of by-play with office politics and so on as well.
If there's one point on which the novel falls down ever so slightly, it would be the identity of the villain. A lot of the plot relies on the villain being one step - or several steps - ahead of Wallander and his team, and one almost expects the final scenes to involve the unmasking of a mole in the police department, but this is explained in the end as being due to police carelessness, rather than anything more sinister.
The villain himself gets what can only be called a James Bond moment towards the end, where he "confesses" to a captured Wallander and outlines chapter and verse of what's been going on. Admittedly, most of these facts are known already, but with as many plot threads as this novel has, it was always going to be welcome to bring everything together somewhere along the line, artificial though this final moment may be.
That said, Mankell makes up for the almost cartoonishly omnipotent villain by delivering a climax in which Wallander "persuades" Höglund to ignore the chain of command - which by now is demonstrably getting in the way of the investigation anyway - and race against time to stop a private jet taking off. The result is just the right side of the line between comic and exciting, and it's easy to see why this is one of the novels that both Swedish and British directors have adapted for television.
All told, this is Mankell at his finest. He even finds the time to work in links to the rest of the series, with the re-appearance of a character from The Dogs of Riga, as well as more links to his other passion of Africa. Wallander is a much better-drawn character than he was in The White Lioness, and by the end of the novel there are several other characters who promise a lot for the next instalment.
Four and a half stars.
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