If there is one fictional detective the reader constantly wishes would get a lucky break, it must be Kurt Wallander. His personal life isn't pretty, and from his third novel appearance onwards he seems to have more than the typical level of Swedish existential guilt, particularly after he shoots a man in the process of stopping an assassination.
1995's Villospår (translated into English as Sidetracked in 1999) seems to show Wallander in a much better place. His tentative relationship with Baiba Liepa - a woman he met in Latvia while investigating a crime linked to that country - has developed to the extent that she's flying to Copenhagen to meet him, his daughter Linda seems keen to have him play a more central role in her life, and even his irascible father seems to have calmed down. Besides which, it's close on Midsummer.
All is not well, however. Wallander is called to a farm outside Ystad, where a young woman sets herself on fire in front of him. While Wallander and his colleagues are attempting to process this horrific event, a former Minister of Justice is found murdered and scalped. The reader meets this victim slightly before his death, and while the man is hardly shown to be a paragon of virtue, there's definitely a level of sadism here which makes one sit up and take notice.
Henning Mankell's interests in social justice and the dark underbelly of Sweden are very much to the fore here, with a plot extending as far as the Dominican Republic in order for the twists and turns to make sense. The body count climbs higher than Mankell has achieved previously, and for once there is a real sense of danger to Wallander himself - as well as to Linda, who emerges as a much more three-dimensional character than she had previously been in the series.
As the premise might indicate, this is definitely a very dark novel. Sadism is a key ingredient in the murders, as well as elsewhere in the plot, and seems to arrive with minimal warning. There are also a few glimpses into the mind of the murderer, which become suitably foreboding late in the novel but are also quite disconcerting at times.
Mankell's growing ease with the techniques of writing a crime novel are also on show here. The scenes from the killer's perspective are a very strong example of this, as they begin by implying a completely different motive from the one actually in play. Wallander and his colleagues frequently debate whether they're viewing the case the wrong way, and as the tension mounts it becomes apparent that the reader could easily have done the same thing.
There are in fact one or two scenes which feel cinematic in a very good way. A relatively innocent sequence involving missing front door keys morphs into something very sinister, and the moment at which Wallander realises a key piece of evidence was under his nose all along is more than a bit spine-tingling.
And yet, Mankell never ceases to play fair with his readers. The evidence which finally clinches the murderer's identity (or, for the reader, the murderer's motive) has been in plain sight for some time and was even discussed by multiple characters earlier in the novel. Just as in the classic "Golden Age" novels of yesteryear, you can't blame the author when it becomes apparent that you missed it.
Mankell even has the chance to add some extra realism to the plot by having the Ystad police betting on the 1994 World Cup, which Sweden memorably finished third in. Wallander is resolutely not into the sport, but is convinced to bet anyway, at one point predicting a ludicrous scoreline he's talked out of.
The killer even takes advantage of a key group-stage match to strike, and Mankell is careful to have the results of the matches link to reality. We only get as far as Sweden's Round of 16 match against Saudi Arabia, but there are asides about drunken brawls regarding the performance of the then-Swedish goalkeeper and other very important matters in footballing terms.
The only weak note for which Mankell can be critiqued here is the rather odd characterisation of officer Sjösten, a colleague of Wallander's in Malmö who discovers the final victim. Sjösten is presented in a very sympathetic light for several chapters, before he is suddenly required (purely for reasons of dramatic tension) to be confrontational towards a witness.
While real people are of course made of both light and dark sides, Sjösten's sudden change of personality doesn't seem to make sense and I wouldn't be surprised if there had in fact been another character involved here who perhaps didn't make it past the editing stage.
The translation by Steven Murray is generally strong (characters don't use quite so many British turns of phrase as Laurie Thompson has them doing in The Man Who Smiled, for example), but there are occasionally clunky moments.
One such is the tendency - by both translators - to render the Swedish Systembolaget as "the state off-licence", or even "the off-licence". While the concept of an "off-licence" makes sense to British readers, the Scandinavian concept of the government having the monopoly on the bottle-shop sector really doesn't seem to be conveyed by this term. Most other translations from Swedish (to say nothing of those from Icelandic or Norwegian, where the concept also exists) render the term either as "the state liquor store" or (as in the Millennium series) "the System store", which doesn't sacrifice as much clarity as Murray or Thompson may think. The choice of terminology is rendered even stranger, in fact, when we note that Murray (under the pen-name Reg Keeland) is the translator of Stieg Larsson's trilogy into English.
More jarring, though, is the reference to "rape fields" throughout southern Sweden. While "canola" only covers one particular cultivar of this plant, it seems very unusual that Murray didn't render the Swedish raps as "rapeseed". The girl being discovered in the farmer's "rape field" is an unfortunately weird moment (although, at the risk of a spoiler, perhaps it's not the most ridiculous choice of term), and Wallander's reaction to smelling "all the rape" as summer warms up is also a bit strange. Nonetheless, we can overlook this issue in the name of a real page-turner of a novel.
In many ways, this is the point at which Henning Mankell became the big name he remained for the rest of his career. A truly absorbing novel with a genuinely surprising twist at the heart of the plot.
Five stars.
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