Midsummer. Sweden. A small group of friends are celebrating the longer days - and the long-awaited arrival of warmer weather - dressed in historical costumes when they're shot by an unknown marksman. If this atmospheric beginning doesn't immediately make the reader think they're in southern Scania and about to follow Kurt Wallander and the rest of the Ystad police, I don't know what will.
One Step Behind (Swedish: Steget efter) is Henning Mankell's seventh Kurt Wallander novel, making its appearance in Sweden in 1997 and its translated appearance in 2002. As with many of Wallander's earlier cases, the age of the novel is immediately apparent to the reader in 2017/2018 - younger characters can't be automatically assumed to have mobile phones, for example, and the circulation of a suspect's photo outside of Sweden takes some time to achieve. Mankell's muted social commentary - the sort of thing which would become a hallmark of Scandi-crime in the post-Stieg-Larsson era - makes its appearance as well, with several characters bemoaning the move towards a more "modern" and "lawless" Sweden as they gradually uncover the crimes here.
Unlike most of Wallander's earlier cases, One Step Behind begins in a rather oblique manner. The murders referred to above are described (tensely, and from the perspective of the killer) in the prologue, but the first Wallander and his colleagues hear about them is the belief of the mother of one of the girls in the group that her daughter hasn't gone on the trip around Europe her postcards seem to indicate that she's taken. Looking again at the age of the novel, it's rather touching to see Wallander asking relatives of the youths involved for handwriting samples (from letters) and musing on how easy it would be to forge the writing of the people in question.
Things become more interesting, though, when Wallander's colleague Svedberg misses work for a few days in a row. Acting on a hunch, Wallander calls on Svedberg's address, only to find a brutal murder scene. The death of one of their own sparks the Ystad force in a way that the missing teenagers hasn't, particularly as they are forced to confront the fact that they really didn't know Svedberg very well at all, making the investigation exceptionally challenging.
In the first of several twists, Svedberg appears to have had almost no private life, even according to his two living relatives (one of whom has made a minor appearance in an earlier case). And yet, as this puzzle begins to unravel, Wallander is met by another puzzle, that Svedberg had seemingly been connected to the disappearance of the teenagers in some way or another, and seems to have been conducting his own investigation during his annual holidays.
Wallander and his colleagues - particularly the increasingly-well-written Ann-Britt Höglund - are faced with a truly baffling mystery involving a telescope, a mysterious woman, the bonds between the teenagers and a killer who can somehow manage to stay ahead of them.
In contrast to Wallander's earlier cases, Mankell has genuinely crafted a remarkable set of puzzles for his characters (and readers) to solve. Wallander is reminded of his former mentor Rydberg's dictum of removing the "extraneous layers", but even the brief vignettes from the perspective of the killer don't give the reader much of a chance to remove those layers.
From a crime-writing perspective, this is a huge leap from the earlier "straight thriller" plots (such as The Man Who Smiled, which is more an exercise in watching Wallander assemble evidence against someone the reader already assumes is the villain, while this character tries to destabilise the case, or Sidetracked with its frequent killer's-eye-view passages). We aren't exactly in the realm of the classic whodunit with its myriad clues and red herrings and the detective summoning all the suspects for a comfortable chat, but there is patently more detective work required to discover the ins and outs of this mystery than earlier ones.
That said, Mankell drops the ball in two important ways here. The first may simply be a product of its time - Svedberg's status as a "confirmed bachelor" leads many characters to assume he was gay, and this subplot seems to bring out the worst in many of the supporting characters (not Wallander and Höglund, admittedly). It's entirely possible, as mentioned, that Sweden in the late 1990s may simply have been less tolerant than it famously is now, and that judging One Step Behind by contemporary standards on this issue may be as pointless as expecting the characters here to communicate by email and smartphone rather than letter and fax.
The second concern, though, is more serious. Mankell gives us a genuinely cold-blooded killer here, but one who appears to have performed certain actions purely to advance the plot, which is most unfortunate. One Step Behind features a brief epilogue where Wallander goes over his interrogation of the killer and asks many of the questions the reader will doubtless have about motive (some of the killer's-eye-view sections imply a very long-game kind of a plan - with a "schedule" of kills, and a reason for one of the more impressive set-pieces). The response, apparently, was that there was "no reason" for these.
There's nothing intrinsically wrong with a fictional killer performing bizarre actions to make a case more complicated, of course. One of the most famous lines in the cult comedy Clue is Tim Curry's explanation of why one of the victims was found in the bathroom - "Don't you see? To create confusion!" That said, when most of the killer's rationale is "I don't know", it's hard not to feel that the author created a set of puzzles without putting a motive behind them.
A lot of ink has been spilled, and bytes filled, about this sort of thing, and I don't intend to add much more to the debate, but it genuinely does seem a bit of a letdown when someone who is being set up to be one of the more memorable serial killers in recent literature really doesn't have a motive. Even the seemingly-motiveless killings in Larsson's Girl with the Dragon Tattoo can at least be put down to "men who hate women", while the vague attempts at a motive here are more than a bit facile.
4 stars. Leaving aside the rather weak ending, this is a truly gripping read.
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