Henning Mankell - "The Pyramid"

After the publication of Firewall in 1998, Henning Mankell considered the Kurt Wallander story to be complete. Fans, however, consistently asked him about what had happened to Wallander before his first appearance (Faceless Killers), and Mankell eventually felt that it was important to tell those stories as well. The result was Pyramiden, published in Swedish in 1999, and translated as The Pyramid into English by Laurie Thompson and Ebba Segerberg in 2008.

The Pyramid covers five shorter Wallander cases, spanning everything from his first investigation out of uniform through to the case he had just wrapped up when Faceless Killers began. In a charming touch, Mankell ends that fifth story - the novella The Pyramid - with the same fateful phone call which sends Wallander to a farmhouse where two people have been brutally murdered.
The second, third, and fourth stories (The Man with the Mask, The Man on the Beach, and The Death of the Photographer) are legitimately short stories, with The Pyramid and the appropriately-titled Wallander's First Case which bookend them being slightly longer. The Man with the Mask, indeed, is barely more than a brief sketch of an event which occurred when Wallander was in the process of moving from Malmö to Ystad, the smaller town with which he is so intimately associated.

A recurring thread in these stories is the tenuous relationship Wallander has with Mona, the woman who is his ex-wife by the time the series properly starts. His troubled relationships with his father and daughter, too, play key roles. The irascible man regular Mankell readers know and love is still painting his landscapes (sometimes with a grouse, other times without them), and on one occasion calls the police station and describes himself as "a distant relative, which infuriates Wallander. On the other hand, The Pyramid itself features a moment where Wallander - to say nothing of the reader - genuinely appreciates the depth of feeling the two men appear to have for each other.
We also see a much stronger connection between Wallander and his colleague Rydberg, whose death plays a role in the rest of the series. Many of the pieces of wisdom Wallander holds dear make their debuts in these stories, in fact.

Plot-wise, these stories tend to leave a bit to be desired. The Man on the Beach has a particularly clever plot, but the resolution feels rather staged, while The Death of the Photographer really deserves a much cleverer resolution than the two-dimensional solution provided. The title story has more of Mankell's expected twists and turns, and a resolution perhaps better-crafted than some of the novel-length excursions Mankell has given us over the years.
That said, the reader is unlikely to be reading these as detective stories, so much as for the insights into Wallander's character, and these are plentiful. Mankell, in a foreward, also makes the point that a lot of Wallander's stories focus on the crisis of the Swedish social-democratic state, and that particular concern is omnipresent here, which perhaps explains the "bad guy is bad" resolution so common to the series a bit better.

Not an essential inclusion in the Wallander series, but one which his more dedicated followers will want to read.

3.5 stars.