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It's also entirely possible that's just what Sweden's like at that time of year, though, so perhaps it's quite presumptuous of me to frame it like pathetic fallacy. The environment also seems to mirror the drabness of Wallander's life the story takes place in the dead of winter, and the backdrop is so grey that it probably looks something like purgatory for those afflicted with seasonal depression.

Probably sounds uneventful, I know, but it rounds out Wallander's character nicely, and it makes the people surrounding him also feel equally real. Mundanity also has as much a presence in the novel as Wallander's work there's several diversions devoted to his personal life, and sometimes it's not even that, like his car breaking down, for example. Best of all, the book doesn't offer any answers, which I find surprising more than ever given Mankell's left-wing persuasion, but I actually kind of respect him for that, because the issues the book grapple with are far too complex for there to be a single or easy solution, and it's not something that can be solved by any one person, let alone a novelist.

Mankell rightly decries the bigoted asshats that Wallander has to put up with, but he also has dim view of contemporary immigration policies, or at least the policymakers there's a chapter where Wallander phones an immigration officer who refuses to acknowledge the government's failure to account for a shamefully large amount of refugees and somehow fails to realize that anything's amiss. I gather that it was a sensitive issue in 1991 Sweden, and it probably still is, though it's far more evenhanded than I remember it being. In what I hear is the grand tradition of Scandinavian crime fiction there's a great deal of social commentary, mostly concerning immigration in this case.

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Latent xenophobes immediately latch onto the wife's dying word, 'foreign', and thinking it gives them license to act on their hatred, begin a slew of racially motivated crimes that keeps the police department's hands full.

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The idea of rereading any crime fiction book wasn't an immediately attractive one, because where's the fun in a mystery that you already know all the answers to, but somehow I liked it far more having reread it.įaceless Killers/ MÃ¶rdare utan ansikte, the first in the Wallander series about a detective based in the southern Swedish town of Ystad, has Kurt Wallander investigate the double murder of a farmer and his wife. Then I got wind that Scandinavia's a happening place for the genre, picked up this book, and read a lot of and before the subsequent and ongoing fantasy binge. well, whatever I could find in the basement and the occasional texts from English classes that particularly struck me. In the early days before I discovered crime fiction I was more into.

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