There’s a good half-dozen cops involved in the investigation but they’re pretty much all indistinguishable except for Rydberg (who’s old) and Wallander (who’s the protagonist). In keeping with the overall tone, this book is deeply procedural except in a few flashes of action.
Only cruel death and the threat of sectional (immigrant vs native) violence seems to wake anyone up from their daily rounds of unsatisfying, unpunished vices (gambling, philandering) and jobs. The only thing that distinguishes Wallander is that he likes opera- that’s his only character trait that distinguishes him from the “lonely divorced murder police” archetype (and come to think of it, I don’t think he’s the only one of those with a yen for classical music). Everyone is bored and boring and kind of sad. Life in Sweden as depicted in this book (and, to my understanding, the burgeoning Scandinavian crime fiction scene) as social democratic purgatory, but without the dynamic element purgatory usually has. Maybe that’s just an indication of how well Mankell gets into the mindspace of his cop protagonist, Kurt Wallander, in this first of several Wallander mysteries.īut there’s an extent to which everyone is faceless, here. I understand Mankell was a leftie - was on the Gaza flotilla that got shot up by the IDF, for instance - but this book seems pretty critical of Sweden’s lax border policies. Ciphers, flotsam from the fall of the Iron Curtain washed up on Sweden’s all-too-welcoming shores.
Henning Mankell, “Faceless Killers” (1991) (translated from the Swedish by Steven Murray) – Well, SPOILER ALERT, the killers are indeed faceless.
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