The man should never
have looked up. Weaving towards him over the water’s surface like a giant
firefly the drone glared at him with beady eyes. Then two white flashes… hot metal pierced his eyes. His body tumbled
into the icy harbour water, dead before submersion.
If the late, great Henning
Mankell had been writing Inspector Wallander police procedurals today that
is how he might have introduced another horrific crime in Ystad. In twenty
years the name of Kurt Wallander has become synonymous with this pretty,
medieval market town and the surrounding landscape.
Ystad, on the coast in
the county of Skåne, is at the southernmost
part of Sweden. Before 1997, when the first Wallander crime novel was
published, it is unlikely that many people outside of Sweden will have heard of
it. I visited in the summer of 2010. As I walked its cobbled streets, flanked
by colourful half-timbered houses and ubiquitous hollyhocks, I imagined criminals
lurking in every narrow side street. Strolling down Mariagatan where Wallander
lived in the early stories, I found the hospital where chilling events took
place in the novel The Fifth Woman - a
book in my top five crime novels published in the last thirty years.
Landscapes and mankind across the globe have fought each
other for centuries. In Ystad we have the phenomenon of a landscape haunted by
the ghosts of a fictional detective and appalling imaginary crimes. So many
crimes (described in eleven novels and numerous short stories over fourteen
years) that many readers have questioned how such a small Swedish town could
play host to such carnage and
crookedness.
Readers of Mankell
will appreciate the Skåne landscape is as central to the plots as the
characters of Kurt Wallander, Jussi his dog and the other police officers in
Ystad. It is a gentle landscape with rolling fields. In early summer oilseed
rape grows profusely. In autumn fogs roll in from the Baltic before the winter
snows blanket farmhouses, fields and roads, providing perfect cover for murder
and mayhem. At the nearby village of Kåseberga lies Sweden’s largest megalithic stone circle,
Ales Stenar. It has stood a lonely, silent witness to actual and imaginary death
and destruction.
Throughout my visit real life tragedy and violence in Sweden
was never far from mind. For what happened here is so un-British. In 1961 the
Secretary General of the UN, Dag Hammarskjöld, died mysteriously in an air crash. His
farmhouse near Kåseberga is only
twenty kilometers from Ystad. Thirty years ago the then prime minister Olof
Palme was gunned down in a Stockholm street and in 2003 the Foreign Minister,
Anna Lindh, was fatally stabbed in a shop. I think Henning Mankell was creating
in macrocosm in his Ystad crime novels the violence he perceived in Swedish
society at large. The writer Andrew Brown wrote; “After Palme’s death, Sweden
became, for a while, a foreign country to itself. The country we lived in was
cracked open like a roofless house in winter."
There is this recurring theme in the Wallander novels - what
went wrong with society. Kurt, in The
Fifth Woman, at one point asks a hotel receptionist, “Why is it that
everything is getting so much worse, more brutal?” He was talking about Swedish
society in the 1990s. The answer is that the Sweden that was built after the
war was brittle. Under the veneer of reconstruction was “quagmire”. The 1960s
high-rise buildings were unfeeling. Inhabitants could not maintain their
dignity. Thus, city dwellers felt unwanted and unloved in the place they knew
well. So they kicked out. They perpetrated violent acts on fellow citizens.
Kurt Wallander talking to his daughter in The Fifth Woman draws me to an
alternative analysis of what has gone wrong in our landscapes. I like this as it reflects my own
sense of how our mode of life has changed. Mankell/Wallander says: “When I was growing up Sweden was still
a country where people darned their socks. Then suddenly one day it was over.
Socks with holes in them were thrown out. No one bothered to repair them. The
whole society changed. ‘Wear it out and toss it’. As long as it was a matter of
our socks, the change did not make much difference. But then it started to
spread, until finally it became a kind of invisible moral code."
Instead of Sweden now think Britain. Jobs stricken urban
landscapes in the UK may be a root cause of tension between some xenophobic
Brexiteers and immigrants. Landscape, and human activity within it, influences
a country and how it evolves. Crime fiction is enjoying an upsurge in sales. We
must be wary of it anaesthetising our psyches against the real life terror
playing out in cities, remote farmhouses and forests.
I keep an ever changing list of crime novels and their worldwide
settings. If you would like a copy let me know.
Books by all the authors referenced above can be bought at: https://bookshop.blackwell.co.uk
The Fifth Woman, Henning Mankell.
Harvill Secker. Sweden 1991
Faceless Killers, Henning Mankell Harvill
Secker. Sweden 1996
Quicksand, Henning Mankell. Harvill Secker. London 2016
Fishing in Utopia, Andrew
Brown. Granta Books 2008
The crime fiction
of Michael Connelly, Jo Nesbo, Martin Walker, Stephen Booth, Lindsey Davis,
Michael Dibdin, Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö
are all available in paperback
