YSTAD

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.

To me the twin fascinations of crime fiction are the bringing of order out of chaos, (for I am a tidy fellow), and the exploration of harsh landscapes and their effects on mortal folk.

 As I read the Harry Bosch novels of Michael Connelly my mind constructs a vivid picture of Los Angeles - when I drove down Mulholland Drive a few years ago I imagined I was tailing Bosch or Joe Pike. Reading The Snowman by Jo Nesbo, I relive with Harry Hole my visit to the eerie Holmenkollen ski tower in Oslo. Landscape features strongly in the Martin Walker ‘Bruno Courreges’ novels set in Périgord, France; Stephen Booth’s novels set in the Peak District, especially The Devils Edge in the Peak District; Lindsey Davis’s ‘Falco’ novels in Rome; Michael Dibdin’s best Aurelio Zen novel, The Dead Lagoon set in Venice; and from the queen and king of police procedurals, Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, the city of Budapest plays a central role in The Man Who Went Up in Smoke. When I read these authors’ works I can sense the places they portray, adding to the enjoyment of the read.

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.

 If you would like to share your experiences of reading crime fiction and the places discussed in this blog please record them in the Comments section.

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