Book review

The Troubled Man by Henning Mankell
Vintage paperback £7.99 USBN 978-0-099-54840-9

Mankell in New York in 2011

Henning Mankell, the Swedish novelist and crime writer who died last week, was one of the most human and perceptive authors in the genre. The Troubled Man, his final book about Kurt Wallander, a reluctant police detective with a lot else to worry about, hinges on the fact that Wallander absent-mindedly leaves his service gun in a cafe. There is of course an official rumpus, but at a more telling level, it ushers in Wallander’s awful fear that he is in the early stages of Alzheimer’s. At the time, we now realise, Mankell would have known he had lung cancer. The plot is Chandleresque in its subtlety, but the strength of the writing comes from the author’s ability to get deep inside the psyche of his troubled hero. At one level, the book is a tense, dangerous thriller, but at another, its pages set out a human testament that is elegiac and deeply moving.

A baggage check ticket to Johannesburg fell out of my second-hand copy, left by someone reading Mankell on a long flight. He was truly a writer for the world.