Henning Mankell, the Swedish crimewriter who is the creator of Inspector Kurt Wallender, is being taken increasingly seriously: an international bestseller but also the subject of profiles in literary papers. He has already won the prestigious (British) Crimewriters’ Gold Dagger Award with Sidetracked. It seems the measure of the success of his dour, dispirited and diabetic Inspector that the last Mankell, The Return of the Dancing Master, made a feature of ignoring Wallender altogether — much as Agatha Christie created a middle-aged lady sleuth in Ariadne Oliver, sated perhaps with Poirotmania.
However, the latest Mankell offering is right back with Wallender and in my opinion all the better for it. The trouble with The Return of the Dancing Master was that the book itself was dispiriting, instead of assigning that burden to the detective himself, leaving the reader to revel in his personal crises at one remove.
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