STOCKHOLM, Oct 6 — Henning Mankell, the Swedish novelist and playwright best known for police procedurals that were translated into a score of languages and sold by the millions throughout the world, died yesterday morning in Goteborg, Sweden. He was 67.
The cause was cancer, said his literary agent Anneli Hoier. Last year, Mankell disclosed that doctors had found tumours in his neck and left lung.
Mankell was considered the dean of the Scandinavian noir writers who gained global prominence for novels that blended edge-of-your-seat suspense with flawed, compelling protagonists and strong social themes. Others include Arnaldur Indridason of Iceland, Jo Nesbo of Norway and Stieg Larsson of Sweden.
But it was Mankell who led the way with 10 mystery novels featuring Inspector Kurt Wallander, a gruff but humane detective troubled by self-doubt, overeating, alcoholism and eventually dementia. Most of the action takes place in and around Ystad, a real-life town of 18,350 inhabitants on the Baltic Sea; it has become a magnet for Wallander buffs.
Mankell divided his time between Stockholm and Maputo, the capital of Mozambique, where he was artistic director of Teatro Avenida, a local theater.
“I came to Africa with one purpose: I wanted to see the world outside the perspective of European egocentricity,” he wrote in an essay for The New York Times in 2011. “I could have chosen Asia or South America. I ended up in Africa because the plane ticket there was cheapest.”
Though Africa was rarely the main setting for Mankell’s detective novels, it informed his sensitivity to the mistreatment of non-European immigrants in enlightened Sweden.
“Solidarity with those in need run through his entire work and manifested itself in action until the very end,” Robert Johnsson, Mankell’s literary agent for Sweden, and Dan Israel, with whom he founded the publishing company Leopard, said in a statement.
Mankell grew irritated over attempts by readers to trace elements from his life in Wallander’s. Still, the parallels were there.
Born in Stockholm on Feb. 3, 1948, he was abandoned by his mother, along with his two siblings, and they moved in with their father, a judge, in Sveg, a small community in northern Sweden.
Through his father’s court activities, Mankell learned about criminal cases in a small-town setting not unlike Wallander’s investigations in Ystad. And like the author’s mother, Wallander is an errant parent who abandons a child — though the two reconcile in the course of the detective series.
Mankell, whose grandfather was a composer, passed on his love of classical music to his famous detective. Wallander spends many lonely nights listening to Mozart operas or walking the windswept beaches of Ystad with his dog, Jussi — named after Jussi Bjorling, the Swedish tenor.
And Wallander’s repeated failures at lasting romances echoed the author’s own: Mankell was married four times, the last time to Eva Bergman, daughter of the Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman. “It shows I am an optimist,” Mankell said in a 2013 interview with The Guardian.
Mankell embarked early on a literary career. Hoping to emulate Joseph Conrad, he went to sea in the Swedish merchant marine at 16. But he quit when, after numerous voyages, he had travelled no farther than the British industrial port of Middlesbrough. Besides, at 19, a play he had written was produced in Stockholm. A year later, he was named an assistant theatre director and travelled the country with touring productions.
It was not until 1991, when Mankell was 43, that the first of his Wallander novels, “Faceless Killers,” was published. In the opening scene, Ystad police officers, led by Wallander, are called to an isolated farmhouse where they find the owner, an elderly man, tortured to death. His wife, brutally bludgeoned, survives only long enough to utter a single word: “Foreign.” And that incites Ystad mobs to attack local immigrants in revenge. The novel won the Glass Key award, given annually to a crime novel written by a Scandinavian.
Mankell’s popularity grew with each Wallander mystery. In “Sidetracked” (1995), a series of aged men, apparently model citizens, are killed in increasingly grisly fashion and then scalped by the murderer.
In “One Step Behind” (1997), three young revellers, dressed as 18th-century nobles, are found shot to death in a forest. And in “The Man Who Smiled” (1994), a depressed, alcoholic Wallander comes out of brief retirement to investigate a double murder that may be linked to a wealthy philanthropist.
Like almost all of the Wallander mysteries, these best-sellers were adapted for television. The British actor and director Kenneth Branagh played Wallander in several BBC broadcasts. Perhaps the most successful Wallander screen portrayals were for Swedish television and starred the Swedish actor Krister Henriksson, whom Mankell often said came closest to his own image of the detective.
Income from his novels and their screen adaptations made Mankell a multimillionaire. But he continued to espouse often controversial, left-wing views.
A virulent critic of Israel, he denounced the two-state solution as fraudulent. Writing for a leftist political blog, Pulse, after a visit to Israel and the West Bank in 2009, he called for “the fall of this disgraceful Apartheid system.” And in 2010, he was aboard one of the ships in the flotilla that tried to break Israel’s blockade of Gaza. In a confrontation with Israeli forces on one of the boats, nine people were killed. Mankell, who was on another vessel, was arrested and deported.
He is survived by his wife, Bergman, and a son, Jon. — The New York Times
