The Troubled Man
Henning Mankell (2011)
PT9876.23.A49 O7613 2011
Highly successful mystery/detective story writer. Very popular, almost revered, fictional detective known world-wide (translated into forty languages selling more than thirty million copies globally) the subject of films, television (Mystery, starring Kenneth Branagh no less), commentaries and other books. An instantly recognizable city and region inhabited by fictional characters who feel real. How does the mystery writer kill-off the detective, his most successful creation – and the source of his livelihood and freedom? Sound familiar?
Close to the renown of Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes, Henning Mankell is faced with the same decision in his latest (last?) Kurt Wallander novel, The Troubled Man as Conan Doyle was with Holmes in his short story, The Final Problem: how to write a page-turning, compelling novel and kill-off Kurt Wallander?
The parallels between both authors are unmistakable and the structural similarities are recognizable even as readers are carried along by carefully plotted mysteries which are satisfyingly resolved. Where Holmes has his Moriarty, Wallander has his Alzheimer’s. Will Mankell, like Conan Doyle, regret his decision and have Wallander return to intuitively solve complex mysteries and crimes? And, by the way, The Troubled Man is a great mystery! Wallander unravels the mystery of the disappearance of a retired top Swedish naval officer and his wife during which time Wallander also plausibly “solves” the real-life mystery and scandal in the 1980’s of the alleged incursion of Soviet submarines into Swedish territorial waters as well as indirectly suggesting a possible scenario for the assassination of Sweden’s then prime minister, Olof Palme, in 1986. Ghosts of the Cold War from the former Soviet Union, East Germany, western and eastern spies, the CIA and NATO continue to haunt contemporary Europe. People, who in their younger years served the west or east (or in some cases both!), are still alive in today’s Europe and for any number of reasons don’t want secrets revealed, ambiguities clarified or mysteries solved. Who would have thought that naval maneuvers and submarine incursion could be the stuff – the basis - of an enthralling mystery?
