

Finding out the truth behind horrific crimes was as much a result of the ability to see connections as the patience to dig them out. The strong point of Mankell’s novels was Wallander’s dogged determination and painstaking thoroughness.
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Unlike sayĮlementary where the consulting detective has been pulled out of the fog-enwreathed Victorian world of hansom cabs to the present day, modern technology or problems do not add anything to the narrative.Īt a time when technology is evolving at a breathtaking pace,Īlex Rider (the books are set fairly recently in the 2000s), showed how to update seamlessly.

So if we are following Wallander’s print timeframe, he would have been 21 in the late 60s or early 70s. The story acts as a precursor to his struggles with maintaining a work-life balance, his fraught relationship with his painter father (who paints the same scene an astonishing 7000 times) and his girlfriend Mona, who would later become his wife. The tenacity and intuition that marks his later work are in play here when he refuses to accept the death of a neighbour as a simple case of suicide. The story follows a 21-year-old Wallander, who has just joined the police force. “Wallander’s First Case” appears in a collection of short stories, There was also the BBC English production with Kenneth Branagh (before he was the magnificently moustachioed Hercule Poirot) in the lead.
Faceless killers summary series#
A Swedish television series with Krister Henriksson playing Wallander featured new stories. There was a Swedish film series with Rolf Lassgård playing the titular role from 1994 to 2007. Wallander, also like Perry Mason has a robust, onscreen life. Swedish author Henning Mankell (1948-2015) wrote 12 books featuring Kurt Wallander, a police inspector in Ystad, from 1991 (the English translation,įaceless Killers, was published in 1997) to

Young Wallander is disconcertingly set in the present. While the HBO show on the defence lawyer’s transformation from down- and-out PI to courtroom titan (he is not pacing with his thumbs hooked to the armholes of his waistcoat yet) was set in 1931 Los Angeles, Here is another origin story of a beloved fictional character, close on the heels of the excellently atmospheric
