The man who smiled

Nabbing the villain is the weakest part of a strong book

The Man Who Smiled
By Henning Mankell
Translated by Laurie Thompson
The New Press. 325 pp. $24.95
Reviewed by Maxine Clarke

Inspector Kurt Wallander of the police force in Ystad, Sweden, has killed a man, and has spent more than a year on sick leave, unable to continue with his work. At the start of The Man Who Smiled, he finally decides to quit. But that very day, he discovers that an acquaintance, Sten Torstensson, who has recently asked him for help, has been murdered, which leads him to change his mind.
Henning Mankell's Wallander books are mainly about character - the characters of the police force, that is, not of the criminal mind. The reader knows from almost the first page that an apparent suicide, Torstensson's father, was in fact murdered. Not only this, but how and by whom. Yet it is not until one-third of the way through the book that the police are sure that the first death was in fact a murder. And only after another 100 pages, two-thirds of the way through, do they realize who is responsible. The strength of the book is to draw the reader into the police investigation, trying like them to tie the clues and threads together into a coherent picture. Nothing much happens until the last 50 pages.
Why is this book so compelling? In a word, the character of Wallander. This is a man who approaches his work like an academic: "So much police work is dull routine, but there could occasionally be moments of inspiration and excitement, an almost childish delight in playing around with feasible alternatives."
Wallander is not the policeman of crime-fiction cliche who tries to solve the mystery on his own without collaborating with colleagues, nor is he the type who can be persuaded to do anything for expediency. He just follows his own stubborn course. So the heart of the book is the inner life and thoughts of this unromantic, fiftyish man, and how he doggedly convinces first himself and then his colleagues and superiors that there is a thread to follow, a thread that will lead to an answer. The satisfaction of the book comes from a description of this exercise of the mind, not from any thriller or graphic elements.
Wallander spends much of the book following slight leads, not letting any of them, however tenuous, go. A typical example is when a person tangential to the investigation is found to have committed suicide some time ago, in a different part of the country. Wallander visits the victim's boss, who barely knew him, but provides the information that the previous boss had retired after many years' service. So Wallander visits the retired man. He knocks on his door out of the blue and asks to talk to him. The witness replies: "I'm an old man, tired but not yet quite finished. I admit to being curious. I'll answer your questions, if I can."
This leads to the first major break in the case, and pretty well sums up the pared-down, unsentimental style of these books. Later in the story, Wallander is interviewing a young woman journalist: "They both worked on investigations, they both spent their time constantly running up against crime and human suffering. The difference was that she was trying to expose crime to prevent it happening, while Wallander was always occupied in clearing up crimes that had already been committed."
Mankell is not writing "mere" genre fiction, but about the sadness of the human condition.
Eventually, Wallander gets his man. To me, this was the least satisfactory part of the story. After setting up the situation in which Sweden is changing after the assassination of Olof Palme, becoming a younger country with a different type of criminal and hence a different type of policeman (or -woman), the book peters out. Wallander finds himself in a standard "hero in peril" situation, and although the villain is apprehended, I found this unconvincing - indeed almost self-induced. The plot also depends on the villain's being ruthlessly efficient at dispatching people without leaving clues, but then suddenly becoming strangely inefficient at this task.
But do not be put off from reading this book, which is excellent. For an unknown (to me) reason, Mankell's books have been translated into English in non-chronological order. The Man Who Smiled is the fourth Wallander story of eight. I have read the others, and would probably not have read this one had I not been asked to review it, as I know what happens in subsequent books. That would have been a mistake, not least because this is the book in which policewoman Ann-Britt Hoglund makes her debut. I commend the New Press (www.thenewpress.com) for publishing this as well as other Mankell novels and nonfiction works in translation.

Maxine Clarke is a science editor for the journal Nature. Her Web log Petrona is at http://petrona.typepad.com.

Review at Philadelphia Inquirer Sunday 17 September 2006