"Are you a pessimist?" someone asks.
"We live in a terrible world," Mankell says, grimacing.
The Wallander novels are set in the countryside of Sweden. "Twenty years ago," Mankell says, "something changed. Crime moved into rural areas."
Crime, says Mankell, "gives us a mirror to talk about humanity's contradictions." His latest novel is "Before the Frost."
(Susan Biddle -- The Washington Post)
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His portly old detective wrestles with vanishing manners and changing mores. There is as much action in the heads of his characters as there is at the police stations and crime scenes. "I'm not very interested in action itself," Mankell says. "Thinking, contemplating, the real drama is inside the heart."
In "Before the Frost" a religious cult plans terrorist attacks and, as in other Mankell books, there is much death. At one juncture, Wallander walks among a stand of trees and tells his daughter: "I came here a week or so after your grandfather died. I felt as if I had completely lost my footing in life. You were much stronger than I was. I was sitting down at the station trying to figure out a brutal assault case. Ironically it was a young man who had half-killed his father with a sledgehammer. The boy lied about everything and suddenly I couldn't take it anymore. I halted the interrogation and came here, and that's when I felt that these trees had become gravestones for all the people I knew who had died. That I should come here to visit with them, not where they are actually buried. Whenever I'm here I feel a calm I don't feel anywhere else. I can hug the dead here without them seeing me."
Crime, Mankell says, "gives us a mirror to talk about humanity's contradictions -- man and man, man and society, man and society and dreams."
A high school dropout, Mankell can be preachy -- a didactic autodidact. Crime literature, he says, "is one of the oldest genres." It predates Edgar Allan Poe. The ancient Greeks wrote about murder and mystery and mayhem. So have other writers through the centuries. The best crime story ever written, he says, was "Macbeth" -- about a woman who urges her husband to murder someone for political gain.
And he can turn philosophical. "I don't believe we are born evil," he says. "There are only evil circumstances."
In his books, and in person, Mankell rails against those circumstances. "The ABCs book is probably the most political and dangerous book in the world," he says. "Some people want to keep others from learning to read and write."
He wags his finger. "Do you know how much it would cost to put an ABC book in the hands of every child? The same as what Europe spends on food for cats and dogs." He rants some more.
In his books, the moral lessons are more subtle.
"I like the way he deals with social issues," says Linda Laymon, a Bethesda property manager who is at the movie premiere. "They are woven into the story."
Pick up a Mankell and you know immediately that he is a practitioner of the popular postmodern No Style style -- that is, short sentences with few modifiers and almost no flourish. He writes spare sentences. But he is also a master, as Laymon says, of pinpointing societal problems and exploring them, sometimes in graphic detail. Wallander is an old fat guy who is beset by adult diabetes and other chronic and corrosive maladies, which the reader hears all about. Wallander does not shy away from life's sicknesses and sadnesses.
The character, says Ebba Segerberg, who translated "Before the Frost" into English, "is so ordinary, really, but he gets under your skin."
