Mankell is quick to point out that he and Wallander don't have a whole lot in common. "We both like Italian opera," Mankell says. "We work a lot. But he's not the kind of man I would be friends with."
Mankell has quirks of his own. When he comes to New York, he likes to stay in a particular room at the Drake Hotel. If the room is not available, he will wait a week until it is. What he likes most about the room: There are no neighbors.
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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He has been to Washington twice before, but on this day he wants to see two landmarks he has never seen: the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the Watergate hotel and office complex. As he walks near the Lincoln Memorial, he asks questions about America, about its abundance and its poverty. He stands with his back against the chill wind and stares toward the east.
Then he begins to talk a little -- just a little -- about his family. And, in a weird coincidence, the bleak midwinter sun breaks through the clouds overhead.
The Mankells, he says, come from a long line of French musicians. His father, a judge, broke from tradition.
When Henning was young, his mother ran away. "There was not another man," Mankell says. "She just left."
The judge raised Mankell and two other children. There is a sister, who is a librarian, and a brother, who is a musician, with Mankell in the middle. "I didn't meet my mother until I was 15," he says. By then, there wasn't much to say.
Talking about his mother, his family, is difficult for Mankell. His face reddens; he clears his throat a lot. It could be the winter wind.
Mankell learned right and wrong from the judge, he says, and "a fierce sense of the seriousness of the system of justice." You can feel that passion in his pages. The family lived in the northern village of Sveg. Mankell's father served all of Harjedalen province -- population 2,000. In 24 years on the bench, the judge presided over no murder cases and only one manslaughter trial. Mostly folks ended up in court for hunting out of season and having children out of wedlock. There were lots of paternity suits, Mankell says.
The judge also taught his son that "in order to do anything, you have to understand the person." And Mankell was able to see that many human stories have beginnings, middles and ends.
When he was 16, Mankell dropped out of high school and eventually settled in Paris. By the time he was 20, he was writing plays. His literary career took off. His favorite playwrights are August Strindberg and Tennessee Williams. In a few weeks, Mankell will leave for Mozambique and his theater.
He doesn't watch television. He doesn't like to sit and drink coffee and waste time. He says that he and Eva do have friends over for dinner now and then. His specialty is sweet-and-sour tomato soup. "The secret," he says, "is the lemon."
For a brooder, Mankell stays busy. "This is not true, but I like to think it's true," he says. "In the Amazon forest there is a bird that flies all the time. It must fly or it will die. I am like that bird."
He wants to be buried where he dies -- in Sweden or Africa, it doesn't matter.
Until then he plans to write. He believes his Wallander novels will become more widely read in America. "It's like an express train in some countries," he says, "and a slow train in others."
Translator Segerberg agrees. From Germany she writes in an e-mail, "My impression is that he is getting more popular in the U.S., but remains more exotic there."
He's just finishing a new thriller, "Kennedy's Brain," about the global AIDS crisis. In future works, he will explore the relationship between Kurt Wallander and his daughter.
He also writes children's books. In one, he says, a cat disappears and never comes back. The book differs from most children's books about vanishing cats. Ordinarily, the pets return and there is a happy ending.
Not in Mankell's dark, out-of-the-ordinary story. When the book was published in Sweden, he says, "it created a scandal." Some critics thought Mankell's view of this planet as an uncertain vessel, full of loneliness and loss, may have crept into the tale a little too much.
None of his children's books, it turns out, have been translated for Americans.
