An Event in Autumn: A Kurt Wallander Mystery (13 page)

The book was duly published. Many years later the BBC discovered the story and made it the basis of a manuscript for a television film in which Kenneth Branagh would play the part of Wallander. I saw the film, and realized that the story still felt alive and relevant.

Later, when it became necessary to make a list of all my Wallander stories, I saw an opportunity to publish this “Dutch” story once again.

Chronologically, it dates to the period just before
The Troubled Man
, which completed the Wallander series.

There are no more stories about Kurt Wallander.

Henning Mankell

Gothenburg, October 2012

In a cardboard box down in my cellar is a collection of dusty diaries. They go back quite a long way in time. I’ve been keeping a diary since about 1965. Regularly on and off, you might say. They contain all kinds of things from attempts to create aphorisms to straightforward notes reminding me about things I’d prefer not to have forgotten about the following day. They contain a lot of gaps, sometimes a month or more long, but there are also periods when I have written every day.

Such as in the spring of 1990. I had returned from a long, unbroken stay in Africa, where I lived for six months at a time. When I got home I soon realized that while
I had been away racist tendencies had started to spread in Sweden in a most unpleasant way. Sweden has never been totally free from this social evil, but it was obvious to me that it had increased dramatically.

After a few months, I made up my mind to write about racism. I had quite different plans at the time for what I was going to write about, but I thought this was important.

More important.

When I began to think about what kind of story it would be, it soon dawned on me that the natural path to follow was a crime novel. This was obvious because in my world racist acts are criminal outrages. A logical consequence of this was that I would need an investigator, a crime expert, a police officer.

One day in May 1990 I wrote in my diary—unfortunately more or less illegible for anyone but me:
The warmest day this spring. Went for a walk round the fields. A lot of birdsong. It seemed to me that the police officer I shall describe must realize how difficult it is to be a good police officer. Crime changes in the same way that a society changes. If he is going to be able to do his work properly, he must understand what is going on in the society he lives in
.

I was living in Skåne at the time, in the middle of what could be called “Wallanderland.” I lived in a farmhouse on the edge of the village of Trunnerup. From the garden I could see the sea and a lot of church towers and steeples. When I got back from my walk I took out
the telephone directory. First I found the name Kurt. It was short and sounded fairly usual. A longer surname would be appropriate. I spent quite a while looking, and eventually hit upon Wallander.

That was also neither too common, nor too uncommon.

So that was what my police officer would be called: Kurt Wallander. And I let him be born in the same year as me: 1948. (Some pedants maintain that this isn’t consistently true in all the books. I’m sure they are right. What is consistently true in this life?)

Everything one writes is part of a tradition. Authors who maintain that they are totally divorced from literary traditions are lying. You don’t become an artist in no-man’s-land.

When I started thinking about how
Faceless Killers
should be written, I realized that the best and most fundamental “crime stories” I could think of were classical Greek dramas. The tradition goes back more than two thousand years in time. A play like
Medea
, which is about a woman who murders her children because she is jealous of her husband, reflects human beings through the mirror of crime. It’s about contradictions between us and inside us, between individuals and society, between dream and reality. Sometimes these contradictions express themselves in violence, such as racial conflict. And this mirror of crime can take us back to the Greek authors.

They still inspire us. The only real difference between then and now is that in those days there was hardly anything corresponding to our police force. Conflicts were resolved in a different way; often, gods held sway over human destiny. But generally speaking, that is the only basic difference.

The great Danish-Norwegian author Aksel Sandemose once said, liberally translated, “the only things worth writing about are love and murder.” He may well have been right. If he had added money, he would have created a trinity, which in one way or another is always present in literature, then as now, and presumably always will be.

I wrote that novel without ever thinking that there might be more featuring Chief Inspector Wallander. But I realized after the book had been published—and even won a prize—that I might have created a set-up that could be developed further. Another book was written,
The Dogs of Riga
, dealing with what happened in Europe after the collapse of the Berlin Wall. I flew to Riga, and afterward often felt that I ought to write a book about those weeks I spent in Latvia. It was a remarkable time. Tensions between Russians and Latvians had not yet reached bursting point. When I wanted to speak to a Latvian police officer it had to be a secret meeting in a dimly lit beer house. Much of the atmosphere in the novel was a gift as far as I was concerned—I merely
had to reproduce the difficulties I had in finding my way around with political tensions red-hot on all sides.

But I was still not convinced that there would be a series of novels featuring Kurt Wallander. However, on January 9, 1993, I sat down in my little apartment in Maputo to write a third book. It was to be called
The White Lioness
, and would be about the situation in South Africa. Nelson Mandela had been released from prison some years previously, but there was still a real danger that civil war might break out and plunge the country into chaos. It did not take long to work out that the worst thing that could possibly happen would be for Mandela to be murdered. Nothing could prevent that from leading to a bloodbath.

But just before I actually started writing I became very ill. I had been wandering around Maputo for some time feeling out of sorts. I was tired out, pale, couldn’t sleep. Could I be suffering from malaria? But blood tests showed no sign of parasites. Then one day I bumped into a good friend of mine who took one look at me and said:

“Your face is all yellow!”

I don’t remember much about being rushed into a hospital in Johannesburg, but once I got there I was diagnosed as suffering from an aggressive type of jaundice, and had been doing so for far too long.

I lay in my hospital bed, working out the story in my mind during the nights. By the time I had recovered
sufficiently to travel back home to Maputo, it was more or less ready for writing down. If I remember rightly, I wrote the last page first. That was the point I was working toward!

On April 10 that year, when I had already submitted the text to my publisher, I received worrying confirmation of how my thoughts on the subject had been only too right. On Good Friday a fanatical apartheid supporter shot dead Chris Hani, the chairman of South Africa’s Communist Party, and number two in the ANC. There was no civil war, thanks largely to Nelson Mandela’s intelligent politics. But I still wonder what would have happened if he had been the victim.

People sometimes say about the Wallander books that they deal with events that later happen in real life. I think that is true. I have no doubt that in some respects it is not impossible to foresee the future, and actually to be right. I thought it went without saying that when the Soviet Union collapsed and the eastern states opened up, we would be plagued by a new kind of criminality in Sweden and Western Europe. And that is what happened.

The starting point for
The Man Who Smiled
is about the worst crime involving property one could possibly commit or be a victim of—and it is not being robbed of one’s possessions. What is stolen in such cases is a part of a human being, an organ that can then be sold for
transplantation. When I began writing the book I had no doubt that it was a crime that would increase.

Today it is an industry that is flourishing and expanding.

Why did Wallander become so popular in so many different countries and cultures? What exactly was it that made him so many people’s friend? It is something I have wondered about, of course, and there is no definite answer. But there might be several partial explanations.

Here is the one I believe in preference to all others!

From the very beginning, when I made that spring walk through the fields, I was clear that I would create a human being who was very like myself and the unknown reader. A person who is constantly changing, both mentally and physically. I am changing all the time, and so he would also do the same.

That led eventually to what I somewhat ironically call “the diabetes syndrome.” After the third novel, I asked Victoria, a friend and a doctor who had read the books: “What disease that a lot of people suffer from would you give this man?”

Without a trace of doubt she replied immediately: “Diabetes.”

And so the next time I wrote about Wallander, he was diagnosed as having diabetes. And that made him even more popular.

Nobody can imagine James Bond stopping in a street, while chasing after some criminal or other, in order to inject himself with insulin. But Wallander does, and so he becomes like any other person who suffers from that illness, or something similar. He might have been afflicted by rheumatism or gout, a heart with an irregular beat or soaring blood pressure. But in fact he has diabetes, and he still suffers from it, although he has it under control.

Needless to say there are other reasons why Kurt Wallander has attracted so many readers. But I think the fact that he is always changing is crucial. There is a major but simple reason for this: I can only write books that I would want to read myself. And a book in which I either know all there is to know about the main character after just one page, or realize that nothing is going to change him or her in any way for the next thousand pages, is not a book I would have the patience to read.

You attract a lot of friends in the world of art. Sherlock Holmes still receives letters written to him in Baker Street, London. I get letters, e-mails and telephone calls from many countries. I am stopped in the streets of Gothenburg just as often as in Hamburg. The questions people ask me are friendly, and I try to answer them as best I can.

Most of the people who contact me are women who hope to cure Wallander’s loneliness. I seldom answer those letters. Nor do I think that the writers expect an
answer. People are sensible, despite everything. You can’t live with literary characters no matter how much you might like to. You can have them as imaginary friends that you can call up when you need them. One of the tasks of art is to provide people with companions. I have seen people in paintings who I hope to meet in the street one of these days. There are characters in books and films who become so alive that we turn a corner and expect to see them standing there. Wallander is one of those characters who hides behind corners. But he never emerges and shows himself. Not to me, at least.

I was once almost lost for words. It was 1994. There was to be a referendum in Sweden about whether or not we should join the EU. I was walking along Vasagatan in Stockholm when an elderly man stopped by my side. He was very friendly and well mannered, and asked if I was who he thought I was. I said yes. He then asked the following question:

“I wonder if Kurt Wallander will vote for or against the EU?”

His question was serious. I had no reason to doubt that. His curiosity was genuine. But how should I answer? I had never thought about it, of course. I tried desperately to think whether or not I knew if the Swedish police force as a whole was in favor of membership or not. In the end I said: “I think his vote will be the opposite of mine.” And I walked away before the friendly man had an opportunity to ask a follow-up question.

On that occasion I voted against membership. And so I am convinced that Wallander voted in favor.

A question I am often asked is what books Wallander reads.

It is a good question, because it is difficult to answer. I sometimes think he reads the books I write. But I’m not entirely convinced.

Unfortunately I don’t think Wallander is much of a reader—and what he does read is unlikely to be poetry. But I imagine that he likes reading about history, both factual books and historical novels. And I think he has always been fascinated by books about Sherlock Holmes.

Some people think that what I am about to say is completely untrue. But it is true. It is not a myth. It really did happen.

About fifteen years ago I started writing a book that would have Wallander as the main character. I wrote about a hundred pages, which is the point at which I start to believe seriously that what I am writing is destined to be a book.

But it didn’t turn out that way. After a few more pages I gave up and burned—literally—every page that had been printed out. I also erased the computer file, and when I bought a new computer shortly afterward I destroyed the old hard disc. I think I can say with confidence that
there are no ones and zeros left that could be used to re-create those hundred pages.

I didn’t finish writing the book because I was uncomfortable with it. I didn’t have the strength. It was about the abuse of children. Now, of course, I realize that I ought to have written it. Child abuse is one of the most unpleasant crimes in the world nowadays. And Sweden is no exception. But that is precisely why I became so uncomfortable with it. I simply couldn’t cope.

I understand that people query the truth of what I have just maintained. I have described a lot of things in my books that could certainly be considered horrendous. And I have no hesitation in saying that I found it extremely difficult to put a lot of pages down on paper. But of course I am aware that what happens in everyday life is always much worse than what I describe in my books. My imagination can never exceed reality. And so, sometimes, I must also write about disgusting things so as not to become divorced from credibility.