Mankell’s Kurt Wallander on BBC
By Peter on Nov 29, 2008 in About authors, Excellent book, Swedish crime book, The World of Books, bestseller
Henning Mankell, the Swedish international bestselling author, will now be featured on BBC. The grumpy, newly divorced, middle-aged and opera-loving detective Kurt Wallander will make his appearance on the box in England this weekend.
Inspector Kurt Wallander is being played by Kenneth Branagh in BBC1’s new Sunday-night crime drama Wallander. In this crime series both the main character and the setting are Swedish, which is somewhat unusual for BBC crime series.
Inspector Kurt Wallander is Sweden’s most successful literary export – actually outgrossing Harry Potter in Germany (greatly to that nation’s credit) and selling more than 25 million copies worldwide – and they have made a star of the detective’s creator, Henning Mankell. The Independent writes:
Henning Mankell, born in Stockholm 60 years ago, produced his first Wallander novel in 1991, and there have been eight more since. Wallander has turned Mankell into a multimillionaire – not bad proceeds, given the kind of character Wallander is – a lugubrious detective with a fast-food habit, diabetes and a messy private life. Even Mankell himself says he is not particularly attracted to Wallander as an individual. “I would rather be friends with Sherlock Holmes.”
Mankell’s Wallander novels are the best-selling spearhead of a worldwide wave of Scandinavian crime fiction that really broke in 1994 with Danish writer Peter Hoeg’s Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow. From Norway there have come Jo Nesbo and Karin Fossum, and Mankell’s compatriots Eva-Marie Liffner and the late Stieg Larsson. But it is Mankell and Wallander (the name was picked from the Stockholm telephone directory) who have done most to popularise the wintry charms of the Nordic whodunnit.
And yet in many respects Mankell is an atypical crime writer, less attracted to the genre for its own pleasures than for its possibilities as a conduit for his social concerns. “I could never write a crime story just for the sake of it, because I always want to talk about certain things,” he says, citing John Le Carré as a key influence and Macbeth as the best crime story he has ever read.
You can read reviews of Henning Mankell’s books at ScandinavianBooks (more here).
1 Trackback(s)
You must be logged in to post a comment.