The Man Who Outsells Harry Potter


Detective fiction/police procedurals can be gruesome but, I’ve been thinking that they’re quite hopeful. Unlike science fiction, which seeks to familiarize the reader, detective fiction seeks order. Should I go back to the Comparative Literature fold, I’ll do a monograph on the narrative and themes of detective fiction, Henning Mankell in particular. (For those who don’t know it, I’ve been devouring Scandinavian detective fiction for some months now, spurred by an article in The Guardian I read last year).

Speaking of Mankell – he’s a Swede who works as a theater director in South Africa – I’m halfway through his Kurt Wallander novel called The Man Who Smiled.

Wallander, Mankell’s protagonist is an inspector from a small town patterned after Agatha Christie small towns who always finds himself in the middle of international intrigue worthy of a John Le Carre. He’s can be a cross between the detective in the American harboiled tradition and Inspector Wexford of Ruth Rendell: he’s tortured, forlorn and lovelorn. He hates guns and does a lot of internal monologue. He’s in love with a woman who lives in Riga, Latvia who, in turn, is still in love with her dead husband. Wallander doesn’t speak much English, he’s got an inferiority complex and he used to take antidepressants for a year. (The reason for his depression can be read in The White Lioness. I don't want to explain it - it's a spoiler.) He is bitterly divorced. He has a paunch.

From what the Internet has told me, Mankell is a bestseller in Europe, even outselling Harry Potter in some parts of the continent. Yay!

By the way, while writing this entry, I was listening to The Heavy Blinkers’ The Night and I Are Still So Young album. They have songs that remind me of The Carpenters, but they are not as cheesy.