Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing

Driven by a vague sense of obligation — my parents have been watching and enjoying the Swedish TV adaptations — I decided to read Henning Mankell's Faceless Killers, the first of his series of Wallander novels.

When an elderly farming couple are savagely attacked, the only clue Inspector Wallander and his team have to go on is a peculiar knot and the wife's dying pronouncement: foreign. The news that the police suspect that the murder might not be Swedish quickly leaks, triggering a series of attacks on local refugees causing the police to split their focus between the farm murders and the racist attacks. As the investigation ebbs and flows, Wallander tries to come to terms with the failure of his marriage, his estrangement from this daughter, his father's gradual mental decline, and his gradual slide towards alcoholism.

Despite finding the book perfectly serviceable, I'm not really sure it entirely convinced me. In particular, I found Wallander's legendary gloominess unintentionally comic. Wallander keeps on asserting his own misery but he never really seems to convince as a genuine depressive — Åsa Larsson's accounts of Rebecka Martinsson's breakdowns are far more convincing — and I found that I couldn't take him seriously, rolling my eyes whenever he had another attack of my-life-is-so-awful.

Having said all that, I enjoyed the writing — and the translation — and I liked the way the murder mystery unfolded in an authentic-feeling series of fits and starts. I'm sure that, regardless of my initial doubts, I'll go on and read the rest of the series at some time fairly soon.