FACELESS KILLERS

2011-4-25 FACELESS KILLERS

Tonight I finished FACELESS KILLERS by Henning Mankell, an author from Sweden I got involver with long before I heard of Stieg Larsson and his MILLENNIUM TRILOGY. FACELESS KILLERS was published in Sweden in 1991 but it had to wait till 1997 to be translated into English and be published here. It was his first novel that featured Kurt Wallander, his earnest but anxiety-ridden detective, who has solved many cases through ten novels. PBS has done 4 “MYSTERY” programs based on the Wallander novels and more are on the way.

The killers in FACELESS KILLERS were two sets of criminals, one set was two thugs who were in Sweden as refugees from Eastern Europe who robbed, tortured and killed an elderly Swedish couple who lived on a farm, and the other set was another pair who killed a Somali immigrant as a political gesture. The murder of the Somali was solved first. The killers were affiliated with a number of right wing hate groups, although they committed this crime on their own hook. They were political fanatics, one being a retired policeman, who held Neo-Nazi anti-immigration views, which provided the motivation for their actions. They killed as a statement against the national policy on immigration. It was something personal with them. Wallander brought them to justice rather quickly. With the other two he had less to go on and it took months, but he finally, by following up a hunch, tracked them down. They had brutally murdered the farm couple. They were hard habitual criminals looking for scores in Sweden.

I thought it was interesting that Mankell was dealing with the same extremist right wing groups that obsessed Steig Larsson. Apparently, anyone left of center who had the public’s ear was honor-bond to warn them about these fascist wannabe zealots. Wallander was hardly a bleeding heart Liberal when it came to the immigration question; but on the other hand he was aghast at the execution-style murder of the Somali who was walking and minding his own business. He could not let an innocent person like the Somali, no matter how he got the spot were he died, pass without the guilty parties being found and punished.

Actually, Wallander is being retired. I have already bought THE TROUBLED MAN; it is in it that his travail ends. At the moment I don’t know how but I’ll find out soon.

He was pretty much a mess from the get-go. His wife Mona had left him and already had made a connection with another man, which pained him deeply. He was suffering terribly without her. He was drinking too much to meet other women. He was estranged from his daughter Linda who was living with a black man, which made him somewhat uncomfortable. Near the end of the book he does improve the relation a bit. He has a bad relationship with his elderly father, a painter who digs into his son at every opportunity, relentlessly. The old man, who is played perfectly by David Warner in the PBS series, which is simply called “Wallander,” lives alone and was going senile, an affliction that gets worse in the later novels. Like his father, Wallander has slovenly personal habits. His apartment is a sight; he wears rumpled clothing, and rarely combs his hair. He has other priorities. The one woman he made a play for while inebriated rebuked his advances and rejected him out of hand, which doesn’t do much for his low self-esteem. He worried about his weight and diet, slept poorly, and was preyed on by anxiety and depression. But despite all this baggage and burden he was a bulldog as a detective, a cop who would never give up till he got his man. He was able to compartmentalize his work from his life. He was able to focus on the case to the exclusion of personal demons and distractions, to bring his powers to bear, using both his analytical skills and his amazing intuition, which helped him find the two Eastern European killers after months of getting nowhere. He was an interesting character on both levels, as a sharp, determined detective always willing to go the extra mile to catch the bad guys, and as an emotional and psychological train wreck, a near-basket case who often seems to be hanging by a thread to sanity. Perhaps his personal confusions help him understand the criminal mind in some way. Whatever was the explanation, it was amazing what acentric balance he had; it allowed him to keep going as a functioning human being and resourceful detective. He may be a sad sack and a problem to himself and his family, but at HQ he was and still is THE MAN, the cop who always solved cases no matter how difficult they seemed at the beginning.