The 3 best books by Henning Mankell

El swedish writer Henning Mankell was already dedicated to Novelty when all the current upstarts of the Nordic Negro genre were still in diapers. I say it this way to try to empathize with the perspective of an author who in his later years would discover the potential as a best-selling genre of the stories that he himself had been writing for many years.

The advantage for the first Mankell, of which he made virtue, was that the possibilities of the genre noir extended in a fertile field. The disadvantage was that voracious readers of the black genre would arrive at least a decade later, with the turn of the millennium, with globalization and the taste for a genre that only reflects a sinister reality on some occasions and decadent on others.

Maybe because of it, or maybe not, Mankell also dedicated himself to the world of dramaturgy. Tireless traveler, musician, activist for different causes and with a political soul.

A tendency for politics that to a large extent differentiated him and will always differentiate him from many of the new authors of the Nordic Negro. And it is that Mankell used his gruesome cases to give more than a review of power, the status quo and corruption.

His character from Kurt Wallander, present in more than 10 of his novels, it is essential for all lovers of black and police.

3 Recommended Novels By Henning Mankell

Return of the dance teacher

Sometimes, with authors so given to serial novels, it is always difficult to pinpoint where to start. Many of his novels about policeman Kurt Wallander are anthologies for the genre. But to start with one that has no outstanding or future debts in its series, I would select this as your best individual novel.

Summary: In December 1945, a British plane lands in Buckenburg (Germany) and a man with a small black bag descends from it and heads to Hamelin prison, where twelve German war criminals are held: his mission is to execute those dangerous killers.

Fifty-four years later, in 1999, Herbert Molin, a retired Swedish policeman who lives peacefully on his farm in the small village of Härdjedalen, is brutally killed. An old partner of Molin, the young Stefan Lindman, decides to travel to Härdjedalen to find out what happened, despite the fact that he is not in very good health.

Bones in the garden

Entering fully into the Wallander universe, my favorite novel is this. At times an aroma of Agatha Christie, I don't know, in sophistication ...

But good old Wallander, cunning and stubborn in difficult cases, returns us to the dark reality of a world where a well-executed murder can wipe someone off the face of the Earth, until chance stumbles over their bones.

Summary: One Sunday in October 2002, an exhausted Kurt Wallander after an intense week of work goes to visit what could be the house of his dreams, on the outskirts of Löderup. While wandering alone through the garden of the farm, ruminating whether to buy it or not, he stumbles upon something half hidden in the grass.

To his surprise, they are the bones of a hand. That same night, when the technicians turned on their floodlights and dug around, a corpse came to light that, according to forensics, has been underground for more than fifty years.

Shortly before Christmas, and despite budget cuts in the Scania police, Inspector Wallander, along with his colleagues Martinsson and Stefan Lindman (the protagonist of Return of the Dance Teacher), continues to investigate what appears to be a very murder. ancient.

But is it possible to clarify a crime committed so long ago? When he is about to give up, Wallander returns to the garden of what may have been his home. And something awakens in him new suspicions that will become a new discovery.

The fifth woman

Men killed in an unexpected series. Gray types of lives, with simple hobbies and zero records in any police station ... An unusual case for good old Wallander. A genre novel certainly different.

Summary: The usual placidity of the Swedish city of Ystad is broken when, with a certain interval of time, three men appear savagely murdered.

The victims led a calm and peaceful life, dedicated to ornithology, the cultivation of orchids and poetry, which makes the almost unbearable sadism to which they have been subjected even more incomprehensible.

During the investigation of the case, the police inspector Kurt Wallander discovers that not only must he face a murderer with a fearsome intelligence, which undoubtedly rivals his own, but that he seems to be guided by a murderous and murky desire for revenge.