Social deterioration chills a Swedish detective story

THE Vikings, renowned for their sagas, are again making landfall on our shores, this time in mystery novels by such outstanding Scandinavian authors as Peter Hoeg, Karin Fossum, Jan Kjaerstad, Ake Edwardson and Arnaldur Indridason. Although their books have long been popular abroad, the well-translated ones have only caught on in America since the mid-’90s.

Few of them can equal the sustained suspense in the intricately plotted police procedurals of Henning Mankell, the prizewinning Swede whose novel “The Man Who Smiled,” the fourth in his Detective Inspector Kurt Wallander series, is now available in English in the United States.

In “The Man Who Smiled,” we encounter a deeply depressed Wallander. Despondent over having shot and killed a man the year before (albeit in self-defense), the detective inspector is at the end of an 18-month leave of absence from the Ystad Police Department, slowly emerging from his descent into a living hell of debauchery, aimless foreign travel and alcoholic stupors. In a last-ditch effort to resolve his ambivalence about rejoining the police force, he has found a bolt-hole in remote Skagen, on the northernmost tip of Denmark, where “[f]oghorns had been sounding in the distance like lost, invisible cattle.” There, after weeks of solitary pacing on its autumnally deserted, fog-bound beaches, he is suddenly approached by longtime friend Sten Torstensson, who implores him to investigate the cause of his father’s death, which has been ruled the result of a car accident, a conclusion the son finds improbable.

Wallander regretfully declines, saying he is no longer a police detective. But soon after returning to Sweden, on the morning he is about to resign from the police force, he reads his friend’s obituary. Upon learning from colleagues that Torstensson had been shot in his office, and sensing a connection between the deaths of father and son, Wallander rejoins the force, an eager, newly energized detective.

Wallander leads the entire detective division, fueled by gallons of coffee (a common activity in most Scandinavian mysteries), on the hunt for the criminals. Their progress is slowed by the conservative police chief’s admonition that “certain suspects” be treated with near reverence, due to their eminent, influential positions in government and industry. This is, of course, ignored by Wallander, whose customary intuitive approach, aided by input from his intelligent, young, fresh-from-the-academy partner, Ann-Britt, results in a theory so far-fetched and inconceivable that few other colleagues even consider it.

Vast social changes in Sweden are causing the ground to shift. Crime, Wallander tells his partner, has become “more frequent and more serious: different, nastier, more complicated. And we started finding criminals among people who’d previously been irreproachable citizens.” In his day, he continues, “morals were clearer, and the authority of the police unchallenged. Nowadays, we need a different kind of training and different experiences ... to be as efficient.... What used to be considered a crime ten years ago is now judged a noncrime.”

There is less cohesion among the characters in “The Man Who Smiled” than in previous books in the series, perhaps because they are even more disoriented by their precarious environment. But one recurring enigma in Mankell’s previous novels is finally explained: Why Wallander’s father, a tetchy, eccentric artist, has for years on end been painting the exact same scene, an oil landscape of a sun rising over farmland, “with or without a grouse in the foreground.” Wallander even comes to some form of peace with his father’s paintings, which he has always considered tasteless and crude. In the precarious, ever-changing cultural and social climate in Sweden, he comes to see his father’s paintings as comforting, giving “people a feeling of balance and normality they were looking everywhere for, but only found in those unchanging landscapes.” Strangely enough, the paintings form an integral part of the diabolic plot.

There has long been a tendency among some Scandinavian writers (think Ibsen, Strindberg) to cast a sense of gloom over their works. Mankell, by contrast, is a master at developing varied atmospheres, creating deeply probed, vulnerable -- and hence believable -- characters, as well as devising ingenious plots. His informative reflections on Sweden’s culture and politics remind me of the 1960s novels by Per Walhoo and Maj Sjowell, the husband-and-wife team whose superbly written Det. Martin Beck mysteries are classics. “The Man Who Smiled,” which is elegantly crafted and has a chilling denouement, is their equal in this genre. Skol, Mankell!

Elaine G. Harp is a contributor to “Lives and Landscapes: A Photographic Memoir of Outport Newfoundland and Labrador, 1949 -- 1963” by Elmer Harp Jr.