A bunch of Wallanders by Henning Mankell

Following the relative success of the BBC’s attempt to film Wallander in English but in Sweden, I’ve been enjoying the original Swedish series on BBC 4 over the past year or so.

Inevitably, I was going to pick up a few of the books to read.

It so happened that a few crates of books arrived in the staff room at work (a colleague had died and they were donated to the school) and a couple of Wallanders were included. I read those and then ordered a couple more from Amazon.

I think I’m done with Wallander for now, having read (in no particular order):

Faceless Killers, The Dogs of Riga, The White Lioness, and One Step Behind. I also read his sole Linda Wallander novel, Before the Frost. You can read about them here on Mankell’s web site.

Those who have seen Wallander on TV will know that he is a melancholy individual, who is estranged from his ex-wife, and intermittently estranged from his own daughter. His health is not good, he drinks too much, but he generally operates like a policeman as opposed to a crazy maverick who makes up his own rules. That’s except when it’s time for one of his cases to be turned into a novel, at which point he tends to become a crazy maverick who makes up his own rules. Like Inspector Morse, he’s unlucky in love, and slightly pathetic when he tries to get lucky. He has a tendency to choose inappropriate partners and make a fool of himself.

The TV Wallander tends to be more of a team leader and a delegator. In print, he more often than not loses his head and gets himself into dangerous situations. In the end, I prefer the TV Wallander to the novel character, who basically needs a kick up the backside.

The first TV episode filmed in Sweden is actually based on Before the Frost, which is a different novel, as it’s told from the point of view of Linda, who is a much more sympathetic character. The TV series starts with Linda and then she’s in every episode (as a cop), whereas in the novel world, she is, in the main, a student with no clear sense of direction. Unfortunately, Johanna Sällström, who played Linda on Swedish TV, committed suicide, and I believe Mankell was so upset by this that he’s not planning to write any more Linda Wallander novels.

Try to keep up at the back.

The most successful of the other novels are the shorter ones, which have a tight focus on one case, which is generally following a police procedural. I guess it’s supposed to be realistic, in that the police rarely have anything to go on, until some chance event helps put things into place. Apart from Before the Frost, I’d recommend One Step Behind, which was also filmed for TV, but which has other elements, on the page, which aren’t shown on TV.

The least enjoyable of the five I’ve read was The White Lioness, which is a sprawling, double-length book, set in both Sweden and South Africa. It’s a bit like one of those double albums that would be better as a single. Wallander completely loses it in this one, and you don’t quite get why, it’s just a massive existential crisis which sends him over the edge.

He frequently moans about the state Sweden has fallen into, and there seems to be an anti-immigration, isolationist agenda, with the sense that a lot of the new types of crime in Sweden are caused by incoming Poles, Russians, Latvians, etc. Wallander frequently bemoans the state of policing and security, and questions his role as a policeman. He’s always on the verge of quitting.

I’d cautiously recommend reading a couple of these, but probably best not to do what I did and read five in a row. One health warning is to consider that, if you read them in English, you are reading a translation, so some of my criticisms may be considered unfair.

The Brass Verdict by Michael Connelly

At the end of my review for The Lincoln Lawyer, Connelly’s previous book about Mickey Haller, self-proclaimed “sleazy defense lawyer”, I suggested that the Bosch-meets-Haller sequel wasn’t far away and here it is.

Detective Bosch and Haller are half brothers, something Bosch knows but Haller doesn’t. Haller has been off the scene for a couple of years after being gun shot and then becoming addicted to pain killers. At the beginning of The Brass Verdict, he’s about to make a tentative return to work when 31 active cases drop into his lap.

Another lawyer has died in suspicious circumstances and left Haller his practice. Unfortunately, the dead lawyer’s briefcase and laptop were stolen, so Haller has to scramble to get up to speed. One of the 31 cases is a high-profile Hollywood murder case. So far so good, but then Bosch turns up and starts asking questions about the dead lawyer and why he was fielding phone calls from the FBI, and what happened to $100,000 that disappeared from his bank account, and Haller finds himself caught up in the sleazy tactics of his predecessor before he’s quite ready to get back to full-time work.

This book, like The Lincoln Lawyer before it, is a fascinating read. The level of detail you get as Haller builds his case is extraordinary; you wouldn’t think the minutiae of practising law would be interesting, but they are. Haller is always searching for the “magic bullet”, the key piece of evidence which will blow the case wide open and plant reasonable doubt in the minds of the jury. Connelly is so very practised at writing this kind of thing that it’s all too easy to find yourself unable to put the thing down at one in the morning. A genuine page-turner that builds to a gripping climax.

Highly recommended.

Point of No Return – Scott Frost

I was disappointed by this, the third Alex Delillo novel. I’d previously enjoyed Frost’s Never Fear, but found this to be both preposterous and skippable: no point of return.

Whereas Alex Delillo of the Pasadena PD seemed quite a different sort of protagonist in the earlier book, with positive personal relationships and respect for her colleagues, here she runs all the classically stupid risks you’d expect of an out-of-control maverick cop, and it’s all so ridiculously portentous that you just want to tell her to get a grip.

Like Spook Country (see review below), this book has Iraq (and GPS chips) as part of its backdrop, but not for one moment does it seem reasonable for a detective in the Pasadena PD to get involved in the affairs of a bunch of mercenaries and military types (who operate a long way out of her jurisdiction) in her search for a missing LAPD cop she met once at a conference. What?

Conspiracy is it? Cover up? Another one?

The inner voice of Delillo, as she agonises and labours every point and lurches from place to place, grates on the nerves. What has this got to do with her job? Nothing. But she takes “a few days off” anyway to look into matters, never seeming to notice that she’s making everything a lot worse than it was to start with. There are no scenes here with more than two people: Delillo goes through a series of one-on-ones with people who either (a) drop dead, or (b) disappear, and whinges so much about every little thing that goes wrong that you wish she’d (a) drop dead, or (b) disappear.

No point, no return, not recommended.

Never Fear by Scott Frost

I can’t remember why or when I picked this book up, but there it was on my shelf, and not yet read.

This is a US crime thriller in the vein of Michael Connelly’s Bosch series, also set in Los Angeles, but with a female protagonist/narrator in the form of Alex Delillo, a Lieutenant in the Pasadena PD. Unlike Bosch, Delillo has a positive relationship with her superior in Pasadena, and is very close to her current partner.

Just as the Bosch series have been sometimes critical of the Los Angeles PD (an easy target since the King case, after all), this novel pits Delillo against the LAPD machine as she investigates the death of a half-brother she didn’t know she had.

This 400-pager is tightly plotted, irresistible reading, with a labyrinthine story that should keep you guessing. There’s a high body count, and a quite bleak view of the justice system in Southern California.

I hadn’t read any Frost before, and there’s clearly at least one Delillo story before this one (Run the Risk). Before turning to thrillers, Frost has written scripts for Twin Peaks, Babylon 5, and Andromeda, among others. This is not surprising, as his more famous brother is Mark Frost. It says on the book’s blurb that he wrote for The X Files, too, but this credit isn’t on his IMDB entry.

This is good stuff, and I’d certainly pick up another one. A little bit despairing, perhaps, and with a title that doesn’t really mean anything or have much to do with the story, but you don’t read thrillers for the laughs.

Gone to Ground by John Harvey

John Harvey has been one of the leading British exponents of the police procedural since the 1989 publication of Lonely Hearts, the first in the Nottingham-based Resnick series that ended with Last Rites 10 years later. (Except Resnick is back, in Harvey’s just-published Cold in Hand.)

This 2007 novel, Gone to Ground (The paperback came out in January 2008), is a police procedural in a similar vein, with Cambridge police officers Will Grayson and Helen Walker investigating what appears to be a hate crime – the brutal murder of a gay academic. There are also links to Nottingham, though, so you’re constantly reminded of the Resnick series and some of its supporting characters.

The art of the police procedural is to show the puzzle of the crime being solved by slow, painstaking increments: leg work, paper work, and blind chance. Harvey brings to life the harsh realities of ASBO Britain, the violent, struggling underclass and their casual hatreds; and the venal, corrupt business men and their lawyers.

Neither Grayson nor Walker strike you as being brilliant: though Walker seems to have better instincts. The inquiry into one murder is complicated by another, and the officers (and the original victim’s sister) follow investigative paths that don’t necessarily pay off, but lead – eventually – to some form of resolution. Don’t come here expecting to find a maverick loner who solves crimes singlehandedly and beats up the bad guys in his spare time. Instead you get something of the flavour of what it must really be like: knocking on doors, trawling through paperwork, interviewing witnesses who may be lying – but not necessarily because they’re guilty of this particular crime.

Accurate and realistic it may be, but I didn’t find this particularly gripping. It’s been a while since I read a police procedural, and I found the progress to be a bit slow. I shouldn’t complain; the last crime novel I read, I seem to remember complaining it was all a bit skimpy. Still, if police procedural is your thing: with believable characters and a sense of how difficult it really is to get the evidence you need for a successful prosecution, then they probably don’t come better than this.