FACELESS KILLERS (5 may 2004)
When I bought the book, I hadn't realized it was a translation.
But when names appeared like Lunnarp and Krageholm, it started to dawn upon me that it must originally have been written in some Scandinavian language.
Normally, I don't read translations. Earlier experiences ( click) have taught me that Dutch translations of crime novels can be criminally bad.
But this translation was in no way comparable to the trash I had read in Dutch.
I'm referring to Faceless Killers by Henning Mankell,
The blurb at the back of the book read:
One frozen January morning at 5 am, inspector Wallander responds to what he expects is a routine call out. When he reaches the isolated farmhouse he discovers a bloodbath. An old man has been tortured and beaten to death, his wife lies barely alive beside his shattered body, both victims of a violence beyond reason. The woman supplies Wallander with his only clue: the perpetrators may have been foreign. When this is leaked to the press, it unleashes racial hatred ...
Inspector Wallander is a real human being and not exactly a hero, at least not one for the bigots and other hypocrites.
In the classical sense, he is more of an antihero: he sometimes gets really drunk, he experiences his divorce as painful, and his daughter doesn't want to see him - not exactly what most of us would associate heroes with.
I found the respect that Wallander shows for his assistant Rydberg very sympathetic, unlike for instance Conan Doyle or Colin Dexter, who have the assistants Watson and Lewis treated rather condescendingly.
If I didn't read through this book at high speed, it was not because it was uninteresting, but because it was so interesting that my thoughts often tended to wander off at a tangent.
With his police inspector Wallander, Henning Mankell has really enriched the genre with an interesting figure, in my view much more interesting than classical icons like Agatha's Christie's rather inhuman Hercule Poirot.
