The last word on Kurt Wallander
Swedish author Henning Mankell says goodbye to his morose, ailing detective in a novella, writes Guy Haydon
An Event in Autumn
by Henning Mankell
Harvill Secker
3.5 stars
This really is the end. After 10 novels, a collection of short stories and, finally, this novella, An Event in Autumn, all of Swedish author Henning Mankell's stories featuring the increasingly careworn detective Kurt Wallander have now been published in English.
There will be no more tales about Wallander - a series Mankell has often described as his "novels of Swedish unrest". At the end of the last full novel - the disappointing The Troubled Man - the detective begins a slow descent into the "darkness" known as Alzheimer's disease. "After that there is nothing more. The story of Kurt Wallander is finished, once and for all."
So fans should be pleasantly surprised by the novella - chronologically dating to a period just before The Troubled Man - which, Mankell, 66, says in the afterword, is definitely the end: "There are no more stories about Kurt Wallander."
All of the [Kurt Wallander] stories ... tap into [Sweden's] hitherto unknown dark side of life, the evil lurking just beneath the surface of people
Mankell was asked to write a short story that could be given away free to everyone in the Netherlands who bought a crime novel during a particular month: hence An Event in Autumn, which was published in 2004. The BBC then adapted the story for its hugely popular television series, starring Kenneth Branagh.