Life after Wallander: Writer Henning Mankell on his new goals
With his detective consigned to a care home, Swedish writer-activist Henning Mankell has other goals in sight, writes Stephen Moss
I approached my meeting with Henning Mankell, creator of the gloomy Swedish detective Kurt Wallander and thus the man who might be said to have started the current obsession with noirish crime drama, with trepidation. He has a reputation for being a little, well, curt. When one Swedish journalist started an interview with "What do you think I should ask you?", he walked out. Another who had travelled to Sweden to meet him found him icy.
"I am waiting for your clever questions," is Mankell's opening remark to me, not said with any malice, just as a statement of fact. Iciness isn't really his defining characteristic; just matter-of-factness. He answers questions honestly, but without adornment; there are only occasional shafts of expansiveness or humour, as with his reply when I ask whether the fact he has been married four times suggests he is difficult to live with. "It shows I am an optimist," he insists.
I think I have written a couple of novels that will survive, but no one knows, and all we can do is work and participate in the time in which we happen to live
Mankell, a 65-year-old with a lived-in face and a capacious stomach, has come over to Britain from Sweden on an early flight, but tells me he still managed to squeeze in 45 minutes' writing in his hotel room as soon as he checked in. "I have to be able to write anywhere, because I have never had the privilege of being able to say I need that table, that view, that flower pot. I have to work wherever I am. I work everywhere."
As well as a Trollopian capacity to write anywhere, he has an obsessive need to work. It explains how he has managed to write more than 40 novels, only a quarter of which feature Wallander, and 30 plays, as well as spending half his year running a theatre in Maputo, Mozambique.
Mankell's new novel, A Treacherous Paradise, tells the story of Hanna Lundmark (nee Renstrom), a young Swedish woman who leaves a ship bound for Australia and ends up running a brothel in Lourenco Marques, which is what Maputo was called before independence from the Portuguese in 1975. Most of his books begin with a kernel of truth, but on this occasion he can pinpoint it with unusual precision.
"Normally it is very difficult to say exactly when a novel starts," he says, "but in this case I can say exactly what happened. It was an early morning some 10 years ago in Maputo. I was in the theatre and a friend of mine - a Swedish scientist who was working in the Portuguese colonial archives - came to me and said, 'Hey, Henning, I have found something very strange'.
"Then he told me that in the tax archives at the beginning of the 20th century, there had been a Swedish woman who had been one of the biggest taxpayers, and she was the owner of the largest brothel in the town. She came from nowhere, owned the brothel for three years, then disappeared. I found this story enormously intriguing and tried to find out more about her, but it was impossible, so in the end it became a story about the little we know and a lot we don't know."