Henning Mankell: An Event in Autumn: A Kurt Wallander Mystery

I didn’t finish writing the book because I was uncomfortable with it. I didn’t have the strength. It was about the abuse of children. Now, of course, I realize that I ought to have written it. Child abuse is one of the most unpleasant crimes in the world nowadays. And Sweden is no exception. But that is precisely why I became so uncomfortable with it. I simply couldn’t cope.

I understand that people query the truth of what I have just maintained. I have described a lot of things in my books that could certainly be considered horrendous. And I have no hesitation in saying that I found it extremely difficult to put a lot of pages down on paper. But of course I am aware that what happens in everyday life is always much worse than what I describe in my books. My imagination can never exceed reality. And so, sometimes, I must also write about disgusting things so as not to become divorced from credibility.

After The White Lioness , I realized that the Wallander phenomenon was something I could exploit to make the most of what I had to say. At the same time I also realized that I needed to be afraid of the character I had created. From now on there would always be a danger of my forgetting to write my novels to be performed by a full orchestra, and instead to concentrate on his horn solos. What I always needed to bear in mind was: the story is the most important thing. Always. And then to ask myself if Wallander would be a suitable solo instrument to enhance this particular story, or not.

Over and over again I would tell myself: now I’m going to do something different. I wrote texts in which he didn’t appear — novels that were not about crimes, plays for the theater. Then I could return to him, drop him, write something different, then return to him again.

All the time I could hear a voice deep down inside me saying: “You must make sure that you drop him at the right moment.” I was well aware that one day I might pick up Wallander, stare hard at him and ask myself: “What can I think of for him to do now?” A point when he rather than the story was the most important ingredient. That would be the time to drop him. I think I can say in all honesty that Wallander has never been more important than the actual story.

Wallander never became a burden.

But there was also another warning alarm ticking away inside me. I must avoid starting to write as a sort of routine. If I did that, I would have been caught in a dangerous trap. It would be showing insufficient respect for both my readers and myself. If that happened, readers would pay good money for a book and soon discover that the author had grown tired and was simply going through the motions. As far as I was concerned, my writing would have been transformed into something to which I was no longer fully committed.

And so I stopped while it was still fun. The decision to write my last book about Wallander crept up on me slowly. It was a few years before I was ready to write the final full stop.

It was actually my wife Eva who wrote that final full stop. I had written the last word, and I asked her to press the “full stop” key. She did so, and the story was finished.

And what now, afterward? When I am working on totally different books? I am often asked if I miss Wallander. I answer truthfully. “I’m not the one who will miss him. It’s the reader.”

I never think about Wallander. For me he is somebody who exists in my head. The three actors who have played him on the television and in films have portrayed their own highly individual versions in brilliant fashion. It has been a great joy for me.

But I don’t miss him. And I didn’t repeat the mistake made by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who halfheartedly killed off Mr. Holmes. That last Sherlock Holmes story is one of the least successful. Presumably because deep down, Doyle was doing something that he knew he would regret.

I am occasionally stopped in the street and asked if I’m not going to write another one, despite everything. And what will happen to his daughter Linda who also became a police officer? Didn’t I once say she was going to play the leading role? Didn’t I write the first book about her, Before the Frost , ten years ago?

I don’t want to exclude the possibility that there might be one or possibly even several books in which Linda Wallander plays the leading role, but I am not sure. At my age, the limits of what I can do have narrowed. As always, time is short — but more scarce now than it has ever been. I have to make increasingly definite decisions about what I shall not do. That is the only way to use the time I have — and nobody knows how long that is — to do what I want to do most of all.

But I don’t regret a single line of the thousands of lines I wrote about Wallander. I think the books live on because in many ways they are a reflection of what happened in Sweden and in Europe in the 1990s and the first decade of the twenty-first century. They are novels of Swedish unrest, as I used to call the series of books about Wallander. How long the texts will continue to live on depends on quite different factors. On what happens in the world, and what happens to reading habits.

The passage of time is in many ways bewildering. I wrote at least half of the first Wallander book on an old Halda typewriter. Nowadays I can hardly remember what tapping the keys of a typewriter was like.

The book world is changing dramatically. It always has done, but one should bear in mind that it is the distribution of books that is changing, not the books themselves. The basic idea of reading a book is holding in your hands two covers containing pages. To be sure, more and more people are going to bed with their e-readers, but traditional books with paper pages will never disappear. Without being reactionary in any way, I am convinced that more and more people will go back to reading traditional books.

Whether or not I am right, only time will tell.

In any case, my story about Kurt Wallander has now come to an end. Wallander will soon retire and cease to be a police officer. He will wander around in his twilight land with his black dog Jussi. How much longer he will remain in the land of the living, I have no idea. That is presumably something he will decide for himself.

Henning Mankell

Spring 2013