The White Lioness

Sweden must be a boring place.

Henning Mankell writes relatively good mystery/thriller type books. (That is praise, by the way.  As anyone who has read much in this genre knows, the average fare is awful beyond belief.)   I recently read the third Kurt Wallander mystery, The White Lioness.  Three books into the saga of Detective Wallander, an odd pattern has emerged.  Wallander is a detective in a small town (city?  Just how big is Ystad, anyway?  Ah, Wikipedia!  18,000. Hmmm, is that a small or large town?  Definitely not a city.  When does a small town grown up to be a big town anyway?  For humans, we break at 18 or 21, but where is the break for towns? Is a town of 18,000 like a human of 6, 18, 21, 30, or what?) in Sweden.   In the first novel, he suddenly had to solve the mystery of a brutal murder.  No surprise there—detective novels need brutal murders.  Nobody writes a detective novel about the person whose bicycle was stolen by teenagers on a Friday night.  (Well, except, now that I think about it, Encyclopedia Brown—my first favorite detective—probably solved mysteries of missing bicycles.)  The book (Kurt Wallander’s book, not Encyclopedia Brown’s book (but, don’t get me wrong, I still have a soft spot for Encyclopedia Brown (though I am not currently rushing out to read another one of his tomes))) was good.  So, you can imagine why Mankell wants to bring back his detective.  But, how many murders can happen in a small (There.  It is decided. Small) town in Sweden?  So, the next book had this whole Latvian angle.  The Latvia part was weird—why would a detective from a small Swedish town be running around Latvia?  Now the third novel.  In this one, mercifully, Kurt Wallander stays in Sweden, but the whole story is really about South Africa.  White supremacists decide to train someone to kill Nelson Mandela and they hook the would-be murderer up with a former KGB trainer and they decide to train in Sweden.  Yeah, that makes sense. 

But, I suppose to complain about a lack of realism in the mystery/thriller genre is rather like complaining about how Krypton never really existed.  (I hope that doesn’t cause anyone too much shock.  Is saying Krypton is fake like telling children there is no Santa Claus?)  So, instead, I am puzzling over Sweden.  Why would a Swedish author who can write well feel the need to introduce a small town detective and then have to keep adding international intrigue in order to get more stories?  Is it impossible to write mysteries based in Sweden?  Are there no country manors with ex-brother in laws, imperious foreign salesmen and the uncle who fought in foreign wars married to the aunt whose family used to have wealth?

Kurt Wallander, by the way, is a lousy detective.  Makes all sorts of stupid mistakes.  Just keeps plodding along.  He will undoubtedly have a nervous breakdown in the near future.  I like that part about Wallander. 

Apparently there isn’t much to say about The White Lioness.  It is what it is.  It is the best of the first three Kurt Wallander mysteries.  So, things are looking up for book number 4.  (I have the complete run already for a very curious reason.  eBay got hacked a while back.  I think what follows is related to the hack.  I clicked on my eBay app one day and got this notice that eBay would allow me to acquire any one item worth up to $50 on eBay for free.  I had one day to use the offer.  I had been thinking about reading a Wallander mystery anyway, and I realized with this offer if I could find someone offering the complete Wallander series, I could get them all at once.  Lo and behold, there they were.  The copies were unread.  Free!  I would thank eBay, but since the offer was not too long after eBay got hacked, I suspect it was related to the hack, so perhaps scorn rather than thanks are appropriate.  This is the sort of useless information which does absolutely nothing to improve the Reader’s Life.  And to think, if I had more mental energy, you could be reading a ruminations about Jorge Luis Borges right now, who is worth pondering and will show up in this here space sooner or later.  But, not today.  Today you get Kurt Wallander and eBay.  You, dear Reader, should ask for your money back.)

So, how about a song?