'Faceless Killers' was Henning Mankell’s first Kurt Wallander mystery but achieved international best seller status and was later the motivation for a BBC TV series and played on PBS Masterpiece Theater. While the storyline was very interesting and compelling, the writing was poor. I later learned it was translated from Swedish to English so perhaps it’s the translation that is lacking.
The mystery is set in Ystad, Sweden where the main character, Kurt Wallander is lead detective and interim Police Chief while his boss is away on a long holiday. Wallander is in his mid forties and disappointed where life has taken him. He struggles with loneliness because his wife unexpectedly left him and his close ties with his daughter have been severed. He has to deal with an aging, possibly senile, father and his attraction to the new female district attorney who happens to be married. Plus, he's drinking too much and putting on weight due to a steady diet of pizza and fast food.
The story begins with an elderly farmer’s discovery that his neighbors, also elderly, have been murdered. The husband has been gruesomely tortured and killed and his wife left for dead. Before she dies in the hospital, her last word is "foreign." With anti-immigrant sentiment running high already, the last thing the police need is for this to slip out to the media, but someone in the department leaks the information and suddenly refugee camps in the area are being firebombed. When a Somali refugee is killed, seemingly at random, Wallander and his staff have two highly charged cases to solve.
Yet Wallander has difficulty focusing on his work with all his personal problems. He spends much of his time brooding about the state of the world and the state of his society and he is sympathetic to the anti-immigrant mentality. He's concerned that just about anyone, even undesirable characters, can come to the country and request asylum. And, the system is ill equipped and underfunded to monitor and locate all the refugees. But tracking down the murderer of the Somali refugee is his job and he does it, even with all his personal distractions.
This book was given to me by my daughter’s friend who picked it up on the recommendation of a West Village boutique bookstore owner in NYC. As I read it I struggled with the writing and that overshadowed the message. (You know the feeling you get when two pages stick together and you are on the third or fourth line of the new page and you think, ‘I must have missed something’? Well, that kept happening…..but in the middle of the page.) But the longer it’s been since I finished this book, the more I find myself thinking about the substance of the story. From the few Europeans I know, I understand the immigration issue is a growing concern and is burdening their economies. I know holidays are very important in the European culture but are often resented by those left behind to cover. Mankell seems to point out several growing social issues but offers no solutions other than we are all in this together and must carry on. Perhaps that’s why the popularity. Now I’m sufficiently interested to try another Henning Mankell novel, hopefully a better translation next time.
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