“The Pyramid and four other Kurt Wallander Mysteries" Henning Mankell

As I have said before, I was drawn to the Kurt Wallander series because in the past year I have read three of the Wahlöö/Sjöwall Martin Beck series. I had also read the first two Stieg Larsson books, again set in Sweden. The only Henning Mankell book I have read before “Pyramid” is “Firewall,” the 8th book written and the 8th in the timeline of Wallander. It turns out that the stories in “The Pyramid” were published immediately after “Firewall,” but tell some of the story of Wallander’s life between 1969 and 1990.

Mankell writes in the foreword of “The Pyramid” that after ten years of writing the series he had finally thought of a subtitle for the series, “Novels about the Swedish Anxiety,” and his books are a continuation of the questions that Wahlöö/Sjöwall bring to light about the welfare state of Sweden. Mankell asks questions about the blooming democracy in Sweden and what will happen when the welfare state is no longer there to support it. Superficially, the lives of the people in this latter series seem to be the same as in the former, frequent divorces and a high suicide rate. On the other hand, he doesn’t dwell of the welfare of seniors and the jobless as much as Wahlöö/Sjöwall, with the exception of Wallander’s father who is struggling to live out his life doing what he enjoys, painting the same scene repeatedly. The crimes investigated by the detectives have changed from the 1960s to the 1970s, becoming more global.

A common feature among the Mankell books is that Wallander is often in physical danger, almost as if Mankell takes a Gene Roddenberry approach to writing and Wallander’s life must be in danger in every book or story just as the Enterprise was in the original Star Trek series. Either health care has improved or philosophies of health have changed in Sweden from the ‘60s to the ‘90s since Wallander’s recovery time seems much more abbreviated than that from the Beck’s time, or it could simply be literary license.

I find the first story about his first case quite amusing, because Wallander is asked early in his career to investigate an apparent suicide in his own apartment building. Another common feature of the Wallander books, based on a small sample of two, is that the cases seem to be cut and dried, but he has a nagging feeling that there is something else to the story, and so keeps digging. He revisits scenes, feeling them as much as seeing them. He, and later his team, goes over the evidence relentlessly. My favorite story in the book is “The Pyramid,” where his duties in Sweden are interrupted by the need to go to Egypt to get his father out of prison. Wallander and Beck both demonstrate a duty to their aging parents, but in Wallander’s case the duty is not accompanied with unquestioning love. Wallander’s father has never approved of his son’s job, a sentiment shared by many Swedes according to the two series, and this combined with a growing loss of memory makes their relationship rocky to say the least.
In this series of stories, we learn how the relationship between Wallander and his wife began, the route his career took in the early years, and how some of his techniques and quirks developed. Again, the book can be read alone without having read the others in the series, as I had only read “Firewall” prior to this book. The stories in “The Pyramid” begin in 1969, and thus, the stories overlap in time with those of Wahlöö/Sjöwall. I kept looking around expecting one of the characters from the earlier series to make an appearance, and I couldn’t help but compare the police procedure between the two. I will continue reading the series to learn more about Wallander and Mankell’s Sweden.