On Wallander by Wendy Lesser

From Work in Progress Mysteries are one of my favorite summer indulgences, and these days it's often a Scandinavian mystery. The greatest of all Nordic mysteries are undoubtedly the Martin Beck series, ten sequential volumes written in the late 1960s and early 1970s by the Swedish husband-and-wife team Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, who wanted to convey a changing Swedish society through the crimes investigated by Detective Beck and his band of policemen. Closer to our own time, the worthiest inheritors of the Sjöwall-Wahlöö mantle that I've been able to find are Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander novels.  I should pause here, though, to admit that my "undoubtedly" is not universally agreed to. The poet Louise Glück -- who in her own way is as much of a mystery addict as I am -- believes that the Kurt Wallander books are even greater than the Martin Beck series. She is so adamant in her devotion, and so effective in her expression of it, that she has almost begun to shake my own conviction about the superiority of the Martin Becks. I began reading the Kurt Wallander novels in the final years of the twentieth century, when they first started appearing in English, and I have reread most of them at least once since then... Read on...