Henning Mankell, author of the series of detective novels starring the inspector Kurt Wallander, died Monday in Gothenburg, Sweden. Since 1987 that divided his time between Sweden and Mozambique, where he ran in Maputo, the Teatro Avenida company.
In January 2014, Mankell wrote a chronicle in the Swedish newspaper Göteborgs-Posten to inform their many readers – the officers who wrote are translated into dozens of languages, sold already over 40 million copies and inspired three television series – that you had been diagnosed with cancer of the lung and the other in the neck (the series Wallander, BBC, based on his books in entering the Police Inspector Kurt Wallander, here played by Kenneth Branagh, spent in Portugal on AXN Black).
Born in Stockholm in 1948, Mankell soon began to write theater and fiction, but only published his first detective in 1991. It was called The Killer Without a Face ( Mördare utan ansikte ) and its hero, Kurt Wallander, was inspector at the police Ystad, a small Swedish town of 20,000 inhabitants. Divorced and the father of a daughter, Wallander still had a difficult relationship with his own father, a man who obsessively painted the same landscape, sometimes by adding a wild rooster.
It was the beginning of a saga of nine novels, all published in Portugal in the collection The Razor’s Edge, the presence collection, to which is added a short novel and a book of Tales. And it could also add up Innan Frosten (2002), the beginning of an announced trilogy starring the daughter of Wallander, Linda, who Mankell interrupted shortly after the publication of this first book, disturbed by Johanna Sällström suicide, then the actress who represented Linda Wallander in a Swedish television series.
If it is fair to grant the status of parents of Scandinavian policeman Per Wahlöö and Maj Sjöwall, the couple who wrote in the 60 and 70 a dozen books starring the Martin Beck police, Henning Mankell was perhaps the main reason for the international recognition of so-called nordic noir , paving the way for authors like the late Stieg Larsson, Camilla Läckberg or Jo Nesbø.
As Wahlöö and Sjöwall assumed Marxists, Mankell has always been a left-wing author, and the introspective Wallander, a man who likes opera and whiskey , shows have Too obvious political leanings, is perhaps not by chance that criminals facing tend to be members of the financial elite, or even fascist. Mankell was one of the activists detained by Israeli forces in June 2010, when they tried to bring humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip.
Unlike heroes who seem to be forever in the bloom of youth, Kurt Wallander was noticeably aging of book to book, with its creator to indulge in perverse refinements, such as to diagnose her diabetes. And in 2009, when you resume your detective in the book A Restless Man – the previous novel Wallander, The Wall Invisible , dating since 1998 – is not half measures and, to use his own words, throw your detective for “empty universe of Alzheimer’s disease.”
Author of about forty plays, his playwright facet, which never abandoned, he intensified through their work with the company Teatro Avenida, Maputo, where he spent several months a year since the mid-80s In a recent book by the presence in Portugal, A Unclean Angel ( Minnet av en Smutsig Angel , 2011), Mankell tells the true story of Hanna Lundmark, a Swedish in the early twentieth century shipped to Australia as a cook on a ship, but it turned out never get there , having become the owner of the most famous brothel of the then Lourenço Marques.
Besides those already mentioned, the books starring Wallander edited in the presence, in translations of Margareta Ek Lopes, include (the Timing in brackets are the original editions): The Riga Dogs (1992), The Leone White (1993), The Man Smile (1994), The False Track (1995), The Fifth Woman (1996) and One Step Behind (1997).
Henning Mankell was married since 1998 with the director and theater director Eva Bergman, his fourth wife.
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