User Reviews
Rating: really liked it
Our main character is a Swedish detective who is “lost.” He’s on leave suffering from deep depression from having to justifiably kill a man. He’s also disgusted with the increasing bureaucracy of the system and dislikes the new ways displacing the old. He fears the administrative bloat of the system and envisions a day when all the administrators, former police officers, will simply pass paper to each in their offices. Yet he is supportive of a woman detective who is put down in various ways by most of the other men.
We pretty much know from the start who the bad guy is: a big-time financier and jet-setter who controls a mega-million international corporation. The bad guy lives in a McCastle within an electronically guarded compound in the countryside. Part of the mystery is figuring out exactly what kind of scam he has going.
The detective knows his thugs are responsible for the three murders, (two “accidents” and a “suicide”), as well as a failed car bomb and land mine attack. He decides not to resign from the force only when an acquaintance of his is one of those killed. He comes back to police work with a vengeance.
This police procedural is an easy and engaging read. This is one of several books with the same character known as the Kurt Wallender series. You can’t get lost in the meticulously constructed plot. The story is told from the POV of the main character and he mentally reviews, or reviews at daily meetings and with his partner, where we are in the investigation. He even fills us in on dates and times. And maybe at times it’s TOO much – in one paragraph we learn he was back at the police station just after 1:00; at 4:00 he went to the prosecutor’s office; he did not leave until 10:00 and he was home by 11:00!
A line I liked: “It’s always easier to maintain a cleverly constructed lie than it is to find an unclear truth.”
We get some local color of Ystad of the south coast of Sweden, a real town, along with a map of the city center and a map of the outlying district so we can follow the action.
photos of Ystad: top from prettywildworld.com;
bottom from marinas.com
Rating: really liked it
The opening of the fourth novel in this series finds Kurt Wallander in a deep depression. At the conclusion of the last book, he shot a man to death, and even though it was clearly a case of self-defense, he's devastated by the fact that he has taken another man's life. After brooding over the incident for more than a year, Wallander resolves to quit the police force and is at the point of turning in his papers when a very bizarre case grabs his attention.
An elderly lawyer has died. The reader knows right away that the man was murdered, but the murder is successfully disguised as an auto accident and fools the initial investigation. The man's son, also a lawyer, makes a clandestine visit to Kurt Wallander, who is still recovering, and tries to convince him to investigate his father's death.
Wallander refuses and presses ahead with his intention to resign. But then the son is murdered and Wallander determines to investigate. He returns to the force, and quickly proves that the father's death was a homicide and not accident. But trying to identify the killer will take all of Wallander's considerable skills--that is, if he survives that long.
This is another very good entry in the series. The characters are fully developed; the plot is engaging, and the police investigation seems very realistic. Fans of the series will enjoy it and it should appeal to any fan of Scandinavian crime fiction. Kurt Wallander is the polar opposite of someone like Lucas Davenport who could easily kill a couple of bad guys before breakfast and not worry about it any longer than lunch. He's the prototypical Scandinavian detective--introspective, depressed, and relatively humorless, which makes him an occasionally nice change of pace from his American counterparts.
Rating: really liked it
Evil! 😈
That’s the only description that I have for “the man who smiled.”
An attorney is found murdered on the side of the road. No one suspects murder…except the son of the victim.
An old friend of Wallander comes for a visit, and asks him for help investigating. Another murder.
This is one of the most suspenseful books by Henning, that I have ever read. It kept me glued to my iPad. Unable to breathe. Scared to death for Wallander. Frightening.
Rating: really liked it
The fourth Kurt Wallander novel, The Man That Smiled, I liked the least so far, though it’s still good, and part of the continuing story of the sad sack cop. As opposed to the more ambitious third book, The White Lionness, that takes place in Sweden and South Africa and involves a (thwarted) assassination attempt, The Man That Smiled takes place, as does the first novel, Faceless Killers, in (mostly) Sweden. It begins with Wallander on vacation, miserable because in that last case he had killed a man. So he’s depressed, constantly drunk, deciding to quit. We don't like or admire him at this point, of course, but maybe there's a bit of sympathy. Of course with the advantage/disadvantage of reading a 1994 book in a series with ten books, I know he will not ultimately quit. Not yet. And besides, I didn’t find his existential crisis all that compelling: Let’s get back to work, Kurt!
One thing I noticed, having just read a string of Jo Nesbo’s Harry Hole books, is a series of parallels between Hole and Wallander (written more than a decade before, though also Nordic Noir). Both are drunks, both have father challenges, women “issues,” experience guilt over dead people in their work, and actually quit and are lured back into the work. Both are outsiders, generally miserable, yet admirable in their obsessive drive to catch criminals, sometimes for vague reasons. Neither are saints. They both break the law at times to catch bad guys, and so on. I know many of these descriptors are typical tec tropes, but I feel sometimes that Hole was written through Wallander. I guess that’s just literature, you build on what's come before.
Anyway, when Wallander comes back as an old lawyer friend’s Dad seems to have committed suicide, then the lawyer himself is killed the next day. Wallander is (of course) also nearly car-bombed, as he begins work with work with a young new female (!? gosh!) detective. So it's pretty much straightforward police procedural for the next â…“ of the book as we try to figure out how these accidents/suicides are actually murders. Then things turn Jo Nesbo thriller as Mankell takes on another international issue actually impacting Sweden, even in 1994: The killing of people to harvest body parts and sell them to the highest bidder. And who is involved but a cartoonish rich guy (this is The Man Who Smiled of the title; and guess who is going to get him to stop constantly smiling? You guessed it, good) who is known for being a philanthropist in Sweden. (Here is another parallel with Nesbo; we seem to require these cartoonish rich or privileged characters; Nesbo's fantasy villain is the too-beautiful Hole colleague Tom Waaler). Lots of people shot, helicopter escapes, stopping a plane from leaving the tarmac, with the generally middling detective suddenly achieving near super hero (Bond-ish) skills I found unrealistic, a little silly at times.
Still, I like the developing story of Wallander, with his (less-estranged, now) daughter and still crazy father tormenting him, and his partnering with the new and very promising woman detective, bumbling along to try and keep the relationship going with his (possible) Latvian girlfriend, and his getting in shape (as Hole did) to try to be a good cop.
Rating: really liked it
Book ReviewThe second review of two crime novels whose titles hint at laughter and joy, Mankell's novel
The Man Who Smiled is in my opinion the best to date in the Wallander series. In the first review, we discovered the significance of how morose Martin Beck finally came to emit a burst of laughter in the last paragraph of that novel: The Laughing Policeman. I find this significant. Let's face it: laughter, joy, humor, these are not exactly the words I would describe as pertinent to Nordic crime novels (with the possible exception of Jussi Adler-Olson's Department Q novels). Granted, some of the humor is lost in tranlation, as Jo Nesbo recently stated in an interview here on Goodreads. And as I mentioned in the Martin Beck novel of similar title, my reading these two novels in succession is entirely accidental. It just so happened that I found myself reading two scandinavian crime novels whose titles revolved around laughter even though the titles were not part of my selection process at all. I read series novels in succession, holding to the belief that authors who write series have a reason for doing so, and that one follows after the other especially in terms of ongoing character development and plot. To read them out of sequence is to miss key aspects of the ongoing story line. It's like arriving late to a meeting only to ask questions already discussed during one's absence. And it just so happened that #4 in both of these series were next in my queue. Do I think the similarity in titles between Per/Maj and Mankell's 4th in the respective series are coincidental? No, I do not. I believe this novel is Mankell's homage to the 4th in the Beck series and that the title is deliberate.
Even though I've given this novel high ratings I do want to disclose something up front. Throughout the novel I was puzzled by the notion of a policeman so distraught about having to use his service revolver - one that ended up killing a criminal - that he left his police career and wandered a beach for weeks on end in obvious emotional pain. Clearly, any American policeman would frown at the notion. Here the police is trained to use their weapon, and though counseling is offered for any rightuous shooting, most policemen here would not leave their jobs as a result of having used their weapon. But, after some internal reflection I found that I, like our fictituous average American policeman, suffer from an ignorance of Scandinavia.
Cover of Singing Sands, a Tey novel...but what I imagine as Wallendar, walking across a lonely beach As we saw in my first review, we find that Kollberg in that Martin Beck novel is a hard-core socialist, does not believe in guns and as a result doesn't carry one in his position as a police detective. Perhaps back then, this was doable. And certainly as a crime novel this tendency served to only accentuate violent crime and the apprehension of perpetrators for the purposes of writing a crime novel. The Martin Beck novels were written some 50 years ago, when Scandinavia was relatively peaceful, non-violent, and the countries did not suffer from later infiltration of crime families and consequent crimes that include gun smuggling, drugs and human trafficking, if not the threat of terrorism itself. In his Wallander novels, Mankell clearly carries over some of these concepts from the Per and Maj novels, infusing into Wallander's character socialist tendencies (though to a lesser degree) even though these novels were written some 30 years later. In general, most Scandinavian countries today are still known as benign, social democratic wellfare states. Ystad, where most of the Wallander novels take place is still relatively peaceful, even though hints of organized crime that are already tangible in larger cities like Stockholm are beginning to filter down to smaller locales like Ystad. Service revolvers in Ystad are often found in desk drawers, rather than on the detective's person when out investigating crime.
Second, Wallander's character is such that facts are easily digested by this policeman, whereas emotional consequences are not (unlike the Martin Beck series). I relegate the cause for this to the writers themselves. In the Martin Beck series, we have police procedurals written by Marxists. Emotion is downgraded, social issues upgraded, statist policies encouraged as they are applied to the masses instead of to individuals and all of it accompanied by economic vitriol of anything that smacks of capitalism: namely individual success and wealth are the result of greed. Henning Mankell is not like Beck's authors in this regard. Mankell is a humanitarian. Aside from his career as a writer, his personal life is heavily involved with his emotional ties to disenfranchised third world countries (Africa, mainly) and his view of their inhabitants is one of indivduals, not the masses. Henning Mankel is an emotional man...and consequently, so is Wallander. Firing his service pistol and killing another human being stands against everything both writer and protagonist represent.
Come to think of it: high crimes, violence and a large portion of citizens incarcerated seems to be a peculiar American phenomenon and I'm not sure how well that speaks of us as a so-called free nation (another discussion).
As I said: the coincidence in similar titles is no coincidence at all. Aside from the similar title Per and Maj gave
The Laughing Policeman, Mankell here gives us a phenomonal police procedural (my first 5 star rating for a Wallander novel) that revolves around the idea of wiping the smile off the face of a suspected criminal. In the case of
The Laughing Policeman laughter is a response to futility and exasperation. In the case of
The Man Who Smiled laughter when expressed as contempt for the disenfranchised must be wiped out. Wallander is not a humerous man and he is not prone to laughter. Scandinavia frowns rather than laughs at life. Like Beck, he has trouble connecting to family. Like Beck he is morose, cannot sleep, is lonely, and is often ill at ease with his colleagues. Like the Beck novel we know who the perpetrator is early on.
The Man Who Smiled also speaks to a systemic dysfunction on police teams. It speaks to the unenviable boredom and tediousness that incorporates a police team's daily work. Unlike Beck, however, Wallander is driven by emotion: by loyalty and compassion and outrage.
-----------------------------------------------------
Series ReviewHenning Mankell is an internationally known Swedish crime writer known mostly for this fictional character Kurt Wallander. He is married to Eva Bergman.
Henning Mankell - Author
It might be said that the fall of communism and the consequent increase in Swedish immigration and asylum seekers has been the engine that drives much of Swedish crime fiction. Mankell's social conscience, his cool attitude towards nationalism and intolerance is largely a result of the writer's commitment to helping the disadvantaged (see his theater work in Africa). In this vein, readers might be interested in his stand-alone novel Kennedy's Brain a thriller set in Africa and inspired by the AIDS epidemic (Mankell often traveled to Africa to help third world populations); or read his The Eye of the Leopard, a haunting novel juxtaposing a man's coming of age in Sweden and his life in Zambia.
Mankell's love of Africa, his theater work on that continent, and his exploits in helping the disadvantaged is not generally known by his American readers. In fact, an international news story that has largely gone unnoticed is that while the world watched as Israeli soldiers captured ships attempting to break the Gaza blockade, few people are aware that among the prisoners of the Israelis was one of the world's most successful and acclaimed writers: Henning Mankell.
It is no exaggeration when I say that Henning Mankell is by far one of the most successful writers in Scandinavia, especially in his own country of Sweden. The Nordic weather, cold to the bones, drives its populace indoors for much of the year where cuddling up to read the latest in crime fiction is a national pastime.
For many GR readers who have been introduced to Kurt Wallander it is interesting to note that ultimately the success of bringing Mankell to English speaking audiences only came after bringing in the same production company responsible for Steig Larsson's Millennium trilogy for the wildly popular BBC version starring Kenneth Branagh. Viewers had no problem with an anglicized version of Mankell's work, an English speaking cast set down in a genuine Swedish countryside. Of course, to those fans thoroughly familiar with Mankell's work, it is the Swedish televised version that is found to be a more accurately portrayal of Mankell's novels...not the British, sensationalized version. And there's a reason for that.
Henning's prose is straightforward, organized, written mostly in linear fashion, a straightforward contract with the reader. It is largely quantified as police procedural work. The work of men who are dogged and patient to a fault. Kurt Wallander, the hero in Mankell's novels, is the alter ego of his creator: a lonely man, a dogged policeman, a flawed hero, out of shape, suffering from headaches and diabetes, and possessing a scarred soul. Understandably so and if some of the GR reviews are an indication; like his famous father-in-law Ingmar Bergman, Mankell is from a country noted for its Nordic gloom. But before you make the assumption that this is yet another addition to the somberness and darkness that characterizes Nordic writing Mankell often confounds this cliche with guarded optimism and passages crammed with humanity (for Mankell, this is true both personally and professionally as a writer).
As Americans we often think of Sweden as possessing an very open attitude towards sex and that this is in marked contrast (or perhaps reprieve) to the somber attitudes of its populace. But this is a view that often confounds Swedish people. The idea of Nordic carnality is notably absent in Mankell's work, as much a statement of its erroneous perception (Swedes do not see themselves as part of any sexual revolution at all) and in the case of Mankell ironic because the film director most responsible for advancing these explicit sexual parameters (for his time) was his own father-in-law the great Ingmar Bergman. In a world where Bergman moves in a universe where characters are dark, violent, extreme and aggressive - take note that the ultimate root of this bloody death and ennui lies in the Norse and Icelandic Viking sagas of Scandinavian history - that dark, somber view ascribed to both Mankell and Bergman's work was often a topic of intense jovial interest between these two artists.
For any reader of Nordic crime fiction, Henning Mankell is an immensely popular and staple read.
Enjoy!
Rating: really liked it
Coffee was supposedly introduced to Europe by Dutch traders in the late 1600s. I think it's safe to say that at that point, every Swedish detective immediately started guzzling copious amounts of the stuff & haven't stopped this practice since. It is of no surprise to me that Wallander has such bad insomnia; when you come home at 3 in the morning & drink a cup of coffee, is it any wonder that you're still awake at 6:30? Although I appreciate his dedication to duty, in that he just drinks more coffee & heads to work to continue solving crimes, I wish he'd just lay off the coffee already & get some sleep.
I like Wallander a lot as a character and I like the people he works with. I think this may have just been a bad place to start out this series, because the mystery seems a little far-fetched. Your lawyer finds out some of your dirty secrets, so you kill him. Okay so far. You also kill his son just to make certain he can't tell anything he might know about you. Also fine by me. But when you plant a land mine in the secretary's back yard, that seems a bit overboard. And Wallander is so insistent that this criminal wouldn't possibly kill a cop who's sneaking around his property - but he planted a
land mine in an old lady's backyard! He's already tried to blow you up you up in your car, anyway, so how does that follow?
Rating: really liked it
This is my second book in this police procedural series, set in a small city in southern Sweden. I found this less than fully compelling. Here are some of my problems with the book:
1. The pacing is slow, and the book bogs down a bit in the middle.
2. The mystery at the heart of the book is suspected financial crime by the principal of a large and secretive complex of businesses. The murder of several people, and the attempted murder of a couple of others, trigger the police investigation and apparently were engineered in order to cover up the financial improprieties. However, Mankell never explains clearly what the financial activities are, and never attempts to explain what the first victim discovered that led to his murder. For a book ultimately based on financial crime, the description of the business aspects is very unsophisticated.
3. Police procedurals typically proceed by having the investigating police officers build up evidence, and thereby unravel the mystery, by individual acts of investigation, research, analysis of physical evidence, etc.; as the evidence accumulates, they are able to piece together the story. Successful books in this genre build suspense and cause the reader to become invested in the story by the gradual revelation of the truth through the careful, painstaking and pedestrian investigation. Mankell simply doesn't build his story particularly well. The guilty party is suspected for much of the book, but evidence doesn't really accumulate, and obvious targets of investigation don't seem to be thought of. In fact, the police in this case acquire very little actual evidence, and the guilt party is demonstrated only through an absurdly silly, television-like confession at the end.
Having read two books in this series, I have no interest whatsoever in reading any others. I think I have one more on my "to read" shelves, in which case I may read it at some point, but I certainly won't buy any more of Mankell's books.
Rating: really liked it
I love how each chapter in Wallander’s life is like a roller coaster ride. His relationship with both his father and his daughter bring him so much grief and yet he doesn’t really understand why.
This 4th novel starts with Wallander unable to cope with events that took place 18 months previously and so is on indefinite sick leave from work. He is contemplating leaving the police force until he has an unexpected meeting from an old acquaintance.
From then on the story starts to unravel with so many threads it is impossible for Wallander to pick them up unless he returns to work.
A complicated yet easy to follow detective story that has you racing from one page to the next almost as fast as the police pursue the perpetrator of the many crimes he is thought to have committed.
Waiting with bated breath to start the next one.
Rating: really liked it
Wonderful book. Presenting truly how police work impacts a man's psyche. The shooting, though justifiable, weighs heavily on Kurt. A year has passed and he is resolved, after 25 years service, to retire from the police force.
During a visit to Denmark, he is visited by Sten Torstensson, an old friend, now practicing lawyer in his father's firm. His father had been recently found dead in an "accident". Kurt declines his request to investigate the matter deeper.
Returning to Sweden, he finds an obituary for Sten. His interest peaked, he finds himself rethinking his decision to retire.
The investigation is one of the best written that I've read so far. Police follow many avenues with small clues coming in and yet not presenting a clear motive or murderer. It is only the discovery by the police forensic scientist of a plastic can that presents those.
Mankell writes well of police frustrations with Sweden's sentencing standards and yet this book finds itself ending on a very soft note in this area. The contractor of the murders is apprehended at the airport but I found myself thinking that he would never be sentenced appropriately based on the evidence available.
Rating: really liked it
A Kurt Wallender police procedural - or not... since Wallender does not always follow police procedures :)
It is best if you read these books in order... even though each one is a "stand alone" in many ways, there are references in Wallenders personal life that will be unclear if you have not read the books in order. This is book 4 (1 is FAceless Killers, 2 is Dogs of Riga, 3 is White Lioness)
This book begins with Wallender doubting himself and dealing with the occurrences in Book 3 where he had to kill a man. At this point he takes an extended to leave to deal with his feelings. As he is pacing along the beach, thinking, a friend of his, Sten Torstenssen, visits him and wants Wallenders help. Sten's father recently died in a car accident - and Sten does not believe it was an accident. Wallender tells Sten he cannot help him.
Soon after Wallender returns home - where he decides to leave the police force. On the day he is to leave - he learns that Sten has been murdered... and the story begins. Wallender feels guilty for not helping his friend and knows he must not let him down now... he must solve the crime
Rating: really liked it
“Who is this Harderberg? A monster?”
“He’s a friendly, suntanned man who’s always smiling,” Wallander said. “He’s also elegantly dressed. There are lots of ways a monster can look.”
Rating: really liked it
The Man Who Smiled is number four in the Wallander series, picking up some time after Wallander's experiences in book 3, The White Lioness. As book four opens, Wallander is still on sick leave, and has made the decision during a period of incredibly intense depression that he will not be continuing on in his career as a policeman. But all of that changes when a friend seeks him out to ask him for help regarding the case of his father's death. The police had ruled it a car accident, but the friend is convinced that it was not. Wallander tells him that the police are most likely correct -- but then his friend is also mysteriously killed. This prompts Wallander to return to the job to find out what lays behind the deaths of father and son ... and uncovers much more than he bargained for.
While the plot will keep you turning pages and provide you with more than a few tense moments, what really made this book stand out was the character of Kurt Wallander. For the first time, really, since I started this series, I really got an insight into how Wallander thinks and what makes him a great cop. Mankell's characterization of Wallander is absolutely stunning, making him much more human in this book as compared to all of the other ones. It was absolutely amazing to be allowed into Wallander's thought processes -- I think Wallander became very real for me in this book for the first time in the series. When a character can become that real, it's definitely a sign that his or her creator is a top-notch writer.
The author does not only offer up a first-rate criminal and first-rate policemen here; he also raises several questions about the future of police forces, about the decline of the whole basis of the modern Swedish state as the profits of corruption become more entrenched, and about issues of morality & the true nature of justice in a world where crime is constantly changing and the police and justice system are trying to adapt. These questions are not relevant just to Sweden, but everywhere.
A bit on the gloomy side, this is not a book for readers looking for a lighthearted crime novel. I'd recommend it to anyone who wants a superb reading experience, but I suggest starting with book one, Faceless Killers, and continuing the books in series order. Mankell is an excellent writer, definitely not to be missed.
Rating: really liked it
This is a real crock of a book.
Wallander is depressed cause he shot a crim and still has relationship problems with his father - which is just layed on as a break from the investigation to show that he has problems outside work.
Is he coming back into the police after his bout with depression and hard drinking. Yes he is and on day one - he is given the case of a father and son pair of solicitors who are murdered. And he is welcomed back as a returning hero.
For a crime book - this contains no red herrings / false trails / interest / excitement. The man (a rich businessman who does everything including ripping of councils and body part trafficing! Please!) is identified as the killer at the start of the book and 300 pages later, he is the killer. Not great reading.
And to top it all - after storming the villians lair for the big literary confrontration - a washed up 50 year manages to overpower two armed special forces henchmen on his way to his execution. With a stone.
This is the laziest, least exciting, non event of a crime book that is shocking that it was ever released. Will I read the next one in the series. Maybe. Maybe they get better.
Rating: really liked it
Every time I read a Mankell book, I'm reminded why I keep picking up one of his books out of hundreds on my to-read list. I just love his stories and his writing.
I read more of Henning Mankell than any other authors, living or dead. That must have said something, right?
Now that I have read most of his books, I am going to ration myself. I want him to beat cancer and keep writing - my fingers are firmly crossed and he has my prayers, I know that he will always be one of the greatest, as well as my favourite author.
Recommend without hesitation!
Rating: really liked it
What a creepy bad guy!
KW is such a broken, sad man, but a brilliant police man. He will get his man, no matter what he has to do.
