Mankell is best known for a series of police procedurals involving Detective Kurt Wallander, a saturnine lump of a man who consistently beats the odds to solve Sweden’s most brutal crimes. (Mankell concluded the series last year, but the final book has yet to be translated into English.) He has also written more than two dozen plays, a few children’s books and several stand-alone novels. As a young man, Mankell began to live part time in Mozambique. “I’ve understood more about the world,” he likes to say, “by living with one foot in the snow and one foot in the dust.”
Mankell’s latest crime novel, “The Man From Beijing,” opens with the discovery of 19 dead and disfigured bodies in the fictional town of Hesjovallen: “It was as if a blood-laden hurricane had stormed through the village.” The local police uncover exactly two clues: The victims appear to be distantly related, and someone dropped a red ribbon in the adjoining woods.
Fortunately, Birgitta Roslin, an inquisitive judge, has some time on her hands: on doctor’s orders (after a diagnosis of anxiety-induced fatigue) she can’t go to work for a fortnight. Hesjovallen is her mother’s hometown, and a little digging among old papers and on the Internet reveals that she is connected to the victims. So she promptly braves the bad roads to Hesjovallen, books a room at a hotel and, before long, has the whole crime worked out. If only the police would listen.
There’s a hard-boiled gruffness to Mankell’s prose, although his story often reads like the product of an oral tradition, dotted with aphorisms. (“White men smelling of spirits were always more unpredictable than sober ones.”) Most grating, however, is Laurie Thompson’s translation, full of awkward syntax and clichés. (To what degree this originates with Mankell is hard to know.) One character is “not yet defeated, once and for all,” while another “should have understood, but refused to accept what she really did understand.” “Ignorance is bliss”; “The devil is always in the details”; and “If you want to make an omelet, you have to break an egg.”
If a Raymond Chandler effect is the goal, the humdrum plot interferes. As is the case with so many of Mankell’s novels, the primary concern of “The Man From Beijing” isn’t to solve the crime (early on, Birgitta understands its genesis as “probably no more than the usual: revenge, greed, jealousy”) but to polemicize — against the wholesale debasement of Swedish society but also, jarringly, against China’s recent chicanery in Africa, where the energy-hungry nation is exploiting a trove of natural resources.
The route is circuitous and often redundant. From Birgitta in the present day, readers are flung back to the mid-19th century, first to Guangzhou and then to Nevada, before returning to 21st-century Beijing and, finally, Zimbabwe and Mozambique. Several characters exist primarily to deliver political and social précis, arguing repeatedly that while China can be an insidious country, we Westerners are hardly innocent of exploiting other nations. The intrigue surrounding the murders dissipates. Detectives fade to distant bystanders. And the origin of the red ribbon — the key with which Birgitta unlocks the mystery — goes unexplained. Mankell’s fierce instinct for social criticism is admirable. If only it didn’t sabotage the opportunity for old-fashioned whodunit delight.
