Enter the modern sleuth, fat, drunk and incompetent (National Post, September 7, 2005)

The older I get, the more I feel that whatever I read should educate, edify or elucidate. Only on vacation do I feel justified indulging myself in the "mere" entertainment of detective fiction.

I looked forward to discovering a new detective hero on this just-ended fortnight at the beach. New to me at least. I have long wanted to plunge into the Kurt Wallander series by Sweden's Henning Mankell, which is presently the rage amongst police procedural aficionados.

Chief inspector Kurt Wallander is detective fiction's saddest sack yet, and that's saying something nowadays. His wife has left him, his daughter is estranged, his intermittently senile father treats him with contempt. Apart from colleagues he has no friends. Wallander is also physically unfit and overweight from a diet of junk food. Needless to add, he is a boozehound. Although an opera lover and physically courageous, he is essentially a loser.

Wallander might make it as the mournful protagonist of a contemporary novel. But a detective hero is a different species altogether. Characters in ordinary novels are one-offs, and the reader isn't seriously invested in a "relationship." But the detective hero is a recurrent figure, so the reader is gripped with anxiety in the make-or-break first meeting. What are the sleuth's guiding values? Will his reader respect him in the morning? Can they have a future together?

I'm open to a variety of types, although I eschew the dryly ratiocinative "locked-room" puzzlers, and favour British writing over American. I've particularly liked P.D. James' sensitive Adam Dalgleish, Colin Dexter's broody Inspector Morse, Reginald Hill's bullish Andy Dalziel and Elizabeth George's labile Thomas Lynley. From this list, detective buffs will deduce at once my partiality for flawed and "wounded," but gallant male sleuths who subordinate an embarrassing romantic vulnerability to dedicated crime-solving, which they accomplish with a persuasive combination of intellect and intuition.

Detectives reflect their authors' era and culture, none more so than Mankell's Wallander. The super-rational, confident (OK, arrogant), psychologically unconflicted Western sleuth of yesteryear with a clear sense of his civic and moral mission -- to defeat evil and restore justice to a culturally homogeneous and self-approving society -- has gradually devolved into the alienated Wallander: a gloomy, self-doubting, dogged but unenthusiastic servant of a demoralized and racist social order, which he regards with a jaundiced or sometimes hostile eye. The postmodern Wallander perceives the notion of justice as fungible or illusory. As for his creator, catching the actual criminal seems very low on Mankell's priority list; rooting around in Wallander's tortured psyche while chronicling the breakdown of Sweden's social fabric is high.

A charismatic detective can rise above a depressing situation. Buoyed by unanimously positive press, I had approached Mankell's work like a blind date set up by all my most trusted friends. I expected to fall in love. Instead I was irretrievably alienated by an unpardonable "crime" in a fictional detective's construction: Mankell sacrifices Wallander's respect for proper police procedure and emphasizes his grotty personal hygiene to add edge and Everymanish fallibility to his character at the expense of his sleuthing.

Wallander forgets to ask witnesses crucial questions, or, in a self-absorbed funk, leaves a crime scene for his underlings to assess. He fumbles an easy arrest through an amateurish tactical error. He gets drunk and drives dangerously. All this is irritating, but salvageable. However, Mankell lost me forever when, his stomach upset from a surfeit of greasy junk food Wallander ends up in a diner washroom and ... sorry, I must draw a veil over the revelation therein. Let us just say that upon reading it I saw Holmes, Poirot and Maigret spinning in their graves.

And yet Mankell's series has been translated into 30 languages, and ("the most widely purchased author in the German language ever") has sold more than 11 million copies over five years in Germany, Austria and Switzerland alone. His German translator says: "Nobody believes in heroes anymore. Depressing Wallander is a figure like you or me -- too fat, divorced and lonely. But he is also totally convincing."

Convincing? Maybe to cynical Germans (and one could long speculate on why)! But not to me. Mr. Mankell, the whole point of a detective hero -- unlike ordinary protagonists -- is to be incorruptible (clean underwear a given!): He must be smarter, cooler and nobler than you or me, and that's why we are so addicted. Ah, but why should we quarrel on our last date ...

© National Post 2005

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