Review: "The Man on the Beach" by Henning Mankell

 

“The Man on the Beach” by Henning Mankell Novellix, 2019     In my waning memory, it was Henning Mankell’s stories about Inspector Kurt Wallander that started the Nordic Noir craze of the early-2000s in the United States. It seemed for a decade or more everything in bookstores centered around Scandinavian detectives working fictional cases as dark as a Norse winter. Of course when Mankell was outselling almost every other crime writer my inner snob recoiled from his work because any writer so popular with readers must be terrible. As it turns out, I was wrong. But back to Wallander—a taciturn and solitary detective working the streets of Ystad, a small city on Sweden’s southern edge, with almost as many ghosts in his head as the villains he chases. Which is a way to say, Wallander is interesting. So all these many years later I tried only my second of Mankell’s tales: the short story, “The Man on the Beach,” which was originally published in 1999 in Sweden and translated into English in 2008. When a tourist from Stockholm, Göran Alexandersson, dies in the back of a taxi, everyone assumes the cause of death was a stroke or a heart attack. Alexandersson appeared healthy when he entered the taxi, and he had no obvious wounds. But Wallander, with the help of the pathologist, quickly determines Alexandersson’s death is more sinister. The tourist’s movements while in Ystad are unusual, too. Every morning Alexandersson took a taxi to nearby Svarte where he disappeared on the windswept beach until another taxi took him back to Ystad in the afternoon.    “The Man on the Beach” is a cool take on the impossible crime: How did someone kill a healthy man in a taxi without anyone noticing until after he was dead? As the story evolves it becomes apparent the how is less important than the why because the tale’s driver is something of a sociological puzzle about what motivates one person to kill another. And it works very, very well. Now I need to get brave and tackle one of Mankell’s novels.

I read “The Man on the Beach” in an out-of-print standalone Novellix paperback edition published in 2019; however, it is included in Henning Mankell’s collection, The Pyramid: The First Wallander Cases (2008)—check out the Kindle edition here and the trade paperback here on Amazon.