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.

Review: "How I Spend My Days and My Nights" by Håkan Nesser

“How I Spend My Days and My Nights” by Håkan Nesser Novellix, 2019   Swedish crime writer, Håkan Nesser’s “How I Spend My Days and My Nights”—originally published in the Swedish magazine Allas in 2006—is a splendid, if blisteringly dark, psychological chiller that haunts the reader long after the last page. On a rainy November evening, Marteen, a successful novelist, stops on his way home at Harry’s Bar for a quiet drink. His wife, Marlene, is away on business and a quick drink is excuse enough to escape the rain and postpone his arrival to their empty apartment.       Harry’s Bar is empty except for the bartender and a man drinking alone at the bar. After Marteen orders a double scotch, a pitcher of water, and a towel (to dry himself from the rain), and before he can find a table, the lone drinker introduces himself as David Perowne. And while Marteen has never heard of Perowne, the stranger tells him a nasty and unbelievable story about Marlene. But it’s a story that could change everything in Marteen’s life.       “How I Spend My Days and My Nights” is astonishingly good. With a deceptively simple narrative, Nesser seamlessly builds the mystery around the question, is Perowne’s tale about Marlene true? And just as relevant, does it matter if it is true? The Hitchcockian premise is jazzed by a hint of wobbling character reliability, tension, and potential betrayal. Then there are those last few sentences that change everything with an ironic and gut-wrenching twist.

I read “How I Spend My Days and My Nights” in a cool standalone paperback edition from Swedish publisher, Novellix. It was part of a four-book boxed-set called Swedish Crime, which includes stories by Arne Dahl, Karin Tidbeck, and Henning Mankell.       “How I Spend My Days and My Nights” was obviously translated from its original Swedish, but no translator is noted in the Novellix edition.