I was sad to recently learn that this thoughtful writer had gone.
The superbly dour and world-weary detective, Kurt Wallander – for me so definitively portrayed by the actor Krister Henriksson – was but one of his creations.
The world he portrayed was shot through with doubt, inhumanity and random bad luck, but in the tales of Wallander, and in his own insightful and compassionate ideas and words within interviews across the years, Mankell embodied an innate humanity.
He quoted a wonderful line from fellow Swede, Per Olof Enquist, in a final piece for The Guardian:
"One day we shall die. But on all the others we shall be alive."
