![]() ![]() He was born in Stockholm, the son of a lawyer, Ivar, whose wife, Ingrid, left him the next year. His life was distinguished by a restless energy from the moment he went to sea as a teenager. Mankell himself had never been a frustrated middle-aged man. In the economic whirlwind of globalisation, this was something that a lot of frustrated middle-aged men could only dream of. In the optimistic 60s, James Bond was distinguished from other middle-aged men by his licence to kill but by the 90s the policeman as a fantasy hero had a licence to keep his job. One is that police work is one of the last wholly unionised jobs in the world, so that our hero will never be sacked for anything other than gross misconduct – of which he, being the hero, is never really guilty. The extraordinary global success of Swedish and later Norwegian crime fiction as a form of escapist literature for men had several causes. Photograph: BBC/Left Bank Pictures/Yellow Bird Kenneth Branagh as Inspector Kurt Wallander in the BBC’s drama series based on Henning Mankell’s bestselling books. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |