The motherless family lived above the law courts. And his father, a judge, took his young children to live in a small community in central Sweden (he died when Mankell was 24). There may have been a note of self-criticism in this observation, because he has four boys from different relationships and, as he later admitted, he spent two years in Mozambique partly to escape from 'domestic ties'. He has since said that what she did in leaving was only what many men do. Although he belatedly got to know her, they were never close. It was a creative skill that he would later put to profitable use a writer, but such was his talent for invention that he was severely disappointed when he eventually met the real woman. Mankell barely saw her until he was 15, and in her absence he came up with an imaginary version of his mother. His mother left her three children to move in with another man. His childhood was shaped by the divorce of his parents when he was one. Brooding and introspective, Kurt Wallander was handed diabetes by Mankell, who seemed to take a writerly delight in describing male physical decline.īy contrast, Mankell has always been a man of action.

One of the strengths of the Wallander novels is the way that he documented the detective's ailments and frailties. Like many writers before him, he has decided to channel his anxiety into writing a chronicle of his disease. 'My anxiety is very profound,' he acknowledged in Göteborgs-Posten, 'although by and large, I can keep it under control.' But not being afraid is not the same as not caring, especially when the prospect leaps forward a couple of decades. A few years ago, he told an interviewer he was not afraid of dying.

Het graf by Henning Mankell