Furthermore, regarding Wallander, Shane McCorristine, in “The Place of Pessimism in Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallander Series”, writes, “The figure of Wallander was created, therefore, out of an ideological urge, as an agent of criticism with which Mankell could probe Swedish attitudes towards the place of non-Swedes and thereby diagnose the broader path of Swedish society with the aid of a hard-boiled and frequently cynical foil” (McCorristine 2011, 78). In another scholarly work, while commenting on Henning Mankell and his corpus of works, Stafford Hildred notes that in 1989, after Mankell returned to Sweden followed by a long stay in Africa,Ībout Kurt Wallander, Barry Forshaw, in “The Cracks Appear: Henning Mankell”, notes that Mankell’s dyspeptic detective is one of the “signal creations of contemporary crime fiction: out of condition, diabetes-suffering and with all the headaches of modern society leaving scars on his soul” (Forshaw 2012, 21). In his footsteps are writers like Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Georges Simenon, Patricia Highsmith, Henning Mankell, and Stied Larsson (Messent 2013, 4). However, it is Doyle and his creation Holmes who popularised the genre. Auguste Dupin, provides the model for Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. He writes that the modern form of detective fiction is derived from a few stories by Edgar Allen Poe, whose French detective, Monsieur C. To begin with, in the introduction of The Crime Fiction Handbook, Peter Messent attempts to locate Henning Mankell within the genealogy of detective fiction writers. As Barry Forshaw notes, “Mankell unflinchingly exposes the deep divisions in the society of that country, along with a variety of seemingly ineradicable social problems and the darker recesses of the psyches of his fellow countrymen and women.” (Forshaw 2013, 15)Īn inquiry into the available literature on Henning Mankell and Faceless Killers reveals that though not many scholarly essays exist on this topic, certain scholars working on the genre of Scandinavian crime fiction have produced some seminal works regarding the concerned writer and his novel. A recently divorced policeman, Kurt Wallander, lived in Mariagatan in Central Ystad (Mankell 2002, 8) and is the forty-year-old “criminal detective in Ystad who had the most experience” (ibid., 16). The novel is set in the town of Ystad and its surrounding areas, which are sparsely populated, and the villages are occupied by old Swedish farmers. Mankell published the novel in 1991 as Mördare utan ansikte and was first translated in 1997 by Steven Murray. Henning Mankel’s Faceless Killers is the first novel of the Inspector Kurt Wallander series. Keywords: Henning Mankell, Faceless Killers, Kurt Wallander, Xenophobia, Idyll. The “Concluding Remarks” of the paper expound upon Wallander’s way of coping with the changing notion of the idyll. The third section of the paper, ”Kurt Wallander, Xenophobia and loss of the Idyll” exposes how for Wallander, the political upheaval and the social chaos ultimately lead to the loss of the idyll that he has been associating with the Swedish countryside. The second section, “Xenophobia and a Scathing Criticism of the Right-Winged Nationalism”, expounds on how Mankell, through his criminal detective, Kurt Wallander, criticises hardcore and headstrong nationalism supported by the right-winged populace. The first section, titled ‘Swedish Nationalism and the “Other”’, focuses on the aspect of the postcolonial “other” in Mankell’s Faceless Killers. This paper studies the issue of xenophobia in the Swedish context, and how it affects the protagonist of the novel, criminal detective Kurt Wallander, who, although maintains his apolitical worldview, laments the loss of the Swedish idyll. Swedish crime fiction writer, Henning Mankell, introduces his police detective Kurt Wallander in the first novel of the Wallander series, Faceless Killers. Pdf Issue: Loss of the Swedish Idyll and Xenophobia.pdf
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