In Faceless Killers, his first appearance, Inspector Kurt Wallander decides that the brutal murder of an old couple that he is investigating, is “"an old-fashioned crime."” Later, with the racially-inspired murder of a Somali, Wallander realises that "“a new world had emerged, and he hadn’t even noticed it. As a policeman, he still lived in another, older world. How was he going to learn to live in the new?"”
In The Dogs of Riga, the second Wallander novel (though the fourth to appear in the UK), new complexities emerge. The bodies of two smartly dressed young men, their arms wrapped around each other, are discovered in a rubber life raft that has drifted in from the Baltic Sea. It is February 1991.
Despite an attack of chest pains, Wallander (and his team) quickly establish a likely origin for the raft and its contents, Sweden’s foreign ministry becomes involved and a Major Liepa arrives from Latvia to help with enquiries, establishing some kind of icy rapport with Wallander over whisky and the Maria Callas version of Turandot. But Liepa is murdered on his return to his native country and Wallander, in turn, is called to Latvia to assist investigations.
Latvia in 1991 is a country in turmoil. Three years of civil agitation have resulted in a declaration of independence from the tottering Soviet Union, but local factions struggle both amongst themselves and against the Soviet Black Berets also present in the country. "You are in a country’ Wallander is told, “"where nothing is yet decided."”
What follows is a labyrinthine plot in which Wallander is mercilessly batted between the various political factions. But Le Carré gets the better of Sjöwall/Wahlöö, and the result, though exciting, is a step back from the heights of Faceless Killers and Sidetracked. Part of the problem is that Wallander, surrounded by duplicity, is on his own, leading to lengthy passages of rumination as, fairly fruitlessly, he tries to decide who is not who they are pretending to be. As partial compensation, Mankell introduces Liepa’s wife Biaba, the Latvian woman with whom Wallander, we know from later books, has a long-tem relationship. But Mankell’s seemingly artless and dispassionate prose here leaves us short on detail and, as a result, has some difficulty in conveying the attraction between these two.
Read it nonetheless. The atmosphere within a country during a crucial phase of its history is well conveyed. And it’s an essential step on that journey that Wallander undertook in Faceless Killers - to gain some understanding of the modern world in which he lives.
Laurie Thompson has taken over translation duties from Steven T. Murray. The book reads well, and it is to Thompson’s credit that veterans of the series will experience no sense of dislocation in tone from book to book.