He wasn't perfect. That's what made him great. 'Wallender' and his brilliant creator.

The World
Updated on
Henning Mankell appears in Berlin February 5, 2009.

PBS viewers know all about Kurt Wallander, the soul-searching Swedish police detective. His imperfections. His broken marriage. His love for his daughter. 

Wallander was the brainchild of Swedish crime novelist Henning Mankell, a man who published more than 40 novels, plays and children's books, selling about 40 million copies worldwide. Mankell died of cancer Monday at the age of 67.

In a 2010 interview with The World, Mankell says the tradition of his particular form of storytelling goes back to Greek plays such as "Medea,'' 2,400 years ago. "To use the crime as a mirror of society,'' he said. "If our system of justice doesn't work, the democracy will fall.'' (Hear that interview here.)

"Henning Mankell was one of the great Swedish authors of our time, loved by readers in Sweden and all over the world," said a statement from Leopard, the publisher Mankell co-founded in 2001. "Solidarity with those in need runs through his entire work and manifested itself in action until the very end."

"In life and in art, Henning Mankell was a man of passionate commitment,” said Kenneth Branagh, the actor who plays “Kurt Wallander” on the British version of the show, which is shown on PBS in the US. “I will miss his provocative intelligence and his great personal generosity. Aside from his stringent political activism, and his decades of work in Africa, he also leaves an immense contribution to Scandanavian literature.”

“His loving family, and those privileged to know him, together with readers from all over the world, will mourn a fine writer and a fine man," said Branagh.

"It was a tremendous privilege to know Henning and to bring Wallander to life in the English language for the BBC and Masterpiece," said Andy Harries, Wallander's executive producer. “The final three films will serve to honour his brilliant work as a novelist and his passion for encouraging justice, equality and decency wherever he went."

“He was the master,” says international crime fiction aficionado Barry Forshaw. As a writer, he says Mankell was really a kind of Trojan Horse. “With Wallender, you have a wonderfully written detective novel, but it was a detective novel about something. It was about society, it was about nationalism, it was about a whole host of other things."

In one of Mankell’s books, "Faceless Killers," “he addresses Sweden’s attitudes towards migrants, but he’s not holier than thou. He isn’t saying. ‘I am a perfect individual, or Kurt Wallander is a perfect individual, because he has the detective acknowledge that there’s something in himself that he doesn’t quite like, even though he’s a good and worthwhile man, like a lot of us have, a touch of racism that you have to deal with, and he didn’t trust Sweden. He felt that his own country might have made all the right noises about having open arms to immigrants, but it didn’t practice what it preached.”

British novelist Cathi Unsworth said she “admired the way he used to always weave issues of social justice into his work, and the lugubrious character of Wallander, although my favorite novel is probably the standalone "Italian Shoes."

That makes sense. "Italian Shoes" is about a man's unexpected chance at redemption.

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