Saturday 14th July
I have got a thing about these Nordic detectives and having watched Wallander on TV played so brilliantly by Kenneth Branagh I couldn’t wait to get my hands on the books. Being the logical sort of person I am I decided to start with the first Wallander novel, so Faceless Killers was the one I started with. Well, it was brilliant and almost from the first page too. The sense of a life careening out of control was captured without any sentimentality. The prose is quite terse and there isn’t a lot of action or description, but somehow it just works. The character of Kurt Wallander is quite sad really, a bit like a younger Scandinavian version of our very own John Rebus. And why is it that we like our detectives to be miserable. In the twenties and thirties we seemed to like them jovial and rich like Hercule Poirot, but as times have got grittier then we seem to like our detectives grittier too. The weather is also a constant factor in this book, almost every page there is some reference to the weather getting worse or slightly better. And the desolate landscape of Sweden is captured in a few bleak phrases. The story wasn’t actually that great, a few dead ends and the killers in the end aren’t that interesting. One’s whole attention is on the pretty miserable lives of Kurt and his team of cops. And I find that this is what I really like; I don’t really care who dunnit, or how they were discovered, but the character of Kurt or Rebus is all important, even the little details of what they are eating and drinking and the clothes they are wearing.   I finished it in record time and now feel a bit empty that I have got to the end. So a definite hit – and I will be reading more. Shall we say 8 out of 10.
