"Yo, Dr. Monkey, what have you been reading lately?"

Well, since you asked so nicely, here's the run down on what I've been reading in the past few months:

I decided to read another in the Kurt/Linda Wallander series after seeing the BBC/PBS adaption of some of Henning Mankell's other books. I liked this one better than the other one I read but still this one has it's problems. Mankell is a master of pacing, tone, and atmosphere but when it comes time for the pay off he's weak, very weak.

This novel features Linda Wallander, Swedish police detective Kurt Wallander's daughter, who is about to follow in her father's footsteps and become a cop. When one of her friends turns up missing during a massive investigation of some gruesome murders and animal abuse Linda and her father start at different points of investigating the crimes but they end up working side by side in the end, even though Linda is not offically even a patrol person yet. Mankell builds the suspense and drops clues in tiny batches but when Swedes finally figure it all out, he muffs the climax. The ending was such a disappointment to me that I may not read another of his books again. Although I would love to see the Swedish TV adaptions of his novels just to see how they differ from the PBS/BBC versions.

I had high hopes for this book and they were cruelly dashed twenty five pages in. It looked like a promisingly off beat novel about a reporter who is into goofy monster movies and other nerdy stuff who is drawn into a crazy conspiracy but it ended up being one of those novels set in New York city that only New Yorkers could love. It was too insular and too suffocatingly New Yorky for me. I only paid fifty cents for it so I don't feel too bad about not finising it.

This late 1970's crime novel was good but if the author had cut the last fifty pages it would have been great. Lots of twists and turns and a few stereotypical characters as well, but it's a pretty fun read. It just goes on a little longer than it should. But by the time you reach the end of it it's more than worn out it's welcome.

This book is one of the finest crime novels I have ever read. It's fast paced, compellingly written, and it sucks you in from the first sentence. It was written in the 1940's so some of the references are a bit dated and when the characters complain about the high price of things it's almost laughable how low they are in comparison to today's prices. Over all though, it's a cracking good read and one of the landmarks of crime novels. I highly recommend this one.

Book Report

I read on The Local where the BBC is adapting a series of films from the mystery novels of Swedish writer Henning Mankell. Kenneth Brannagh is set to portray Det. Kurt Wallander in the films so I figured I'd read one of the books before I saw any of the films. I wanted to see what the books were all about before Brannagh puts his stamp on the character, so I went to my local library and I checked out the first Kurt Wallander mystery to be translated into English:
I can honestly say while this is the finest Swedish mystery I have ever read, it left me kind of cold. Pun intended.

It was not so much a mystery as it was a novel about a Swedish cop who while trying to catch the murderers of an old Swedish farmer and his wife goes through some bad shit in his personal life. Wallander's wife has left him before the novel starts and he's wallowing in self pity over the break up of his marriage, his daughter is estranged from him, his father is teetering on the brink of dementia or Alzheimer's, he's got the hots for a married co-worker, and he's got drinking problems. And to top everything else off he's got to deal with a wave of anti immigrant sentiment that is sweeping his country.

You get a very acute sense of place in this book. Mankell's Sweden is one of small towns filled with lots of people with all kinds of secrets to keep. The rain, fog, snow, and ice hang over everything. When he writes about the warmer months in his book you get the sense that the harsh Swedish winter shapes things even then.

I liked this book not because I thought the plot and characters were all that great, in fact I didn't think they were that great at all. Nope, I liked it because it gave me a snapshot into a country that I'll probably never visit and because like foreign films tell stories in ways that are different than the way American filmmakers tell them, this novel was laid out and told differently than the way most Western mystery writers tell them.

I may not ever read another Kurt Wallander mystery but I'm glad I read this one.