3/21/2023 0 Comments Faceless killers movieThe crime is very violent, and described very graphically, and there are some intense action sequences in the novel. Over the later books in the series, perhaps, he distinguishes himself in some way besides his fondness for opera. Wallander is a close cousin of Rebus (and not too distant from Peter Robinson’s Inspector Banks)–which is not to say that Wallander is derivative (if I have the chronology right, they are basically contemporaries), just that with his divorce and his drinking and his depression, he seemed formulaic, another in an already well-populated group. Faceless Killers reads like a thin version of, say, Rankin’s Fleshmarket Close. James, of course, does all this brilliantly (think of A Taste for Death, for instance), as does Ian Rankin (whose last three Rebus novels in particular deserve to be called ‘condition of England’ novels), and sometimes Elizabeth George ( Deception on His Mind, I think, is one of her most interesting). And the detectives themselves can be made multifaceted, and have plot lines of their own, so that the case under investigation becomes a device for personal exposure or exploration as well. Cases can be devised that draw both detectives and readers into new territory–social, political, intellectual, even philosophical. A procedural can become rich and interesting if the contexts and the characters are developed enough and the police’s discoveries aren’t all strictly literal. James has pointed out, nowadays it’s really the only way to write realistic mysteries, after all. Lots of very good crime novelists use the procedural form–as P. Because it’s a procedural, solving the case is a matter of following along as the police do their job, which necessarily makes us more passive as readers–we have to wait for their discoveries to be delivered to us. By the end the necessary information has been gathered and the pieces fitted together. How good is Faceless Killers by this measure? It’s fine, I guess. Perhaps the “very best kind” of “terrific” thriller doesn’t need great prose, just an interesting and well-constructed plot (a double-standard, of course, as if genre fiction should not be expected to be well written in every respect). He gets the job done, but do reviewers really have such low expectations for crime fiction qua fiction that something so flat gets so much praise? On the night of the murder they had been staying in a boarding house in Bastad. A man and a woman went on a robbery spree and then left the car in Halmstad. Naslund came back to work and succeeded in solving the problem of the stolen car. He found himself thinking about them in the plural.įor the next three days nothing happened. After the case meeting in the morning he had spent his time organising the hunt for the murderers in Lunnarp. that afternoon Wallander discoverd that he was hungry. Its starkness does seem suited, after a while, to the bleak landscape–both literal and emotional–of the novel, but that didn’t rescue it from seeming perfunctory, as writing, rather than artistic or literary: it often seemed as if Mankell was just working his way down a checklist of things to include or describe:Īt 4 p.m. Maybe the fault lies with the translators, but there is no elegance, no rhythm, no color to the prose at all: it’s just one statement after another. The style is almost unbearably plodding–not quite as dreary as the Stieg Larsson books (or the 1.5 of them I managed to wade through), but close. But I honestly can’t see why this book, or its author, would stimulate such enthusiasm. I’m not in a position to generalize about Mankell, or Wallander, after reading just one novel in this series. “An excellent thriller…A terrific novel.” ( The Independent ). “Beautifully constructed plots.” (New York Post). “A thriller of the very best kind.” ( The Times ). “An especially satisfying crime novel” ( Wall Street Journal). “Sweden’s greatest living mystery writer!” ( Los Angeles Times). My copy of Faceless Killers is littered with snippets of praise, both for Mankell in general and for the book in particular.
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