Thursday, September 17, 2009

henning mankell's kurt wallander.


henning mankell.

my story with this swedish crime author begins with, unsurprisingly at least to me, masterpiece mystery on pbs. i am absolutely smitten with british crime dramas. i'm smitten with most crime dramas in general (we're talking law & order, some csi, etc.) but british ones... to die for. the camera shots, the length, the mini-series. i'm a sucker for all those agatha christie adaptations of poirot and miss marple! but something altogether different was on several weeks ago... kenneth branaugh starring as kurt wallander. i'd never heard of it.

there are nine kurt wallander novels by henning mankell in print. he's also written several other novels, but i haven't read any of them (yet?). right now i'm half way through the above pictured one, and it's amazing. it's just that the barren-seeming, wind-whipped scanian landscape is perfect for ghastly murders and crime with a real international flair. it's fast-paced, it keeps you hooked, and i feel as though it's been translated pretty well, save only a couple times when i've had to kind of decode sentences in which i think "electric" meant "electronic" or something silly. regardless, it's fun.

since i have an hour of lunch time at my job at the bookstore (you can imagine the stacks of books i acquire for myself and hopelessly stare at in yearning to read them all, if only simultaneously!) i get a lot of reading done. so i'll probably be posting books here quite a lot. all the merrier!

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