Long before Steig Larsson provided chilling murders Swedish-style, there was Henning Mankel
By Bob Evans
Ystad's police don't mind posing for photos by crime-fiction loving tourists
YSTAD, SWEDEN – “This is a great place to bring up children,” says police inspector and mother-of-two Charlotte Lindh as parents and children pass by heading to an open-air flea market on a bright Saturday morning. “Ystad is a very peaceful place.”
At the other end of Stora Ostergatan, the main street through the southern Swedish port and market town, milling shoppers halt on the main square to applaud parading military bands from Germany and Austria and Scottish pipers, in town for an annual festival.
The bookshop just off the square, Stortorget, is crowded as are the cafe terraces around it, the waiters threading through the tables balancing trays with coffees and pre-lunch drinks.
Just like any small provincial European town in the seasonal sunshine on the first day of a warm, late summer weekend?
Perhaps, but Ystad, with its 17,000-odd regular inhabitants, is different. For millions of thriller fans around the world, the medieval idyll of brightly painted thatched cottages and “olde worlde”—but with all mod cons—hotels is the murder-and-mayhem capital of Scandinavia.
Thank you, Inspector Wallander
Around its narrow cobblestone streets, the thoroughfares of the modern suburbs and the port, stalk the shades of the police heroes and heroines—as well as the villains—of the 11 “Wallander” novels of 63-year-old Swedish writer Henning Mankel.
Three series of Swedish television films based around the Wallander character, eagerly snatched up by broadcasters across the globe, have added many more mystery stories to the canon—all with plots approved by the author.
And Irish-born international star actor Kenneth Branagh has played the key role in British television versions—also popular in Sweden—of several of the novels, with more being shot around the town this autumn.
First launched into the world by Mankel in 1991, the gruff, introspective Inspector Kurt Wallander of the Ystad police has tracked killers and other assorted villains through the town and the picture postcard countryside beyond.
The death rate in each novel runs at an average of four.
The mainly quiet streets of Ystad, but just around the corner ...
Right there on Stortorget, the unathletic, fast-food addict divorcee inspector has a fight to the death to stop a criminal master-mind wrecking the world economy in an intricate international operation to be climaxed with a card slipped into an ATM machine.
In one of the films, a suicide bomber seizes the minister of defence on the square and in another a hostage-taker blows himself up there when he is cornered by Wallander and his team of male and female detectives.
In leisure moments, the inspector frequents the bookshop and the cafes. But a street away he finds the murdered body of a police colleague and just outside the square the crooked local member of parliament is shot dead despite a heavy police guard.
“One could say it is a pity that our quiet town has to become known for all this fictional violence,” says hotelier Peter Schonstrom, whose “Anno 1793 Sekel Garden,” built into a medieval tannery, features in two Wallander books.
“But I am not complaining. It certainly brings in business.”
Schonstrom’s hotel offers, without fanfare, a Wallander suite.
Tourists stream to Ystad for a closer look
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – The scoops-seeking phone hacking by a private investigator hired by the UK tabloid, News of the World, appears to have reached families of the 7 July 2005 London bombings. The rapidly growing scandal of the phone hacking, with new revelations that police officers were paid, may have begun more than 10 years ago.
“Police officers are turning their attention to examine every high-profile case involving the murder, abduction or attack on any child since 2001 – in response to the revelation that journalists from the tabloid newspaper hacked into the voicemail messages of the murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler,” write the Guardian 6 July.
The newspaper, which has been behind much of the uncovering of the coverup at News International, owner of News of the World, adds that “the move is a direct response to the Guardian’s exclusive story on Monday that Mulcaire caused Milly’s parents to wrongly believe she was still alive – and interfered with police inquiries into her disappearance – by hacking into the teenager’s mobile phone and deleting messages.”
The scandal promises to deepen further and is likely to touch Prime Minister David Cameron with news coming out late Tuesday 5 July that News International paid senior police officers when Cameron’s former communications chief was editor at News of the World.
Links to other sites: BBC, News of the World, Telegraph
China is reeling from yet another in a spate of attacks on young children, where some were murdered and scores have been injured, this time in Hanzhong city in Shaanxi province, where a man reportedly hacked to death a teacher and six young children, with several others injured, report Al-Jazeera and the BBC. Chinese English language media do not carry the story at the moment.
Andal Ampatuan Jr, the mayor of Datu Unsayalso, who is also the son of a provincial governor on the Philippines island of Maguindanao, has been charged with multiple murders in connection with the cold-blooded massacre of 57 unarmed civilians by a large group of armed men Monday 24 November. The massacre has sent shock waves through the Philippines, with the president’s office saying she is enraged at what is a “limited clan political rivalry.” The area has been subject to violence in the past linked to Muslim secessionist groups, but President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s spokesperson says the massacre is not linked to those groups.
Adolf Storms, age 90, has been charged with the murder of 58 people in the final days of the second world war, in northern Germany. A court in Duisberg, western Germany, has brought the charges against the man, a former SS member, who is accused of taking a group of forced labourers to the woods and shooting them 29 March 1945. Storms was found by a student in Vienna who was researching massacres of forced labour workers. The court has not yet decided if it will open proceedings. Die Welt, in a July article about John Demjanjuk, who was brought back to Germany from the US to stand trial as an accessory in the deaths of 27,000 Nazi prisoners during the war, said that Germans have little appetite for more war trials.
Links to other sites: CNN, Independent
Forty-five people were killed in Mardin province in Turkey when gunmen with hand grenades and rifles broke into a house where a wedding was being celebrated and they opened fire. Police say the motive of the masked gunmen is unclear, but some local media are speculating that it was a blood feud and others that one of the guests was a member of a militia. BBC
The International Herald Tribune reports that, despite its massive problems which include a powerful drug-running trade and the violent deaths of the country’s top general and president, Guinea-Bissau is coloured by a tentative optimism, with the two men who have led it through misery for years both gone. (Ed. note: when the two were killed Geneva-based fellow journalist El Hadji Gorgui Wade Ndoye wrote a moving plea to members of the Foreign Press Association, asking that we not slip into the old trap of writing about Africa only as a continent where dictators and generals are toppled: he edits Continent Premier, an online magazine in French that focuses on African issues)
