The ways in which the progressive mind responds to realities that challenge its most profound beliefs provide an enduring source of fascination. One response is to lay claim to the ownership of an alternative “truth” that departs in significant respects from the world perceived by others, an approach also popular with public relations executives and dissident members of the British royal family. Henning Mankell (1948–2015), the initiator of the trend for “Nordic noir” and the creator of the fictional detective Kurt Wallander, followed a rather more unusual approach. The most successful Swedish writer since Strindberg, during his lifetime Mankell sold forty million books and was translated into thirty-five languages. In addition to the thirteen Wallander thrillers, he wrote novels, children’s stories, and plays, while also founding a publishing company and working in the theater. But it was the Wallander detective stories, and the Swedish and British television series based on them, that brought fame, considerable wealth, and influence. Today, his hometown of Sveg boasts a museum in his honor and a bridge bearing his name.

Mankell was born in Stockholm in 1948 and brought up in the northern Swedish town of Sveg, where his father, Ivar, was a district judge. Mankell’s mother walked out on the family shortly after her son’s birth, but the author described his childhood as a happy one, defending his mother’s action on the grounds that she only did what many men do. He has related how he invented an imaginary mother to take