Tuesday, March 15, 2011

The ten best modern European crime writers

Observer Sports Editor Brian Oliver named the ten best modern European crime writers.

One entry on his list:
Henning Mankell
Sweden

Read some of his non-Wallander novels – for example Depths, The Man from Beijing, or Italian Shoes – and you can see quite how impressive a writer Mankell is, and why he has sold 30m books. But it was the creation of Inspector Kurt Wallander that made Mankell so popular, turned Ystad into a tourist destination and started the phenomenal worldwide interest in Scandinavian crime writing, and gloom. “I’m not sure melancholia is a dominant trait of Swedish or Scandinavian literature,” Mankell has said. There’s plenty of it, though, in the 10 Wallander novels
Read about another writer on the list.

Read about the book that changed Henning Mankell's life.

--Marshal Zeringue