Henning Mankell
The Dogs of Riga
Translated from the Swedish by Laurie Thompson
Praise for Books by Henning Mankell
“The Godfather of Swedish Crime”—The Washington Post
“Riga is a haunted place, and Mankell describes it with the sort of creepy detail that one
shudders to believe is accurate.” –
Donna Leon
“The
writing is spare, the characterization deft, the atmosphere strong and the
suspense overwhelming.” –Times Literary Supplement
The Dogs of Riga
The Dogs of Riga is the second novel in the crime fiction series
featuring Inspector Kurt Wallander. Two
dead men are found in a life-raft off the coast of Sweden, near the town of Ystad.
Their deaths could be the result of a Mafia hit. What starts as a basic open-and-shut case turns into an international crime that includes smuggling, torture
and political subterfuge. The dead men are traced to Latvia. At the time in which the detective novel is set, Latvia is a country undergoing
political upheaval as the Soviet Union collapses. Major Liepa, an
officer from the serious crimes unit in Latvia, travels to Sweden and works
with Wallander on the case. The night that he returns to Latvia, Liepa is
murdered.
Wallander must travel to
Latvia and there, under sinister circumstances, he meets the widow of Major
Liepa, Baiba Liepa -- and falls in love. Wallander is asked to assist a
resistance group with whom Baiba is involved. After experiencing police
surveillance and threats, he discovers that the murders he is investigating have
a direct connection with the political unrest in Latvia.
Henning Mankell based the events in this novel on the
political unrest that the Baltic countries experienced in 1991. He did
extensive research, including meeting with a detective in the homicide squad in
Riga to understand how the squad conducted their business.
The first book in the
eleven-book crime fiction series, featuring Inspector Kurt
Wallander, is Faceless Killers, published
in 1991. Mankell’s books have won numerous awards, including the British Crime Writers’ Association Gold
Dagger for Sidetracked.
In his obituary for Henning Mankell in 2015, Ron Scillag quotes a comment by the Canadian best-selling crime writer Linwood Barclay in the Toronto Star: “…Mankell was doing Nordic Noir ‘before we knew it was a thing’... Like the greatest of crime writers, he used the conventions of the novel as a vehicle for social criticism.”
In his obituary for Henning Mankell in 2015, Ron Scillag quotes a comment by the Canadian best-selling crime writer Linwood Barclay in the Toronto Star: “…Mankell was doing Nordic Noir ‘before we knew it was a thing’... Like the greatest of crime writers, he used the conventions of the novel as a vehicle for social criticism.”
PHOTO BY: LINA IKSE
Via Penguin Random House Canada website
Henning Mankell
In 2015, at
the age of 67, Henning Mankell died
of cancer. He left a tremendous legacy, including 40 novels and numerous plays.
His books have sold more than 40 million copies and have been translated into
more than 40 languages.
The year his
first novel was published, in 1973, Mankell travelled to Africa. During his
career as a writer, Henning Mankell
split his time between Sweden and Mozambique, and since 1986 he acted as
the artistic director of Teatro Avenida in Maputo.
Henning Mankell said
of his time in Africa:
“I am like an artist who has to
stand close to the canvas in order to paint, and afterwards take a step back to
be able to see what I have painted. Africa has enriched my life with that
movement. Some things can only be perceived from a certain distance.”
Henning Mankell made large monetary donations to such charities as SOS Children’s Villages and Hand in Hand. In the 1980s, he travelled to United Nations refugee camps in Mozambique and later accompanied the UN High Commissioner Sadako Ogata to refugee camps in South Africa. He has written eloquently about the plight of refugees and his website asks that donations be made to the UN High Commission for Refugees and provides a link to the UNHCR – the UN Refugee Agency’s webpage, which will take you to the painful stories of the refugees who are escaping the strife in Syria.
Visit Henning Mankell’s site here:
Read an excerpt
You can read an excerpt from The Dogs of Riga at the Penguin Random House Canada site:
Penguin Random House.ca/books/107083/dogs-riga#9781400031528
http://penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/107083/dogs-riga#9781400031528
http://penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/107083/dogs-riga#9781400031528
Cinema
The series in which Kenneth
Branagh stars as Kurt Wallander
is made up of three distinct films which are based on the novels by Henning Mankell. You can watch the trailer here:
The Swedish Wallander
movies, several of whose adaptations were written by Mankell himself , have
featured the actors Krister Henriksson, Rolf Lassgård and Gustaf Skarsgård.
You can watch
Krister Henriksson as Kurt Wallander here:
To watch a video of
an interview with Henning Mankell on
the making of the Wallander movie (posted in 2014), you can watch it here:
GoodReads – Meet Your Next Favorite Book
GoodReads website
lists 14,195 ratings and 978 reviews for
The Dogs of Riga.
