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
贺宁·曼凯尔
瑞典
读一读曼凯尔并非以沃蓝德为主角的其他小说,比如《死亡》,《北京来的男人》或《一双意大利鞋子》,你就能了解他是一个多么令人印象深刻的作家,以及为什么他能卖出3000万本小说了。但使曼凯尔声名鹊起的,还是侦探沃蓝德这个人物的创造,而小说中作为场景的Ystad城从此也变成了一个旅游胜地,另外就是他由此开启了北欧犯罪小说在全世界读者中的兴趣——连带其阴郁风格。“我并不确定忧郁是瑞典或北欧文学的一个主导特征,”曼凯尔曾说。但是在他的10本沃蓝德侦探小说中,确实有够料的忧郁成分。