I’ve just finished reading Hanning Mankell’s second Wallander novel, The Dogs of Riga, which takes Wallander away from Sweden into a corrupt underworld of the Latvian capital. Having seen quite a few of the BBC TV Wallander adaptations, I was quite surprised to be reading what seemed to be a very untypical storyline so early on in the series of novels, but as I continued my way through the book I became aware that the story it contained, and the way Wallander’s character is developed through it, helps to explain a lot of the traits he displays in the BBC portrayal (that are presumably based on how he appears in later books). Anyway, in The Dogs of Riga, Wallander is challenged to his very core by ruthless killers, corrupt police and the necessity of operating under-cover and unofficially in a country that he simply doesn’t know or understand, driven largely by a sense of duty and an inexplicable attraction to the widow of a newly-found (and lost) Latvian colleague. In the end, putting it in the simplest possible terms, he gets lucky.
Tim O'Hare 