The Return of the Dancing Master [Paperback]

I've always loved a mystery, but I'm picky. A lot of authors who regularly make the bestseller lists leave me as cold as the corpses they write about (I'm not naming names for fear of casting aspersions on anyone else's taste). My pantheon includes the British classics (Wilkie Collins, Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Josephine Tey, Dorothy Sayers) and their heirs (P.D. James and her ilk), but also some less decorous titles, like really good serial-killer yarns. And I'm partial to complex, gritty police procedurals with a European flavor --- like THE RETURN OF THE DANCING MASTER.

Summarizing this novel, it sounds pretty melodramatic: War crimes. Neo-[Nationalsozialist]. A torture-murder. A second murder that looks like an execution. But like all Henning Mankell's mysteries, it is also powerfully matter-of-fact. The book is as much about the daily obsessions of Stefan Lindman --- a police officer with a cancer diagnosis, troubled memories of his father and an ambiguous relationship with an older woman --- as it is about getting shot at in the dark Swedish woods (though there is plenty of action, too). Lindman is a kind of an anti-hero: surprisingly earthy ("Of all the joys that life had to offer, peeing at the side of the road was the best"), relentlessly unglamorous, with the combination of intelligence and persistence that gets crimes solved. In this he is very much like Kurt Wallander, the protagonist of an earlier series of suspense novels by Mankell. They are both smart, rather isolated men struggling to make connections, and their flawed humanity is endearing.

Making connections, to solve a case and/or to save one's soul, is the essence of THE RETURN OF THE DANCING MASTER (if you're wondering about the title, I'll say only that tango steps are an important clue). Partly to escape his fear of death (he's on sick leave, awaiting radiation treatments), Lindman leaves his home in the south of Sweden and goes north to investigate --- unofficially --- the murder of an older police officer he once worked with. He forms a friendly alliance with a local cop, Giuseppe Larsson (who blames his opera buffa name on his mother's major crush on an Italian crooner), and what started as a quick trip stretches into an obsessive pursuit of a murderer . . . or is it two murderers?

You think I'm going to tell? Not a chance. In any case, the thrill of chasing a killer is not the only attraction of THE RETURN OF THE DANCING MASTER; there are larger issues here. The novel challenges the popular image of Sweden as irreproachably anti-[Nationalsozialist](or at least neutral) during World War II and suggests that the country harbors secret (...)organizations even today. The alertly political aspect of Mankell's work reminds me of the wonderful mysteries written in the 1960s and '70s by a Swedish couple, Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö (some have been reissued by Vintage): they share a fundamental decency, a penchant for social criticism and a strong sense of history.

Mankell's prose, like his characters, is plain rather than fancy, and the translation (by an Englishman, Laurie Thompson), not always in the American idiom ("take it with a pinch of salt"; "a bolt from the sky"), can seem stilted at first. But after a while it grows on you, like a foreign accent. And if your knowledge of Sweden is limited to Ingmar Bergman films, THE RETURN OF THE DANCING MASTER gives a visceral sense of the country: frozen lakes, deep forests, piercing cold, people who keep to themselves and stay warm as best they can.

I must confess, though, that I missed Kurt Wallander. Now that I've read seven mysteries featuring this irresistible cop, he and I have a history: the details and texture of his life carry over from book to book. If you're new to Mankell, get acquainted with Wallander first. You won't be sorry.

--- Reviewed by Kathy Weissman

With any good Mankell novel, the reader is usually treated to a variety of philosophical views about big social and political issues that impact the individual and collective consciences. These treatments of big ideas seem to flow naturally from a very well controlled storyline that takes the reader through an extended adventure into the modern world of Nordic crime. Murder often comes with international terrorism, organized crime syndicates and radical political movements. In this non-Wallander special, "The Return of the Dancing Master", Mankell takes us into the northwestern forestlands of Sweden to the little town of Sveg to start this mystery. Lindman, a dangerously ill detective, on extended sick leave, decides to lend a hand in the ongoing investigation of the murder of his old partner, Molin. Coming from the south, he arrives with a mission to learn who killed his friend and bring him or her to justice. We quickly learn that Lindman, with all his good intentions, has no conceivable idea where this forensic search will take him. He will not be able to put aside the cancerous sore growing inside his mouth, nor will he be able to be indifferent to the demands of a personal relationship with Elena. He will also have to prevent himself from taking short cuts in concluding who the culprits really are. On the big front, frontier Sweden is portrayed as a world that hypocritically harbors the followers of an evil past, and it is that skanky environment that Lindman has wandered into unawares. Neo-Nazism is alive and thriving in modern Sweden under the very noses of a seemingly progressive yet indifferent society. As the awful truth emerges as to who Molin really was and how his father figured in it all, Lindman becomes even more dedicated to exposing the rotten system. As usual, the investigation of the murder leads in many different directions inside and outside the country, consuming all the moral fibre that Lindman has brought to the job. It is from the momentum of this fight for what is right that Lindman gains a new understanding about his own perspective on living. I recommend this novel to anyone who wants to understand what it can often involve when getting caught up in a holy crusade against the forces of evil. There are no easy or reassuring answers in this story; only a momentum that propels the hero to move in the right direction as he chases after the bad guys.

I was intrigued to read a book by Mankell other than the Kurt Wallender series of which I have read all but the yet to be released "The Fifth Woman" and I will say I found this book very involving and well written. However, while I find myself totally captivated by the Ystad/Wallender series (and perhaps this is due to my familiarity with the main character and his colleagues --similar to the many policeprocedurals of the Ruth Rendall/P.D. James genre) I found this book sort of going off into somewhat cliched terrritories -- almost of the Robert Ludlam/Fredric Forsyth types --with inklings of (...) plots and several plot twists that were less than plausible. Interestingly, though he was described as quite different than Wallender (younger, etc) I kept on visualizing Wallender on this case. In short, I enjoyed the read but found much of it to be filler and fortunately I hung into the end which was very exciting.