Henning Mankell: In snow and in sand

Belatedly, long after widespread success elsewhere in Europe, word is spreading among UK readers about Swedish crime writer Henning Mankell. Fuelled by both his CWA Gold Dagger win in 2001 and a successful trade promotion last autumn, his profile in Britain is on the rise: his most recent paperback Sidetracked (Vintage, September 2002, £5.99, 009 9446987) has sold more than 20,000 units through Nielsen BookScan's Total Consumer Market, and the publisher reports that the autumn promotion also lifted sales across all Mankell's backlist titles.

There is still a long way to go, however, before the writer achieves here the outstanding success he enjoys in Scandinavia and elsewhere, particularly in Germany, where he is immensely popular and has sold more than seven million copies.

On 3rd April, Harvill will publish The White Lioness (£16.99, 1860469604), the sixth novel to feature anxious, overweight detective Inspector Kurt Wallander struggling with the darker side of modern Sweden in provincial Ystad. One Step Behind will go into Vintage on the same date (£5.99, 0099448874).

So behindhand is the English language publication that it is now 10 years since Mankell wrote The White Lioness; in subsequent stories, which will continue to appear in Harvill over forthcoming seasons, it is Inspector Wallander's daughter Linda who turns policewoman and takes over as the central detective character in the novels.

The White Lioness is a story with an international perspective, set in both Sweden and in South Africa. Inspector Wallander is called out to investigate the sudden disappearance of an ordinary Swedish estate agent and housewife on a visit to an inaccessible rural property. When her body is finally recovered, it is clear that she has been the victim of an execution-style killing; subsequent events bring Wallander up against the brutal activities of the South African secret service and a right-wing plot to destabilise the country through the assassination of leader Nelson Mandela.

The White Lioness is not the only Mankell novel with African connections--The Fifth Woman (Vintage, £5.99, 0099445212) involves a plotline tracing back to events in the Congo. Africa has played a large part in the writer's life, through the second strand of his career, as a playwright and theatre director.

Mankell has always combined writing with theatre work--his first play was produced while he was just 18, and he is married to another director, Eva Bergman, daughter of film-maker Ingmar Bergman. For the past 15 years he has been a director in Maputo in Mozambique, at that country's one and only professional theatre.

"Today I am so happy because we have managed to survive without any money for 15 years, and I have at least four actors today that I could bring to England and put on any stage here," he explains, in his fluent though idiosyncratic English.

Before Mozambique, Mankell spent time in Zambia. Showing the deep seriousness that informs his fiction, he explains that he made a decision early in his life that he could not live in Europe alone. "I never had any romantic reasons for going to Africa, for me it was a rational question. I realised quite soon as a young author that I needed to have a complementary perspective of life outside Europe. That was my ambition, and it is my ambition today. I think in that sense Africa has made me a better human being."

It is through spending time in Africa, he says, that he has come to understand his homeland. "You cannot from a single European perspective really understand the world, because so many people live a life completely different from ours. I think that today I would defend our fragile but nevertheless functioning democracy in Europe in a way I wouldn't have done 20 years ago, because I have seen madness. That is why I live with one foot in the sand and one foot in the snow."

The workings of democracy, and of justice, that central pillar of the democratic system, are an important concern within Mankell's crime fiction. But he explains that one of his main inspirations has also been the ancient Greek plays, with their archetypal themes of crime and punishment.

"I believe that I am writing in one of the oldest literatures that exist. Just a couple of weeks ago I read Euripides' Iphigenia, about the father who sacrifices his daughter to get more favourable winds for his ships--such a strong story, and written 4,000 years ago." One of the best crime stories of all, he says, is Macbeth. "No one says that it is a crime story, but that is precisely what it is, unbelievably well created to talk about the trauma and the violence of these things."

Mankell is prolific: he has written 30 plays and television series, and is also an essayist. He says that he feels lucky. "I think it is the biggest, most profound privilege in my life that I can sit in an empty room and write, and then I can open a door and there is another room full of people waiting to do theatre together--and then I open another door, and there is an empty room again.

"Really, for me, creativity and my lifeline are the same thing. I will die at the very moment when creativity is dead. There is a small bird in the Amazonas--a small, small bird--and from the moment it starts to fly, it has to fly to the end. If it sits down on the ground it will die. I have sympathy with that bird, because I really have a feeling that is me."