The Return of the Dancing Master

Rating:
Summary: Gritty Reading, Terrific, but Frightening Story
Review: Boras (a city in Sweden) detective Stefan Lindman has been diagnosed as having cancer on his tongue and he takes sick leave to have radiotherapy. Then he learns that Herbert Molin, a former colleague who retired eleven years earlier has been murdered.

Molin had been living a lonely existence in the middle of a Northern forest, doing his jigsaw puzzles and dancing. He was found tied up and dead in the snow. He'd been tortured, his back whipped, his feet flayed, and the killer left a clue, bloody footprints in the house in the pattern of Molin's favorite dance, the tango.

Though Molin had retired to the far north and Boras is in the south, that doesn't stop Lindman from driving up and offering what help he can to Giuseppe Larrson, the officer running the investigation. Larrson is a laid-back, happily married local police officer who easily admits that he doesn't have any idea what's going on.

Struggling to face up to his own mortality while investigating, Lindman talks to Molin's neighbor, then the neighbor is murdered in a similar fashion, though not quite as brutally. The differences in the murders points to two suspects. The original killer, we learn, is a foreigner who is avenging the murder of his father, but he is only interested in killing the man responsible. The second murder has the first killer on the same quest as Lindman. Finding the second killer.

Lindman's investigation leads back to evil deeds done during World War II and forces Lindman to face uncomfortable truths about his country.

The translation here was so well done, that I didn't notice it. What I did notice, however, were the very believable people on Mr. Mankell's pages, the wonderful description of the sometimes harsh environment, and the message Mankell delivers in this rather frightening novel.

Reviewed by Judith Ann Cole

Rating:
Summary: An examination of life within a crime drama
Review: Henning Mankell's "The Return of the Dancing Master" is an outstanding piece of literature written in a manner that parallels its desolate, foreboding and depressing setting central and northern Sweden. Through the eyes of Mankell's main character 37 year old police officer Stefan Lindman we see a profound deliberation of life values and ideologies.

Lindman a bachelor working in the southern Swedish town of Boras has been stunned to learn that the lump on his tongue has been diagnosed as a malignant lesion. Bewildered, he espies a dated newspaper in the hospital cafeteria. He reads that a former colleague Herbert Molin, a retired 76 year old had been found murdered, bullwhipped to death at his isolated cottage in the northern forests of Harjedalen.

Lindman already absent on sick leave is due to start radiation therapy in 3 weeks. He becomes introspective while confronting his believed mortality and decides to escape from that reality and take a trip to Molin's locale to find out what happened.

Based in a hotel in the small town of Sveg, he begins unofficially investigating the circumstances of Molin's death. He soon meets Giuseppe Larsson the local officer investigating the crime, who gives him leeway and eventually allows Lindman to become part of the investigation. Eventually it is discovered that Molin left Sweden during WW2 to join with Hitler's SS troops and always harbored strong Nazi sentiments. It was determined that the murder was retribution for horrid acts committed by Molin during the war.

We also meet the murderer, Aron Silberstein, a German Jew now living in Argentina, who has vowed revenge against Molin. Shockingly during the probe, a retired and elderly neighbor of Molin's is also found murdered, killed by a shotgun blast.

As the inquest goes forward Lindman and the provincial police officers become confronted with a vast network of neo-Nazis operating under the cloak of the Strong Sweden Foundation. All the while, Lindman comes in contact with older people who are coming to grips their their own mortality which forces Lindman to do the same. He also uncovers some secrets which calls into question the basis of his own ideologic beliefs.

Mankell is an important new find for me as an author who goes beyond the confines of a mystery writer to provoke deep thought pertaining to the meaning of life.

Rating:
Summary: Another enjoyable Swedish mystery from Mankell
Review: Herbert Molin, an unobtrusive old man with a love of jigsaw puzzles, living in Harjedalen, an obscure corner of northern Sweden, is inexplicably murdered one autumn night. Far to the south in the town of Boras, a younger man, Stefan Lindman, a policeman in his thirties has been given a period of leave after a diagnosis of cancer. Terrified by the prospect of a possible early death, he reads in the paper about the death of an old man who was once his senior colleague, the same Molin, and decides to try to forget his pressing medical anxieties by going north to check the matter out. His colleagues in Harjedalin are not altogether welcoming of his interest but his outsider status proves a not unqualified disadvantage as he starts to put together the pieces of an altogether sinister jigsaw involving the enduring legacy of Sweden's Nazi movement. The plot only thickens when Molin's near neighbour Abraham Andersson is also killed.

Some crime novels keep the identity of the killer a mystery until the end. Others reveal it close to the start and allow us to see the unfolding investigation from, perhaps inter alia, the perceptive of the killer himself. This complex and ambitious novel does both. We are soon introduced to Aron Silberstein, Molin's killer and given an inking of his motive for his crime. But Molin did not kill Andersson and is no less excerized by the cops by the question of who did, a question Mankell keeps the reader in the dark about until the end.

It's a new departure for Mankell, taking a break from the Kurt Wallander series for which he is best known to write about a wholly new set of characters. The break is a welcome one and the book is fresh and enjoyable, richly complex and intriguing. If you know and like the Wallander books you are certain to enjoy this. If you don't, and you enjoy crime fiction, you haven't been paying attention!


Rating:
Summary: Brilliant international crime novel - mordant yet seductive
Review: I don't know what it is that has suddenly caused this rise in recognition of foreign writers, but it can only be a good thing. Jose Carlos Somoza, Boris Akunin, Karin Fossum, Carlo Lucarelli, and the Dark Wintry King of them all, Henning Mankell, who is increasingly a phenomena. His books fly off the shelves on mainland Europe, he's mobbed in the streets in his native Sweden, in Germany he apparently outsells J.K. Rowling (it's about time someone did), and half-Swedish Ruth Rendell has taken the trouble to read all the novels in their original language, admiring the fascinating procedural detail, which is just one of Mankell's strengths. He never shies from portraying the dull of aspects of routine police-work, but somehow manages to put such a spin on them as to make them interesting. And although The Return of the Dancing Master is a departure from his ever-better Kurt Wallander series - although it may as well not be, for how similar and ominously gloomy the two different protagonists are, it is just as excellent, and probably even better.

Retired policeman Herbert Molin lives a hermetic existence in a lonely house in the middle of a North-Sweden forest. Whatever he's hiding from, he's eluded it for 11 years, occupying himself with his fears, his jigsaw puzzles, and his dancing. Then, one day he is found beaten and lashed, lying dead in the snow on the edge of the wood. In his house, bloody footprints pattern the floor, marking out the steps of his favourite dance, the tango.

When Stefan Lindman, on sick-leave and obsessed with death having recently been diagnosed with cancer, reads of his old colleagues murder, he ventures north to the forests of Molin's retreat in order to try and find out more about who killed him, and in doing so places himself into a bleak investigation that stretches itself back to the evil acts of the second world war, and forces him to confront uncomfortable truths about his modern-day Sweden.

I can well see how Mankell's books, this one in particular, may not be suited to all. The Return of the Dancing Master - this title has quickly jumped to the top of my "Favourite Book Titles" list - is a dark, bleak and intense book with a heavy, dark atmosphere. There is little sunlight to be glimpsed anywhere, literally or metaphorically. So this is not for people who like their fiction light and happy, but more melancholy and affecting.

Sweden is evoked brilliantly, which is important as setting is one of the three necessary factors required in order to make a crime book effective, the other two being plot and character, where Mankell succeeds as well. The vast lonely forests of Northern Sweden contribute effectively to the bleakness (as you can tell, "bleak" is very much a watch-word here) of the book, and it is clear that Mankell has a very good handle on his country, and although is fond of it, shows us the things which worry him about modern Sweden, which he has said he thinks is a "pretty average" society. Here we are treated to bigotry, racism and neo-Nazism in pretty heavy doses, which makes for some disturbing scenes, and along with the atmosphere and the morbidity-obsessed lead character, it all correlates into a pretty dark book. Dark but brilliant, though. Mankell is an incredibly powerful writer, and that gift is on display here right from the beginning. The prologue gives us a vision of the executions of Nazi war criminals in 1945, and then in the first chapter we read terrified yet gripped by the throat as a scared, lonely old man's isolated home is assaulted in the dark, the windows shot out and he himself slaughtered.

The Return of the Dancing Master is bleak, yes, but it is fascinating, chilling, with the traditional flawed-hero (just what IS it about these kinds of people???) and it's refreshingly unformulaic. The plot is not once predictable, and constantly shifts beneath the reader to create a kind of gutsy suspense and a great pace. It's not quite perfect (there are a couple of kinks in the translation, I think, but that's forgivable) but apart from that it nearly is! A dark, excellent story by an incredibly talented writer, and I am absolutely sure that this will end up as one of my favourite reads of the year. If you want to try Mankell, start here. Whatever the price, the experience of this is well-worth it.

Rating:
Summary: Title is Deceptive for new Mankell novel
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Good but not as great as Wallender series
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: A Haunting and Intricately Plotted Story
Review: 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

Rating:
Summary: Title is Deceptive for new Mankell novel
Review: This book was well done but it was a tease as the visiting detective kept threatening to go home-bad ploy and the resident detective never sleeps except on duty. With the Iraq situation and radical muslims out there as terrorists, a Nazi and neo Nazi
theme is over the top especially as the author is so familiar with Africa and clearly people from that part of the world are floating around Sweden up to no good. I hope his next book is more with it as muslim terrorists are busy committing crimes in order to finance their operations including murders which could make for a now police procedural. But Mankell is very good much better than Karin Fossum who needs to go to school on Mankell's
Kurt Wallender series. Her detective is boring.

Rating:
Summary: Murders in Mankell's home valley!
Review: This was the third Mankell mystery I'd read (the other two are "Die falsche Fährte", " Brannvegg", then later "Hunde von Riga") and it's fully up to par. Hard to say whether Firewall is really better. Here, as in "Firewall" (and as opposed to "Die falsche Fährte") the book takes off and flies from the beginning. The suspense builds enormously but there came a point where I doubted, with all the tangled loose threads, if Mankell could bring it to a decent ending (according to John Berger, and maybe Kafka as well, a writer should never have a specific ending in mind, just let it fall out as the writing progresses). Anyway, the book ended reasonably after all. Highly recommendable. Mankell and Donna Leon are the only mysteries I can tolerate, having read Sherlock Holmes much earlier in life.

This review is based on the Norwegian translation, "Danselærerens tilbakkekomst".

Rating:
Summary: Murders in Mankell's home valley!
Review: This was the third Mankell mystery I'd read (the other two are "Die falsche Fährte", " Brannvegg", then later "Hunde von Riga") and it's fully up to par. Hard to say whether Firewall is really better. Here, as in "Firewall" (and as opposed to "Die falsche Fährte") the book takes off and flies from the beginning. The suspense builds enormously but there came a point where I doubted, with all the tangled loose threads, if Mankell could bring it to a decent ending (according to John Berger, and maybe Kafka as well, a writer should never have a specific ending in mind, just let it fall out as the writing progresses). Anyway, the book ended reasonably after all. Highly recommendable. Mankell and Donna Leon are the only mysteries I can tolerate, having read Sherlock Holmes much earlier in life.

This review is based on the Norwegian translation, "Danselærerens tilbakkekomst".