As part of an RPG kickstarter, Cörk Børd, I’d been watching and reading a few Scandi Noir classics, first was The Bat, and now on to what some would suggest is patient zero…

I think I may have caught a couple of the Kenneth Branagh Wallander episodes, so I dismissed this as a bit of a Danish version of Bergerac. Wallander is nothing like that and is also Swedish, not Danish.

Kurt Wallander has problems; he’s going through a divorce, his daughter tried to commit suicide and is estranged from him, and his father may have dementia. So, it’s a welcome distraction to have a triple homicide land on his doorstep.

The first two deaths are particularly violent and shocking for the small, rural community. The only clues were a rope knotted strangely and the word “foreign”.

So begins Wallander and his colleagues, meticulous, detailed and sometimes clumsy investigation - at one point, he forgets to ask a prime suspect for their alibi, but instead of admitting that, he makes up some cock and bull story about it being a clever tactic. The murders are complicated by a third death at a refugee camp, the two cases weave together, and a difficult political and social angle on the concerns of immigration makes the investigation complicated and high-profile.

It’s an excellent, well-written detective novel that shows how hard work, thorough analysis and the plodding, repetitive approach pay dividends over more dramatic small and big screen police action.

As per the Scandi Noir genre, Wallander’s personal life is a mess, he drinks a lot, eats crap, rarely sleeps, faces a very awkward, sexual harassment on a prosecutor, and fellow police cover up his drink driving. All in all, he should be nowhere near a police station; a total mental breakdown is surely just around the corner.

But somehow escaping his personal life is just the incentive Wallander needs to push on with the cases as it stretches over weeks and months. As he builds up evidence and slowly pinpoints the killers, it’s in fact his intuition that makes many of the breakthroughs; he knows instinctively if someone is lying, or if someone's face is that of a killer, or if a bit of evidence is important.

All in all, this is a bleak but compelling book; there’s little lightness, it’s all dark, the darkness of the murder amongst darker personal issues and the country and world’s darkness closing in on Wallander. Wallander, though, has resilience, pushing through everything to the end, with only the dreams of naked black women and a couple of whiskies to offer any respite.

I’ll leave the final quote to Wallander: “We’re living in the age of the noose.” Recommended.

I gave this 8.5 out of 10.

TTRPG Thoughts:

This gave me some great insight into writing more Cörk Børd scenarios. I have one in draft form, crossings, hopefully out this year. In this RPG, you have to chip away at a scene (location, NPC, event) until you’ve uncovered the clues. On a bad roll, you may suffer some impact - a fantastic example of this is when Wallander goes to a suspect’s house, spies in through a top-floor window and then falls off the scaffolding outside, some seriously bad rolls there!

There are some great characters too, which support Wallander and show how multiple PCs can act together to solve mysteries in a game; The stoic Rydberg, older, more thoughtful, is often used as a sounding board by Wallander. Then there is Martinsson, who represents the new face of the police force, analytical, procedural, but lacking intuition and the ability to engage with suspects. Svedberg, balding, middle-aged, a bit boring, but reliable, getting the job done. Björk, Wallander’s boss, seems to be on constant holiday, turning up in colourful shirts, worried about public opinion and fairly ignorant of the minutiae of cases or how to solve them.

These are brilliant resources that show how a team manages and resolves cases and the various scenes they encounter as they do.