The Pyramid: And Four Other Kurt Wallander Mysteries (2008) - Plot & Excerpts
THE PYRAMID is a collection of 5 short mysteries by which Henning Mankell introduces us to Kurt Wallender when he is a 21 year-old patrolman investigating the first homicide of his career. In a foreward, Mankell explains that he has received many inquires over the years about what happened to Wallender in the years before he receives the phone call the begins the first book in the series, FACELESS KILLERS. Mankell acknowledges that there have been inconsistencies in Wallender’s story as it stretches across the eight book series and he tries to resolve them in these stories.FACELESS KILLERS begins on January 8, 1990 when Wallender is almost 43 years old. “Wallender’s First Case” takes place when Wallender is a 21 year-old patrolman in Malmo, just beginning his relationship with Mona, the woman he will marry. Artur Halen is a very private man who lives across the hall from Wallender. One night Wallender hears what sounds like a gunshot and, when he investigates, he finds Halen’s door ajar and his body on the floor. The death is ruled a suicide but Wallender isn’t convinced and he decides to investigate on his own time, acting against the rules of the police department.In the second story, “The Man with the Mask”, it is Christmas Eve 1975 and Wallender is in a hurry to get home to Mona and his 5 year-old daughter, Linda. Just as he is leaving his office, his supervisor, Hemberg, asks him to make a stop at a grocery store that is on his way home. The owner, an elderly woman, has called reporting the presence of a man who seems just to be waiting outside her store. Wallender agrees to make the stop and a tragedy unfolds as he confronts a man overtaken by circumstances.Mankell jumps forward to April, 1987 for “The Man on the Beach”. Wallender is now a chief inspector in Ystad, he is nearly middle-aged and his marriage is failing. Hansson, a colleague, asks Wallender to meet him at the local hospital so that he can hear a very strange story from Stenberg, a taxi driver. The driver describes collecting a fare in a nearby town for a trip to Ystad. Stenberg believed the man had fallen asleep in the backseat but when they arrive in Ystad, the man is dead. Wallender and his team learn that the man’s name was Alexandersson, that he owned a small business, lived in Stockholm, was divorced, and was the father of one child, a son who had died 7 years previously. Alexandersson had been staying in Ystad for the past week and each day a taxi took him to Svarte, dropped him off at the edge of the village early in the morning and then a taxi returned him to Ystad in the late afternoon. While in Svarte, Alexandersson walked on the beach. The team is unsure what it is they need to do about this case until they learn that there was poison in Alexandersson’s system. Did he commit suicide or was he murdered? As the story unfolds, Wallender finds himself caught in a story of obsession and love.“The Death of the Photographer” takes place in April, 1988. Wallender and Mona are separated and he is trying to re-establish a relationship with his daughter, Linda. Early one morning in the middle of April, the body of Simon Lamberg is found in his photography studio. Lamberg was as close to an official photographer for the city of Ystad as anyone could be; he had taken Wallender’s wedding photos when he and Mona had married in 1970. The early investigation reveals only one odd thing in what was a very regular life – Lamberg took newspaper photos of prominent leaders in the government and community, including Wallender’s, and used the tools of his trade to turn the faces into grotesques, pictures which he saved in albums. That hobby seemed harmless and there didn’t seem to be anything else to warrant his violent death. As the investigation procedes, the police learn that Lamberg had a daughter who had been born with severe mental and physical handicaps. Until she was 4 she had been cared for at home but then it was necessary to have her placed in a hospital. Lamberg never visited her; her only visitors were her mother and a woman whose identity was unknown. Wallender refuses to believe that a man whose life was so normal, so regular could be the victim of a brutal attack such as the one that killed him. He is not surprised when, as he ends the case, he discovers that the motive was jealousy and revenge from a very unexpected quarter.The final story in the book is also titled “The Pyramid” and it is in this story that Mankell examines Wallender’s relationship with his father, the eccentric painter of landscapes, with and without a grouse. On the 11th of December, 1989, a small plane drops from the sky and crashes in a forest far from any runway. The two men on board are killed, leaving nothing to identify them. It is quickly determined that this plane, not appearing on radar as it flew into Swedish air space, was carrying a load of drugs. Wallender is beginning this investigation when the sewing shop and home of two sisters catches fire, killing them. It is quickly ruled arson but why would anyone have anything against two seemingly pleasant old ladies? As Wallender tries to make sense of both cases, he gets hit with a third problem. His father has gone to Egypt to fulfill a dream to see the pyramids. Wallender is surprised by his father’s decision but not nearly as surprised as when he receives a telephone call from the police in Cairo reporting that his father has been jailed for trying to climb the ancient monuments. Wallender didn’t realize his father’s dream was actually to stand on top of a pyramid and the old man is not pleased that his son comes to rescue him.Of the 5 stories, I enjoyed the last the most as Mankell resolves the pyramid. All of the stories are equally well-written and Mankell does a superb job creating Wallender’s back story. In the foreward, Mankell writes that the Wallender novels have served as a means to examine the relationship between the Swedish welfare state and democracy. While others may have grasped this subtext I did not. I have simply enjoyed some of the best written, most engaging mystery novels available today. The date of the foreward is January, 1999. I wonder what Wallender would make of 21st century Sweden.
"Wallander woke up shortly after six o'clock on the morning of the eleventh of December. At the same moment that he opened his eyes, his alarm clock went off. He turned it off and lay staring out into the dark. Stretched his arms and legs, spread his fingers and toes. That had become a habit, to feel if the night had left him with any aches. He swallowed in order to check if any infection had sneaked into his respiratory system. He wondered sometimes if he was slowly becoming a hypochondriac." Kenneth Branagh as WallanderKurt Wallander has good reason to always be checking his health. He works too many hours, his eating schedule is haphazard at best, and he goes days sometimes with little or no sleep. Really the only time he can catch up on his sleep is when he is sick and he does get sick...a lot. He suffers from crippling depression especially when he is between cases. His wife has left him. His daughter is a floating presence just off stage most of the time. His father is cranky, disappointed that his son became a cop, and like Kurt mostly lost in his own world only instead of puzzling over a murder he is painting the same landscape picture over and over sometimes with a grouse and sometimes without. Krister Henriksson as Wallander in the Swedish versionThis is a compilation of five short stories. I was under the impression that these would all be cases from his days before the novels begin. The first story is of his first case where Wallander is still in uniform, but already displaying the tenacity that makes him a valued investigating detective. The best story is also the longest story called The Pyramid which is with Kurt in his forties already divorced and in the time line falls much later in his career. Over the course of these stories Wallander does find himself bludgeoned, smacked, knifed, tied up, attacked by a dog, and in a position where he has to use his gun to return fire at an assailant. He closes his eyes when he shoots; so his aim, to say the least, is less than perfect. Dirty Harry he is not. Despite these near death experiences Wallander seems impervious to changing the way he investigates. Once he lands on a new line of inquiry he rarely has time to find a partner to go with him. People are just annoying distractions to his thinking process. Going solo does put him at risk, but the rewards, in his mind, outweigh a potentially carelessly achieved early death. Usually in a book series we are supposed to root for our hero to find romance. In the case of Wallander whenever a new woman has caught his attention I'm yelling, run, run for your sanity. He is mysterious and intriguing to women. They think this quiet man is thoughtful, smart, and successful. When they can get his attention away from a case he must provide all the proper responses to keep the relationship moving forward. It doesn't take long for them to learn that he is absolutely obsessed with his case load. At first they can believe that it is just THIS case and that once the case is solved Kurt will go back to being the person they perceive him to be. After several cancellations for dinner, the calls in the middle of the night that have him dashing away, and their inability to pry him away for a vacation the women start to realize that this is the way Wallander is all the time and there is no chance of them changing him into the man they want him to be. His mind is too inverted to share his thoughts with colleagues or with people who care about him. He may stop mid-sentence to follow another clue that has suddenly clicked into place leaving the person he was talking with hanging on his last word, desperately wishing they could be a part of the world in Wallander's head. I sometimes feel the need to give Kurt a good shake, but if I am found deceased under suspicious circumstances there is no doubt in my mind I want Wallander on the case. Ystad, Sweden the setting for the Wallander seriesWhen I started this book I thought it would be a good place for anyone to ease into the Wallander series, but after reading it I believe that readers will like this book more after they have read a couple of the novels. The stories were solid, but were too docile to even blow Marilyn's skirt up.
What do You think about The Pyramid: And Four Other Kurt Wallander Mysteries (2008)?
The Pyramid was a disappointment for a long-standing fan of the fictional Swedish detective. I am used to Henning Mankell’s writing being rather uneven, but the Detective Wallander stories set in Sweden have been reliable until now. I simply lose him when he moves the setting to Africa.The book is apparently a collection of bits and bobs lying around on the writer’s desk – and, in fact, he pretty much says that in the foreword. The problem is that no one piece scores as a standalone short story or as a coherent novel, although the main story runs to about 160 pages in my paperback copy.
—Yngvild
The book contains five stories, which set the stage for the Wallander novels, which I've thoroughly enjoyed, even with Mankell's constant tics (Wallender's father's paintings, etc.) The stories here, which follow wallander from his early twenties to around forty, are eminently readable - I eagerly went from one to the next and finished the book quickly. Wallender is a fully realized character, a ratheer downbeat one, to be sure. Maybe that's due to the weather: spring always seems to arrive late, or winter early, in these atories. If there's a fault here for my tastes, it's that these police procedurals don't have an element of puzzle-solving. There aren't any twists - once Wallender and his fellow cops are led to a killer, it's only a matter of following through on what the evidence has yielded. There are no surprises at the end of these stories. But they do provide an atmosphere of what it was like to live in Sweden in the Ninetee-Seventies and Eighties and are a worthy successor to the great Martin Beck series.
—Myer Kutz
Da dieses Buch chronologisch vor den anderen kommt, habe ich dieses nun auch zuerst gelesen. Mein erster Mankell also. Er ist hier erst 21 Jahre alt, und am Beginn des Buches noch Ordnungspolizist, der aber durch Zufall bei den Ermittlungen für einen Kriminalfall miteinbezogen wird. Er war es nämlich, der die Leiche entdeckt hat. Im Buch werden mehrere Fälle erzählt, zwischen denen manchmal Jahre liegen. Auch wenn ich normalerweise einen kompletten Roman Kurzgeschichten vorziehe, fand ich dieses Buch doch sehr gut zu lesen, da die Aufklärung der Fälle dennoch detailliert waren. Und auch spannend. Aufgefallen ist mir, dass die Syntax ja relativ einfach ist, sehr kurze Sätze und diese sind nicht irgendwie kunstvoll miteinander verbunden. Sondern eine sehr einfache Sprache, und dennoch ganz angenehm zu lesen. Das ist irgendwie wohl auch sein Stil scheint mir, zu schreiben wann genau Wallander aufgestanden ist, sich geduscht hat, einen Kaffee getrunken hat und dann zum Polizeipräsidium gefahren ist, wann er dort angekommen ist... Lauter Dinge, die für die Story eigentlich vollkommen unwichtig sind und eigentlich nur Füllstoff. Aber das soll die Figur wahrscheinlich menschlicher machen. Gestört hat es mich nicht. Nur einige Wiederholungen fand ich unnötig, wenn Wallander immer wieder den Fall kurz zusammenfasst (für die Leser, die vorher nicht genau aufgepasst haben?). Einmal ist ok, aber zu oft sollte das nicht sein.
—Karschtl
