Policing Immigration: A Study of Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallander

Abstract

The present paper looks at the representation of inter-national mobility and immigrants in select works from Swedish author Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallander series. Mankell’s works are set in Sweden, a country where despite exceptionally inclusive foreign policies lies fault lines within its very social exceptionalism. This challenges the complete denouement that is conventionally observed in the genre of detective fiction. Sweden’s geographical proximity with the Baltic countries makes its national boundaries porous, which enables the covert extremist factions to surface and function globally. Illegal human trafficking, followed by the absence of any restriction in compliance with the social welfare state allows one to blend in better, despite the rising anti-immigrant sentiments across the nation in the more recent years. This paper studies the underpinnings of geographical features in the constant run and chase, and how these boundaries are breached by the severity, rigidity, and interdependency of these morally fractured underground networks. Mankell’s Faceless Killers (1991) reveals nascent xenophobia provoked by the neo-Nazi remnants, which is supplemented by local projection of immigrants. These boundaries are further abused in The White Lioness (1993) which has Russian and African fugitives operating deeper networks of extremist groups that manifest an inexistent national security. The paper will reflect on the idea of an immigrant figure as potentially a victim, as a criminal. Finally, an engagement with the physical aspects of the represented urban spaces will facilitate a discussion on the (il)legality of immigration which punctures the welfare state now close to collapse.