Firewall (Swedish: Brandvägg) was published by Ordfront in 1998 and represents Mankell’s attempt to bring the Wallander series into the digital age. The novel begins with two seemingly unrelated events: a taxi driver collapses dead at an ATM, and two teenage girls murder another taxi driver apparently at random. The investigation connects both to a shadowy network of hackers and financial criminals planning a massive cyber-attack on the world’s banking systems.
Mankell’s social diagnosis extends here to the new world of information technology and financial globalization: the “firewall” of the title refers to both the technological barriers that protect computer systems and the social barriers that separate legitimate from criminal economies. Mankell argues that in the digital age, these barriers are illusory — that the same systems designed to enable global commerce also enable global crime, and that traditional policing is hopelessly inadequate to address threats that exist in cyberspace.
Wallander is characteristically out of his depth — he barely understands email, let alone network security — but his old-fashioned investigative instincts (patience, observation, persistence) prove more valuable than technological sophistication. The novel’s final set-piece, in which Wallander races to prevent a financial catastrophe while barely understanding the technology involved, is both tense and blackly comic. The novel was intended as the final Wallander book (Mankell would later write two more), and its vision of a world overwhelmed by technological complexity reflects Wallander’s — and perhaps Mankell’s own — sense of being left behind by modernity.
Collecting Firewall
First Swedish edition (Ordfront, Stockholm, 1998): Hardcover with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First Swedish edition: $25–$60
- First English edition (New Press, 2002): $15–$35
- First UK edition (Harvill, 2002): $10–$25