The Man Who Smiled (Swedish: Mannen som log) was published by Ordfront in 1994 and opens with Wallander at his lowest point: on leave from the police, drinking heavily, contemplating resignation, and still traumatized by having killed a man in the previous novel. The plot begins when a retired colleague asks for help investigating his father’s suspicious death in a car accident — and is then himself found murdered.
The investigation leads Wallander to Alfred Harderberg — a wealthy businessman and philanthropist who lives on a grand estate, funds charitable work, and is regarded as a pillar of the community. But behind the smile (the title’s “man who smiled” is Harderberg, whose public face is one of unfailing amiability) lies a network of illegal organ trading and corporate corruption. The novel explores the theme of power concealed behind benevolence — how wealth and respectability provide perfect cover for criminality.
Mankell uses the novel to examine the corruption of Swedish corporate culture in the early 1990s (the period of the Swedish banking crisis and the beginning of deregulation), and Harderberg represents a new kind of power in Swedish society: international capital that operates beyond the reach of the democratic state. Wallander’s difficulty in investigating Harderberg — the lack of evidence, the political protection, the legal barriers — is itself a social diagnosis: the democratic state is powerless against concentrated private wealth.
Collecting The Man Who Smiled
First Swedish edition (Ordfront, Stockholm, 1994): Hardcover with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First Swedish edition: $40–$100
- First English edition (New Press, 2005): $15–$40
- First UK edition (Harvill, 2005): $10–$30