The Troubled Man (Swedish: Den orolige mannen) was published by Leopard in 2009 and is the final Kurt Wallander novel — the book that brings the series to its devastating conclusion. Wallander is now in his sixties, and the novel opens with hints of cognitive decline that will, by the book’s end, be confirmed as Alzheimer’s disease. The investigation — into the disappearance of Håkan von Enke, a retired naval officer and the father of Wallander’s daughter’s partner — takes the detective into the world of Cold War espionage, submarine incursions, and Swedish neutrality’s hidden compromises.
The Cold War plot is Mankell’s vehicle for examining Sweden’s relationship to its own recent history: the submarines that violated Swedish territorial waters in the 1980s, the possible collaboration between elements of Swedish military intelligence and foreign powers, and the lies that successive governments told their citizens about national security. Von Enke’s disappearance connects to these historical events, and Wallander’s investigation requires him to dig into secrets that powerful people want buried.
But the real subject of the novel is Wallander’s decline. The forgetting — names that slip away, procedures he can no longer recall, moments of confusion that he hides from colleagues — is depicted with clinical precision and emotional devastation. The final pages, in which Wallander walks into the fog and loses himself permanently, constitute one of the most moving endings in detective fiction: the great solver of puzzles losing the ability to think.
Collecting The Troubled Man
First Swedish edition (Leopard, Stockholm, 2009): Hardcover with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First Swedish edition: $20–$50
- First English edition (Knopf, 2011): $10–$25
- First UK edition (Harvill Secker, 2011): $10–$25