Customer Reviews

The Return of the Dancing Master (Playaway Adult Fiction)

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I don't know what it is that has suddenly caused this rise in recognition of foreign writers, but it can only be a good thing. Jose Carlos Somoza, Boris Akunin, Karin Fossum, Carlo Lucarelli, and the Dark Wintry King of them all, Henning Mankell, who is increasingly a phenomena. His books fly off the shelves on mainland Europe, he's mobbed in the streets in his native Sweden, in Germany he apparently outsells J.K. Rowling (it's about time someone did), and half-Swedish Ruth Rendell has taken the trouble to read all the novels in their original language, admiring the fascinating procedural detail, which is just one of Mankell's strengths. He never shies from portraying the dull of aspects of routine police-work, but somehow manages to put such a spin on them as to make them interesting. And although The Return of the Dancing Master is a departure from his ever-better Kurt Wallander series - although it may as well not be, for how similar and ominously gloomy the two different protagonists are, it is just as excellent, and probably even better.

Retired policeman Herbert Molin lives a hermetic existence in a lonely house in the middle of a North-Sweden forest. Whatever he's hiding from, he's eluded it for 11 years, occupying himself with his fears, his jigsaw puzzles, and his dancing. Then, one day he is found beaten and lashed, lying dead in the snow on the edge of the wood. In his house, bloody footprints pattern the floor, marking out the steps of his favourite dance, the tango.

When Stefan Lindman, on sick-leave and obsessed with death having recently been diagnosed with cancer, reads of his old colleagues murder, he ventures north to the forests of Molin's retreat in order to try and find out more about who killed him, and in doing so places himself into a bleak investigation that stretches itself back to the evil acts of the second world war, and forces him to confront uncomfortable truths about his modern-day Sweden.

I can well see how Mankell's books, this one in particular, may not be suited to all. The Return of the Dancing Master - this title has quickly jumped to the top of my "Favourite Book Titles" list - is a dark, bleak and intense book with a heavy, dark atmosphere. There is little sunlight to be glimpsed anywhere, literally or metaphorically. So this is not for people who like their fiction light and happy, but more melancholy and affecting.

Sweden is evoked brilliantly, which is important as setting is one of the three necessary factors required in order to make a crime book effective, the other two being plot and character, where Mankell succeeds as well. The vast lonely forests of Northern Sweden contribute effectively to the bleakness (as you can tell, "bleak" is very much a watch-word here) of the book, and it is clear that Mankell has a very good handle on his country, and although is fond of it, shows us the things which worry him about modern Sweden, which he has said he thinks is a "pretty average" society. Here we are treated to bigotry, racism and neo-Nazism in pretty heavy doses, which makes for some disturbing scenes, and along with the atmosphere and the morbidity-obsessed lead character, it all correlates into a pretty dark book. Dark but brilliant, though. Mankell is an incredibly powerful writer, and that gift is on display here right from the beginning. The prologue gives us a vision of the executions of Nazi war criminals in 1945, and then in the first chapter we read terrified yet gripped by the throat as a scared, lonely old man's isolated home is assaulted in the dark, the windows shot out and he himself slaughtered.

The Return of the Dancing Master is bleak, yes, but it is fascinating, chilling, with the traditional flawed-hero (just what IS it about these kinds of people???) and it's refreshingly unformulaic. The plot is not once predictable, and constantly shifts beneath the reader to create a kind of gutsy suspense and a great pace. It's not quite perfect (there are a couple of kinks in the translation, I think, but that's forgivable) but apart from that it nearly is! A dark, excellent story by an incredibly talented writer, and I am absolutely sure that this will end up as one of my favourite reads of the year. If you want to try Mankell, start here. Whatever the price, the experience of this is well-worth it.

Henning Mankell's "The Return of the Dancing Master" is an outstanding piece of literature written in a manner that parallels its desolate, foreboding and depressing setting central and northern Sweden. Through the eyes of Mankell's main character 37 year old police officer Stefan Lindman we see a profound deliberation of life values and ideologies.

Lindman a bachelor working in the southern Swedish town of Boras has been stunned to learn that the lump on his tongue has been diagnosed as a malignant lesion. Bewildered, he espies a dated newspaper in the hospital cafeteria. He reads that a former colleague Herbert Molin, a retired 76 year old had been found murdered, bullwhipped to death at his isolated cottage in the northern forests of Harjedalen.

Lindman already absent on sick leave is due to start radiation therapy in 3 weeks. He becomes introspective while confronting his believed mortality and decides to escape from that reality and take a trip to Molin's locale to find out what happened.

Based in a hotel in the small town of Sveg, he begins unofficially investigating the circumstances of Molin's death. He soon meets Giuseppe Larsson the local officer investigating the crime, who gives him leeway and eventually allows Lindman to become part of the investigation. Eventually it is discovered that Molin left Sweden during WW2 to join with Hitler's SS troops and always harbored strong Nazi sentiments. It was determined that the murder was retribution for horrid acts committed by Molin during the war.

We also meet the murderer, Aron Silberstein, a German Jew now living in Argentina, who has vowed revenge against Molin. Shockingly during the probe, a retired and elderly neighbor of Molin's is also found murdered, killed by a shotgun blast.

As the inquest goes forward Lindman and the provincial police officers become confronted with a vast network of neo-Nazis operating under the cloak of the Strong Sweden Foundation. All the while, Lindman comes in contact with older people who are coming to grips their their own mortality which forces Lindman to do the same. He also uncovers some secrets which calls into question the basis of his own ideologic beliefs.

Mankell is an important new find for me as an author who goes beyond the confines of a mystery writer to provoke deep thought pertaining to the meaning of life.

I've always loved a mystery, but I'm picky. A lot of authors who regularly make the bestseller lists leave me as cold as the corpses they write about (I'm not naming names for fear of casting aspersions on anyone else's taste). My pantheon includes the British classics (Wilkie Collins, Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Josephine Tey, Dorothy Sayers) and their heirs (P.D. James and her ilk), but also some less decorous titles, like really good serial-killer yarns. And I'm partial to complex, gritty police procedurals with a European flavor --- like THE RETURN OF THE DANCING MASTER.

Summarizing this novel, it sounds pretty melodramatic: War crimes. Neo-[Nationalsozialist]. A torture-murder. A second murder that looks like an execution. But like all Henning Mankell's mysteries, it is also powerfully matter-of-fact. The book is as much about the daily obsessions of Stefan Lindman --- a police officer with a cancer diagnosis, troubled memories of his father and an ambiguous relationship with an older woman --- as it is about getting shot at in the dark Swedish woods (though there is plenty of action, too). Lindman is a kind of an anti-hero: surprisingly earthy ("Of all the joys that life had to offer, peeing at the side of the road was the best"), relentlessly unglamorous, with the combination of intelligence and persistence that gets crimes solved. In this he is very much like Kurt Wallander, the protagonist of an earlier series of suspense novels by Mankell. They are both smart, rather isolated men struggling to make connections, and their flawed humanity is endearing.

Making connections, to solve a case and/or to save one's soul, is the essence of THE RETURN OF THE DANCING MASTER (if you're wondering about the title, I'll say only that tango steps are an important clue). Partly to escape his fear of death (he's on sick leave, awaiting radiation treatments), Lindman leaves his home in the south of Sweden and goes north to investigate --- unofficially --- the murder of an older police officer he once worked with. He forms a friendly alliance with a local cop, Giuseppe Larsson (who blames his opera buffa name on his mother's major crush on an Italian crooner), and what started as a quick trip stretches into an obsessive pursuit of a murderer . . . or is it two murderers?

You think I'm going to tell? Not a chance. In any case, the thrill of chasing a killer is not the only attraction of THE RETURN OF THE DANCING MASTER; there are larger issues here. The novel challenges the popular image of Sweden as irreproachably anti-[Nationalsozialist](or at least neutral) during World War II and suggests that the country harbors secret (...)organizations even today. The alertly political aspect of Mankell's work reminds me of the wonderful mysteries written in the 1960s and '70s by a Swedish couple, Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö (some have been reissued by Vintage): they share a fundamental decency, a penchant for social criticism and a strong sense of history.

Mankell's prose, like his characters, is plain rather than fancy, and the translation (by an Englishman, Laurie Thompson), not always in the American idiom ("take it with a pinch of salt"; "a bolt from the sky"), can seem stilted at first. But after a while it grows on you, like a foreign accent. And if your knowledge of Sweden is limited to Ingmar Bergman films, THE RETURN OF THE DANCING MASTER gives a visceral sense of the country: frozen lakes, deep forests, piercing cold, people who keep to themselves and stay warm as best they can.

I must confess, though, that I missed Kurt Wallander. Now that I've read seven mysteries featuring this irresistible cop, he and I have a history: the details and texture of his life carry over from book to book. If you're new to Mankell, get acquainted with Wallander first. You won't be sorry.

--- Reviewed by Kathy Weissman

Boras (a city in Sweden) detective Stefan Lindman has been diagnosed as having cancer on his tongue and he takes sick leave to have radiotherapy. Then he learns that Herbert Molin, a former colleague who retired eleven years earlier has been murdered.

Molin had been living a lonely existence in the middle of a Northern forest, doing his jigsaw puzzles and dancing. He was found tied up and dead in the snow. He'd been tortured, his back whipped, his feet flayed, and the killer left a clue, bloody footprints in the house in the pattern of Molin's favorite dance, the tango.

Though Molin had retired to the far north and Boras is in the south, that doesn't stop Lindman from driving up and offering what help he can to Giuseppe Larrson, the officer running the investigation. Larrson is a laid-back, happily married local police officer who easily admits that he doesn't have any idea what's going on.

Struggling to face up to his own mortality while investigating, Lindman talks to Molin's neighbor, then the neighbor is murdered in a similar fashion, though not quite as brutally. The differences in the murders points to two suspects. The original killer, we learn, is a foreigner who is avenging the murder of his father, but he is only interested in killing the man responsible. The second murder has the first killer on the same quest as Lindman. Finding the second killer.

Lindman's investigation leads back to evil deeds done during World War II and forces Lindman to face uncomfortable truths about his country.

The translation here was so well done, that I didn't notice it. What I did notice, however, were the very believable people on Mr. Mankell's pages, the wonderful description of the sometimes harsh environment, and the message Mankell delivers in this rather frightening novel.

Stefan Lindman is a policeman in southern Sweden. In the same week he hears that he has tongue cancer and that his ex-colleague Herbert Molin is brutally murdered. As a way to forget his cancer he uses the sick leave between the diagnosis and the start of radiotherapy to investigate the murder of Molin, who is slaughtered and left behind with a pattern of footsteps that gives the basic tango steps. He works alongside Giuseppe Larsson, the official leader of the investigation. Together they first discover that Herbert Molin was a convinced nazi until his death and they unravel a network of neo-nazies. But the murderer of Herbert Molin comes from his past. Already quite in the beginning of the book we meet the murderer, but his exact motives remain unclear until the end of the book.

The first book that I read after the Kurt Wallander series. And even though Stefan Lindman is no Kurt Wallander, he is an interesting enough character and the theme of the book (neo-nazism in Sweden) is interesting enough to read this book in a few days. Despite this, there was something missing: the plot did not grip me like the last few Mankells that I have read.

First of all,let me say I questioned the introduction of a new dectective by Mankell ..as readers of the Kurt Wallander series we have gotten to know and understand most of what makes him tick. Now we meet another police officer ,in another place with his own set of problems...cancer of the tongue obviously the most serious of these.

Forget that...I should have known there was a plan here.The story takes off like a forest fire and offers us the most visual and terrifying of all of Mankell's books.I literally could not put the book down until it was finished.

Get hooked, get the whole series and read this BEFORE "Before the Frost'

Herbert Molin, an unobtrusive old man with a love of jigsaw puzzles, living in Harjedalen, an obscure corner of northern Sweden, is inexplicably murdered one autumn night. Far to the south in the town of Boras, a younger man, Stefan Lindman, a policeman in his thirties has been given a period of leave after a diagnosis of cancer. Terrified by the prospect of a possible early death, he reads in the paper about the death of an old man who was once his senior colleague, the same Molin, and decides to try to forget his pressing medical anxieties by going north to check the matter out. His colleagues in Harjedalin are not altogether welcoming of his interest but his outsider status proves a not unqualified disadvantage as he starts to put together the pieces of an altogether sinister jigsaw involving the enduring legacy of Sweden's Nazi movement. The plot only thickens when Molin's near neighbour Abraham Andersson is also killed.

Some crime novels keep the identity of the killer a mystery until the end. Others reveal it close to the start and allow us to see the unfolding investigation from, perhaps inter alia, the perceptive of the killer himself. This complex and ambitious novel does both. We are soon introduced to Aron Silberstein, Molin's killer and given an inking of his motive for his crime. But Molin did not kill Andersson and is no less excerized by the cops by the question of who did, a question Mankell keeps the reader in the dark about until the end.

It's a new departure for Mankell, taking a break from the Kurt Wallander series for which he is best known to write about a wholly new set of characters. The break is a welcome one and the book is fresh and enjoyable, richly complex and intriguing. If you know and like the Wallander books you are certain to enjoy this. If you don't, and you enjoy crime fiction, you haven't been paying attention!

A retired Swedish police officer Herbert Molin, living a solitary life out in the country, is brutally murdered in what looks like an execution-type killing. It appears that at some point during this horrendous event he has been dragged through a bloody rendition of a tango. There initially seems to be no motive and no suspect. A former colleague of his, Stefan Lindman, a young police officer just diagnosed with cancer of the tongue, remembers that when he worked with him a few years ago that Molin often appeared frightened and that once when they were chasing an escaped murderer, Molin had commented, "I thought it was somebody else." With that snippet to go on Lindman sets about to solve this complex case.

All the elements of a Mankell crime mystery are here: methodical police work by intelligent officers, reliance on instinct and experience, bending the rules to get the right results, characters-- even one of the murderers-- who are flesh and blood with real problems, and deep ethical and moral issues. In this instance Mankell delves into World War II Nazis both inside and out of Germany and a neo-Nazi network in Sweden.

Mankell makes the usual profound and cogent statements about the human condition. One police officer is described as a man "who laughed his way through life." Death is described as each one being "individual, every horrow has its own face." It is also characterized as a "tailor who measured people for their final suit, invisibly and in silence." Finally, Lindman, as most of us do, figures out that as he becomes older he looks more and more like his father.

This is my fourth Mankell mystery and it is every bit as good as the others. What is unique about this one is that there are two murders committed; and early on, the reader knows, unlike the investigators, that there are two killers involved. There are of course many surprises. Lindman is not quite ready for what he learns about his own father.

We can hope that all of this writer's thirty-three novels eventuallly get translated into English

I was intrigued to read a book by Mankell other than the Kurt Wallender series of which I have read all but the yet to be released "The Fifth Woman" and I will say I found this book very involving and well written. However, while I find myself totally captivated by the Ystad/Wallender series (and perhaps this is due to my familiarity with the main character and his colleagues --similar to the many policeprocedurals of the Ruth Rendall/P.D. James genre) I found this book sort of going off into somewhat cliched terrritories -- almost of the Robert Ludlam/Fredric Forsyth types --with inklings of (...) plots and several plot twists that were less than plausible. Interestingly, though he was described as quite different than Wallender (younger, etc) I kept on visualizing Wallender on this case. In short, I enjoyed the read but found much of it to be filler and fortunately I hung into the end which was very exciting.

The Return of the Dancing Master by Swedish author Henning Mankell is an excellent and unusual police procedural novel which will keep fans turning pages with mounting interest in the story.
The hero is Stefan Lindman. He is a 37 year old detective who has recently learned he suffers from cancer of the tongue. Lindman is in a love affair with Elena a Polish teacher who is ten years his senior. As with Wallender this man also has troubles with domestic issues as he neglects Elena for his police career. Lindman is tortured by dreams of his childhood and his complicated relationship with his deceased father is a motif in the novel. Lindman muses with horror about the possibilities of a fatal disease and the meaning of life. He is well drawn by Mankell; a complex human being who elicits our respect in his efforts at ferreting out the murderer of a perplexing crime.
One night an elderly retired police detective whose name is Herbert Molin (an alias) is brutally murdered. Molin lives in an isolated area of Sweden. His only hobbies are solving handmade jigsaw puzzles, listening to Argentinian music and dancing the tango with a doll! Later one of Molin's neighbors Abraham Andersson is also brutally murdered by being tied to a tree and killed with a shotgun blast. A woman named Elsa Berggren knows both men Berggen is an old woman who revers the Third Reich in which her father served. She is a horrible human being! While sleuthing into the crime Lindmann discovers an SS uniform hanging in a closet in Berggren's home. What is the connection between the murdered men and Berggren? Lindmann also discovers a revealing diary kept by Molin when the slaughtered man was a member of Hitler's SS in World War II. Also involved in the story are Victoria Molin the coldly sexy daughter of Molin who has secrets to hide. A Jewish born German from Argentina eager for revenge whose real name is Aron Silberstein is in Sweden to revenge the murder of his father a kindly Berlin dancing master at the hand of a SS murderer. The plot is intricate but the solution of the crime understandable.
Mankell's novel is an indictment of the rise of hate groups in modern Sweden where xenophobic groups like Strong Sweden and other neo-Nazi organizations promote their racial hatred towards others. One can almost feel the cold snow and the isolation of Sweden in this well written novel of murder, suspense and careful police detection.
This is an excellent detective novel which will also make you think. A first rate entry by Mankell in his growing oeuvre of outstanding police procedural novels! This reviewer would like to see more of Stefan Lindman in future novels!