Two dollar pistol but the gun won't shoot

I pushed my way through two of Henning Mankell's Wallander novels, Faceless Killers and Firewall and was not so impressed. They were commendably bleak but surprisingly loose with the plot. Here for instance, Hastings, is Firewall not summing things up:

They never did manage to find a satisfying answer to why Sonja Hökberg was thrown against the high voltage wires at the power station, nor why Falk had been in possession of the blueprint.

Which was only central to the entire plot. To quote Raymond Chandler, Casual Notes on the Mystery Novel (1949):

The mystery novel must punish the criminal in one way or another, not necessarily by operation of the law courts. Contrary to popular belief, this has nothing to do with morality. It is part of the logic of the form. Without this the story is like an unresolved chord in music. It leaves a sense of irritation.

Still, Mankell sells mega, so it's a reminder maybe that mysteries are not all about answers. (I've pleaded as much myself.)

I am however a hard and fast fan of the Swedish TV production starring Krister Henriksson. A few of the handsomely produced movie-length episodes were based on Mankell's novels while the remainder were storylined by the author and scripted / worked up by television screenwriters. The encroaching professionalism means that over the course of the two seasons the series evolves into something not unlike others we have seen but at its core Wallander is grim, locally authentic and refreshingly awkward. One aspect of this is the locale – as with Stieg Larsson, the extremes of winter are both an elemental symbol and threatening plot device. Another is the mood of the players: the Scandanavian cast are naturalistic and react in ways that are unexpected. Kurt Wallander really is curt; Prosecutor Katarina is brittle; Martinsson is blinking and uncomprehending – a by-product of the writers not giving him many lines, or the camera needing something/one to cut away to. Sometimes the stories are just damn clunky, but there's really something there, and so the dramatisation has sent me back to the novels to puzzle them out. I love a good mystery, especially the conundrum of how the writer did it.