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    Pyramid: And Four Other Kurt Wallander Mysteries
    Unavailable
    Pyramid: And Four Other Kurt Wallander Mysteries
    Unavailable
    Pyramid: And Four Other Kurt Wallander Mysteries
    Ebook608 pages6 hours

    Pyramid: And Four Other Kurt Wallander Mysteries

    By Henning Mankell

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    At last, a key addition to the Kurt Wallander mystery series: the book of short mysteries that takes us back to the beginning. Here we meet Wallander the twenty-one-year-old patrolman on his first criminal investigation, Wallander the young father facing an unexpected danger on Christmas Eve, Wallander on the brink of middle age solving a case of poisoning, the newly separated Wallander investigating the murder of a local photographer, and Wallander the veteran detective discovering unexpected connections between a downed mystery plane and the assassination of a pair of spinster sisters. Over the course of these five mysteries, he comes into his own as a murder detective, defined by his simultaneously methodical and instinctive work, and is increasingly haunted from witnessing the worst aspects of an atomized society.

    Written from the unique perspective of an author looking back upon his own creation to discover his origins, these mysteries are vintage Mankell. Essential reading for all Wallander fans, The Pyramid is also a wonderful showcase for Mankell’s powers as a writer whose works transcend their chosen genre to become thrilling and moral literature” (Michael Ondaatje).
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherThe New Press
    Release dateSep 23, 2008
    ISBN9781595585820
    Unavailable
    Pyramid: And Four Other Kurt Wallander Mysteries

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    Reviews for Pyramid

    3.5/5

    354 ratings17 reviews

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    • 4/5
      I enjoyed these short stories as much as the novels; maybe even more so. I will miss the Wallander series.
    • 4/5
      This book came at the end of the series...but I wanted to find out why Inspector Wallander turned out to be a mess. There were not many answers. He loves Mona (why?!, I cannot fathom), but the love mirrors the complicated love of his relationship with his father. Wallander can be an ass; not above using the company of another woman, though at least he has the decency to feel bad about not feeling anything for her. Wallander seems to construct caricatures of people in his head that he believes to be accurate...but reality leaves gaps, and sometimes reality does not even come close to his constructions. Interesting. Wallander is a mess, and I love him!
    • 4/5
      The book contains five stories, which set the stage for the Wallander novels. The stories here, which follow Wallander from his early twenties to around forty, are eminently readable - I eagerly went from one to the next and finished the book quickly. Wallender is a fully realized character, a ratheer downbeat one, to be sure. Maybe that's due to the weather: spring always seems to arrive late, or winter early, in these atories. If there's a fault here for my tastes, it's that these police procedurals don't have an element of puzzle-solving. There aren't any twists - once Wallender and his fellow cops are led to a killer, it's only a matter of following through on what the evidence has yielded. There are no surprises at the end of these stories. But they do provide an atmosphere of what it was like to live in Sweden in the Ninetee-Seventies and Eighties.
    • 4/5
      Five stories about Kurt Wallander, the fictional Swedish detective created by Henning Mankell. They are well written and cover the 20 years before Mankell ,wrote his first novel featuring this character in Faceless Killers. A very enjoyable read and copper-fastens Mankell's reputation as a wonderful crime writer against the background of a changing Sweden.
    • 3/5
      Some short stories about what happened to Wallander before we got to know him in his first book. Some are really short, others a bit longer...Funny to read those, also a bit strange as you already know a few things like The Knife.... Some are just average, others are really good...
    • 5/5
      This collection comprises three short stories and two novellas. They tell us about Wallender's early cases and fill us in on several facts missing from the later stories. I particularly liked the bit in the last story,'The Pyramid' in which Wallender's father goes on holiday to Egypt and gets arrested for attempting to climb the Pyramids.Wallender has to fly out to extricate him.This is not quite such a good read as most of the series,but nevertheless is still essential reading for the completist.
    • 4/5
      This is a collection of five short stories that the author uses to go back to the early days of Chief Inspector Wallander before he became an inspector. The stories are short but serve to fill in some background for the famous detective. I didn't find any of them worthy of more than 4 stars and overall, while arguably an important piece of the legacy of Wallander for fans, none of the cases were outstanding. I get the feeling that the endings are sometimes arrived at with great speed and relief so the author can move on to the next case. A must for Wallander fans - good but not great.
    • 2/5
      Pam and I have watched and enjoyed several of the Kenneth Branagh Wallander mysteries, and so I thought it was about time I read some of the Real Thing; as chance would have it, what I picked was not one of the novels but a sort of later adjunct to the series, a fat volume containing two short novels, a novella, and a couple of novelettes.

      I was left very much in two minds as to whether I wanted to read any more. Segerberg's translation really plods; there are countless sentences that exhibit a sort of magnetic fridge poetry effect -- you know all the components are present and correct, but no one's taken the trouble to put them in the right order. I assume it's not the translator's fault that the prose style consists largely of lots of single-clause sentences, so that no proper rhythm can ever be built up. It's a fact. Like this. See what I mean? On and on it goes. And obviously it's not the translator's fault that in two consecutive stories the bad guy points a gun at Wallander for a long moment, Wallander waits to die, and the bad guy blows his own brains out. The first time it was moderately suspenseful; the second time, not so much.

      One of the novelettes, "The Man with the Mask", is quite extraordinarily slight. The other, "The Man on the Beach", has more of a tale to tell -- where could the murdered man have gone to those days he went to the seaside, walked along the beach, and then seemed to vanish beyond anyone's ken? The first story in the book, the short novel "Wallander's First Case", held my attention perhaps best of all; the young Wallander's neighbor dies in suspicious circumstances and Wallander sets out to solve the crime even though he's not yet a detective, just a humble plod. "The Death of the Photographer" focuses on the disparity between a person's public image and the reality of them; and the same is true of the final, longer short novel "The Pyramid", in which the core mystery concerns the execution-style killings of two supposedly sweet old ladies who run a sewing-accessories shop.

      None of these tales is outright bad -- with the arguable exception of "The Man in the Mask" -- but none of them much moved me, either . . . and, as I say, I found the style extremely rebarbative. So maybe I'll try one of the novels. Someday. Maybe. Or perhaps not. It's like that. See?
    • 4/5
      This provides great background for the Wallander series, and each one is a great mystery on its own. Also it's great to revisit certain characters (who shall remain nameless) who die or otherwise leave in the later books; it's like they've come back to life.
    • 4/5
      As a big fan of the Wallender series, I enjoyed these shorter stories that provided background on the detective's early years. These shorter novels are a quicker and less complex read than the later (and longer) books in this series. Anyone who enjoys Scandinavian mystery/crime stories will enjoy reading these.
    • 2/5
      slow moving relialistic policework while the solutions of the mysteries are not very beliveable. i ahve not read any wallanders but i dont see much depth in this character in these short stories. but it makes a nice sofa-trip to sweden
    • 5/5
      The Pyramid is a collection of 5 short stories which gives readers more insight into the personal life of Kurt Wallander. While it was written after the 8th novel, Firewall, the events depicted in The Pyramid take place well before Faceless Killers, making it 1st chronologically in the series. The first story takes place in 1979 while the final occurs in 1989. In the stories, the reader sees Wallander on his first case and also before he meets his future wife Mona.While a couple are short enough to be called short stories, at least the last two are long enough to be called novellas. * Wallander's First Case * The Man with the Mask * The Man at the Beach * The Death of the Photographer * The PyramidThey trace Wallander's relationship with Mona, who will become his wife, then his ex-wife; with Linda his daughter whom he recognises holds the marriage together long after he and Mona have decided it holds nothing for them; and his father with whom he has an almost love-hate relationship. They also trace Wallander's growth as a detective, from when he is mentored by Hemberg, when he is still basically a cop on the beat, through to his rise as a detective, and his relationship with Rydberg, the mentor who replaced Hemberg, until Wallander was promoted over him.As you do in the novels of Ian Rankin, Ruth Rendell and Donna Leon, the reader becomes aware of social change, as refugees flood into Sweden, and drug trafficking replaces the old ways criminals used to make money. Mankell sees himself as a social commentator, and Kurt Wallender as his mouthpiece: (this is from the Foreword to THE PYRAMID)"... the books have always been variations on a single theme: 'What is happening to the Swedish welfare state in the 1990s?..'.....Wallander has in a way served as a kind of mouthpiece for growing insecurity, anger and healthy insights about the relationship between the welfare state and democracy".I really enjoyed THE PYRAMID. Other reviewers have commented on a certain lack of tension in the short stories but then that is possibly the nature of a short story. I did feel a little as if this Kurt Wallander wasn't quite the same as the one we get in FACELESS KILLERS onwards. He is not the innocent depicted in his first case; he learns gradually not to "go it alone", after his impetuousness gets him into life threatening situations; his intuition is more carefully laid out for us than I remember in later novels.THE PYRAMID is eminently readable, and if you are already a Henning Mankell fan, then you won't want to miss it.
    • 2/5
      5 short stories providing detective Kurt Wallander's back story, from the time he was a young patrolman to the year of his divorce. The stories have a surprising sameness, with short, sometimes ungraceful sentences (more than translation would warrant), and a general air of defeat even though all the cases are solved. Most of them hinge on the unknown character of the victims, and that somehow increases the bleakness with which the author seems to view his native country.These stories were written after the 8 Wallander detective novels, and the author states, in the introduction, that the whole of the series asks the question of whether Swedish democracy can survive the failure of the welfare state. This view makes the stories more interesting (not just puzzles to be solved) but gives them a sameness that does not make me eager to read the novels.
    • 4/5
      Prequel short stories showing Wallander as short tempered when he was young. The last story nicely lead into the first novel, faceless killers. His dad going to Egypt and a lot of him hanging around the apartment kind of dragged the stories down to a 3.5, but still love his Swedish weather descriptions. These were filler. Mankell needs the broader novel canvas. Or maybe that is what I am used to.
    • 4/5
      A volume of short stories about Wallander's early years on the force. A typically good read for this series.
    • 5/5
      A newly-minted police officer on patrol duties aspires to become a detective. Suddenly, trouble finds him when his reclusive, elderly neighbor apparently commits suicide - or did he? Young Kurt Wallander’s performance, eye for detail, and natural inquisitiveness come to the forefront in his first real case.From “Wallander’s First Case,” the other stories are, in order of Wallander’s career: “The Man with the Mask,” “The Man on the Beach,” “The Death of the Photographer,” and “The Pyramid.” Each story brings us a bit more of his career, a bit more of his back story. “The Pyramid” case comes to conclusion just before the first Wallander novel, set in January 1990.Wallander is an appealing character. As a police inspector, his taciturn nature, his insistence that the obvious, seemingly unrelated, facts of a case (or cases) do indeed lead to a logical end, carry him through to satisfying conclusions. There is a current of plausible danger as he closes in on his suspects, with frequently surprising turns as well.I am guilty of assuming that Sweden is a lovely place, full of lovely Swedes, who are just fantastic at everything, socially advanced, caring and loving one another on some higher plane of existence than we Americans can hope for. SureltBut really, the modern Sweden portrayed in these stories seems adrift in a sea of both classic and modern troubles, from vengeance to drug trafficking, and not so different from America.I enjoy the procedural tenor as the stories unfold, and they compare favorably with P.D. James’ stories with Chief Inspector Dalgliesh. Detectives meet, share facts, entertain hypotheses, and pick arguments apart until the events, facts, and suspects come to a coherent conclusion. Better, I came to believe in the characters. These are not super-everything criminals and cops as might be found in the latest Cornwall or Patterson novel, the characters are completely believable. Wallander, for example, loves, and loses. His father is difficult, at times incorrigible. His endlessly teetering car dies. His daughter bounces from one career to the next - will she ever settle down? His ex finds new love, while he gets a draining, emotionless relationship he can’t break off. It’s all the details of a life unfolding, as all lives do, that kept drawing me in.My mom turned me on to this book; she’s always loved this style of writing, from Detective Lt. Joe Leaphorn to Precious Ramotswe. With all the interest around the newer Swedish novels by Stieg Larsson, there might be more interest in other popular Swedish fiction. The Wallander novels have been a big hit for author Mankell, and the stories have translated moderately well into various television series, including one from the BBC featuring Kenneth Branagh.Soon I will start the novels, and I expect I shall find Wallander aging, approaching the end of his career, dealing with life, finding absolutes only in his work, and rarely at that. Further, I expect that Mankell will draw me in again with the little details of Wallander’s life that make it seem so real.
    • 3/5
      The Pyramid and the four other earlier Kurt Wallander stories tell a little more about the Wallander when he starts out first as a police man and detective before the original series begins. Mankell wrote The Pyramid et al after he had written several of his other books just to fill in some gaps and paint a broader picture of who Wallander is. They were good but not nearly as detailed and interesting as his more in depth books. The reader learns more about the demise of his first marriage to Mona, his daughter Linda, his father and his mentor, Ryberg.