A Quote by Henning Mankell
I work in an old tradition that goes back to the ancient Greeks. You hold a mirror to crime to see what's happening in society. I could never write a crime story just for the sake of it, because I always want to talk about certain things in society.
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The best crime stories are always about the crime and its consequences - you know, 'Crime And Punishment' is the classic. Where you have the crime, and its consequences are the story, but considering the crime and the consequences makes you think about the society in which the crime takes place, if you see what I mean.
Today the crime novelist has one advantage denied to writers of 'straight' or 'literary' novels. Unlike them he can range over all levels of society, for crime can easily breach the barriers that exist in our stratified society. Because of these barriers the modern literary novel, unlike its 19th-century predecessors, is often confined to the horizontal, dealing only with one class. But crime runs through society from top to bottom, and so the crime novelist can present a fuller picture of the way we live now.
A state is not a mere society, having a common place, established for the prevention of mutual crime and for the sake of exchange. Political society exists for the sake of noble actions, and not mere companionship.
What do you really want to know? Am I sorry for what I did? There's not a day goes by I don't feel regret. Not because I'm in here, but because you think I should be. I look back on the way I was. A young, stupid kid that committed that terrible crime. I want to talk to him. I want to try to talk some sense to him. Tell him the way things are. But I can't. That kid's long gone, and this old man is all that's left.
In everything I've written, the crime has always just been an occasion to write about other things. I don't have a picture of myself as writing crime novels. I like fairly strong narratives, but it's a way of getting a plot moving.
Once I got interested in organized crime, and, specifically, Jewish organized crime, I got very interested in it. I have learned that, like my narrator Hannah, I'm a crime writer in my own peculiar way. Crime with a capital "C" is the subject that I'm stuck with - even Sway is about "crime" in a certain way. The nice thing about crime is that it enables you to deal with some big questioO
I've read crime fiction all my life. A thing that's bothered me about crime fiction is that it's generally about one or two people, but there's not much about society. I want to get away from that particular pattern: a lead, a supporting role and backdrop characters.
Society had a crime problem. It hired cops to attack crime. Now society has a cop problem.
We are not prepared to consider special category status for certain groups of people serving sentences for crime. Crime is crime is crime, it is not political
We don't talk about things, and in certain communities we really don't talk about our feelings. It's just, 'Put it in a box and forget about it, push it to the back.' That's something I think has hurt us as a society.
I think that crime is a good vehicle for looking at society in general because the nature of the crime novel means that you draw on a wide group of social possibilities.
The media insist that crime is the major concern of the American public today. In this connection they generally push the point that a disarmed society would be a crime-free society. They will not accept the truth that if you take all the guns off the street you still will have a crime problem, whereas if you take the criminals off the street you cannot have a gun problem.
All novels are about crime. You'd be hard pressed to find any novel that does not have an element of crime. I don't see myself as a crime novelist, but there are crimes in my books. That's the nature of storytelling, if you want to reflect the real world.
Despite crime's omnipresence, things work in society, because biology compels it. Order eventually restores itself, by psychic equilibrium.
Good writers know that crime is an entre into telling a greater story about character. Good crime writing holds up a mirror to the readers and reflects in a darker light the world in which they live.
Because crime stories reveal an aspect of our personality that everybody has, but which we normally keep very deeply hidden. We like to talk about the good sides of ourselves. We don't like to talk about our hatreds, our distrusts of one another, our secrets, but crime stories drag those things to the surface and consequently they fascinate people and always have throughout all history.
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