Sports Calendar

“I didn’t,” he says, “meet my mother until I was 15. Obviously I met her when I was born but she left before I can remember. So I grew up with my father and that worked out very good, but naturally there was always something wrong: there was no mother. And when I met my mother later on then I realised actually that I really disliked her very much because she had abandoned me.”

Did he, as Joel does, fantasise that she was a great woman? “I probably did but, more importantly, I created my own mother and when I met my mother in real life I preferred my imaginary mother.”

His father died in 1972, having never, to Mankell’s relief, remarried. “He was a good father. When he died I felt sadness. When my mother died a little later I didn’t feel anything at all.”

Even though she had killed herself? “Yes, but I preferred the spirit mother.”

She must have been unhappy to abandon him? “Probably.”

He doesn’t sound very sympathetic? “I’m not, even though I don’t talk very much about her now she is dead. On the other hand, no one is perfect and I did not end up in a very bad kind of life. I’m a good example of the fact that divorce doesn't lead necessarily to problems.”

He has been careful, despite his own divorces and sojourns in Africa, to ensure that his four sons never felt abandoned. He wrote letters and, he says, they knew he would be there when needed. “We have very good relations. It’s actually very simple: first of all always be available and, secondly, always send out good positive signals.”

His present marriage, to the theatre director Eva Bergman, is happy, despite their long African separations. “Finally, that came,” he says.

Mankell, as perhaps he would, believes we underrate crime writers, whom, he believes, have been in work since Euripides wrote Medea. Why has John le Carré not won a Nobel prize? But if we undervalue detective novels, we also undervalue real-life detectives empowered to bring justice to the society we have become. It is, he says, “crap” to say that Sweden lost its innocence with the still unsolved murder of its Prime Minister, Olaf Palme, in 1987, but the first Wallander book, Faceless Killers in 1991, was powered by his fears for race relations in Sweden with the beginning of mass immigration from Eastern Europe.

Some critics might read Wallander’s physical decay as a personification of a demoralised and corrupted justice system, but Mankell paints a consistently sympathetic portrait of a man struggling to maintain his sense of public duty and moral outrage.

“I don’t think we really understand what it means to be a police officer. They have to see the shit that we don’t want to see. I know quite a lot of police officers and they are very tainted by what they see. Wallander, I think, is left vomiting quite often.”

What does writing about murder do to a writer? “Actually what I’m writing about crime isn’t affecting me as much as what I see of the ugly faces of poverty in Africa. Some days you really feel like life is ashes in the mouth, like you have eaten a cigarette or something.”

He looks at his watch. My interview has taken an hour and ten minutes. People think that he hates doing them, that he is taciturn and unco- operative, but he rather enjoys meeting journalists, although he now remembers an incident in this very restaurant. A Swedish reporter had been nagging him for an interview and he finally relented. “So,” he began, “what do you think I should ask you?” Mankell thought about it, got up and left.

Henning Mankell talks about his work at the Purcell Room, South Bank Centre, London SE1, next Saturday at 7.45pm. Tickets: £8.50 (concessions half-price). 08703 800400, www.rfh.org.uk

Explore Books

• Book Extracts

• Book Reviews

• Books Group

• Audio Books

Times Recommends

• The 100 Best Books of the Decade
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• The conversation: James Ellroy