Interview: Henning Mankell, author

'SHOW me where you grew up," I say to Henning Mankell, pointing at a rough map of Sweden I've just drawn, in which his homeland looks embarrassingly like a long, limp phallus.

He looks at my map, disgusted. "That's not anything like Sweden. Let me have a go." And he dots his own map with the places that meant something to him. Ystad, of course, where his 11 Kurt Wallander novels are set. Stockholm, where he was born 62 years ago and worked as a stagehand before becoming one of his country's leading playwrights. Bors, on Sweden's west coast just above Gothenburg, where he dropped out of school as a teenager. And Sveg, the place I'm most interested in, a small town amid the forests of north-central Sweden, where he spent his childhood.

Mankell's mother had walked out on the family when he was a baby, and he was brought up in Sveg by his father, a judge in the district court. They lived in a flat above the courtroom. Sometimes the young Mankell and his sister would creep downstairs to the empty courtroom and play there.

If you interview a lot of authors, you often find your questions hovering around the links between their work and their life. Sometimes there are none: the fiction has sprung purely from the writer's imagination and doesn't flow from direct experience.

With Mankell, one suspects, the links are rather more direct, even if still hazy. He has spoken before about the effect of his mother's absence, how he didn't feel scarred by it, how it might even have spurred his imagination.

I'm more interested in Ivar Mankell. I've never heard Mankell talk about his father, but he seems like a remarkable man. Was he – the judge who talked to his young son about some of his cases – the mainspring for Mankell's belief in social justice that motivates Kurt Wallander? Were those childhood games in an empty Sveg courtroom the first stirrings of the books that sell more in Europe than those of any living British writer?

The Man from Beijing, Henning Mankell's latest novel, is one of 29 books he has written that don't feature Kurt Wallander, his shambolic, edgy, diabetic detective. It is, however, the first one in which the central character is a district judge.

She's called Birgitta Roslin, and no, she's definitely not a Wallander-substitute. The Man from Beijing, in which she attempts to track down the man who single-handedly murdered all the adult inhabitants of a sleepy hamlet in northern Sweden, is definitely not the start of a new series.

"I wanted to have a main character who is not connected to the investigation," he explains, when we meet in London. "And I decided that the time had come to use something that I have had as capital in the bank since I was a child – the fact that my father was a judge. To distance it from my father, I opted for a female lead character." (And no, he says, in answer to my map-question, Sveg is nowhere near Hesjavallen, where 19 villagers have been wiped out in the worst crime ever to take place in Sweden: the same latitude, the same cold, the same isolation, but not the same place at all.)

I ask him to tell me more about his father. Ivar Mankell never sat in judgment on any case remotely like the mass-killing Birgitta gets caught up in, with its long tendrils into the 19th century and an epic global sweep that takes in Mozambique, London, the Rocky Mountains and China. He may have introduced his son to detective fiction by getting him to read Conan Doyle, but the real-life cases he judged – paternity cases, accidents, disorderly drunks – were far more prosaic than any of his son's subsequent novels,

"In the ten years my father was a judge in Sveg, there was just one murder case," he says. "A forester – a literate but simple man – killed a shopkeeper who was hated by everyone in the village. My father gave him a sentence that was absolutely the least that he could give – about six years, I think. I'll ask my researcher to find out more about it: it was about 50 years ago, so I'd like to see if I remember it right."

He's never written his autobiography – "Maybe one day, but it's still too early" – yet that fact-fiction line is apparently easy to discern in Sveg, which he used as the setting for four novels about a boy called Joel. In Ystad, the line is more blurred: although the Kurt Wallander tourist trail is big business in the southern Swedish town, Mankell mixes up the fictional landscape and the real one. "Negative research," he calls it.

When he does finally get round to writing that autobiography, he can be quite precise about the day he finally did something about his ambition to be a writer.

He was 16, and it was the second day of the Easter term. "I'd planned it for a long time. We had a Latin class and I decided that when the schoolbell rang at the end of it, I would leave school and never come back again. So the bell rang, and I did just that. I went back home and told my father what I'd done. I explained that I'd always wanted to be a writer, that I thought I'd got some talent for it, and that there wasn't anything I would learn at school that could help me.

"He was silent, and after a while he said, 'I'm going to have to think about this.' The next day, he came to me and said, 'Well, I have to support you.'"

Most fathers would have raged. Judge Mankell didn't. He understood. His own father had been a well-known composer in Sweden, his ancestors all the way back to the 17th century had been musicians, and the only reason he himself had taken up the law was because his own father's death revealed a big hole in the family finances. "Perhaps he thought, I'll give him one year. But he knew I'd never had any problems at school and he could see how dedicated I was, he never spoke to me about going back to school again.

"The second turning point in my life came just three weeks later. I had some money saved, and I took a train to Paris. I can remember arriving in the Gare du Nord with a raging toothache, and there I was: I had to take charge of my own life. I was 16 and on my own in Paris. I hardly spoke any French. I had to find a job. I got one stripping down clarinets, but I was broke. I was writing in my diary all the time. Then about six months later, my father came down to visit me and check that I was OK. He brought me a typewriter."

If this was a biopic, that would be a key scene. There'd be a mad whirl of book covers. The poster for his first play, the one that made his reputation in Sweden at the age of 19. The cover for his first novel, published when he was 23, just after Ivar's death in 1972. And all the time, Mankell hunched over his typewriter in a variety of settings: on an iron ore boat that took him to Middlesborough 13 times, and, rather more exotically, to Liberia.

That would be another key scene, because Africa means almost as much to Mankell as Sweden does. When he first landed there, he felt as though he had come home: odd, but way back when he was living in Sveg, he'd always imagined that the river through the town was the Congo and the logs floating down it were really crocodiles. Since 1986, he's lived for much of the year in Mozambique, where he works as director of a theatre in Maputo and works with a whole range of charities. Africa, he says, gives him a clearer focus on Europe and the interconnectedness of our world. Look again at the Wallander novels – even at The Man from Beijing – and you can catch echoes of that wider vision.

Fiction, he insists, is a form of truth-telling. Wallander has to work out his own way through Sweden's growing social problems. In The Man from Beijing, Birgitta Roslin has to judge a whole list of cases involving Romanian thugs, Iraqi people-smugglers, Vietnamese gangsters. You've got to be honest about the involvement of foreigners in Swedish crime, says Mankell; turning a politically-correct blind eye to the problem will only ultimately exacerbate racism.

There'll be another Wallander novel out in English this time next year but, he insists, it will be the final one. He may have written all but two of them in the 1990s, but they've been good to him: they're like locomotives, he says, pulling millions of readers all over the world on to the rest of his work.

But his horizons, personal and professional, are wider than those of a morose Ystad detective with a dysfunctional family, wider even than a female judge, on holiday in Beijing, trying to find the man who wiped out the inhabitants of a Swedish village. There are more stories, hundreds of them, to batter into existence at his computer keyboard, and they're not all crime stories, not by a long shot.

"Look," he says, "I'm a storyteller. The day that my creativity goes is the day that I go too. I won't find any reason to live any more. This is not self-dramatic, this is not romantic, this is a very serious fact. But as long as I have this feeling for creativity, I will go on living."

I look up. Determination is etched on his face. His father, I imagine, saw the same expression all those years ago.

The Man from Beijing by Henning Mankell is published by Harvill Secker, priced 17.99.