Henning Mankell's recent series of police procedurals set in the southern Swedish town of Ystad, with the inspector Kurt Wallander as their hero, is the exemplary case of the fate of the detective novel in our era of global capitalism.<br>
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The main effect of globalisation on the detective fiction is discernible in its dialectical counterpart: the powerful reemergence of a specific <i>locale</i> as the story's setting - a particular provincial environment. In a global world, a detective story can take place almost literally ANYWHERE: there are today detective series taking place in the Native American reservations in the US, in the industrial Ruhr area of Germany, in Venice and Florence, in Iceland, in Brezhnev's or Yeltsin's Russia, even in today's Tibet (James Pattison's series with the Chinese police inspector exiled there for political reasons as a hero). History also poses no limitations: the "golden" 1880's of the tsarist Russia in St. Petersburg, Julies Ceasar's Rome, Alexander the Great's court... There is, of course, in the history of detective fiction, a long tradition of eccentric locales (recall Robert van Gulik's series taking place in ancient imperial China; even one of Agatha Christie's novels - <i>Death Comes at the End</i> - is set in the ancient Egypt of the pharaohs). However, these settings clearly had the status of eccentric exceptions, this status was part of their appeal which relied on the distance towards the paradigmatic locations (London and the English countryside for the classic whodunit; Los Angeles or New York for the hard-boiled novel...).<br>
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==Source==* [[Henning Mankell, the Artist of the Parallax View]]. ''Lacan.com'' June 13, 2004. <http://www.nosubjectlacan.com/Slavoj_%C5%BDi%C5%BEek_-_Articles?title=Henning_Mankell%2C_the_Artist_of_the_Parallax_View&action=editzizekmankell.htm>
