The fifth woman

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The fifth woman (Swedish Den femte kvinnan ) is a crime novel by the Swedish writer Henning Mankell from 1996 (German 1998). The novel is the sixth case of the serial hero and detective commissioner Kurt Wallander .

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In 1993, five women fell victim to Islamic fundamentalists in Algeria - four nuns and a Swedish tourist who happened to be in the monastery. Under political pressure from above, the investigators decide to ignore the fifth woman. They destroy any evidence that could indicate a stay in the monastery and make it appear as if the Swede was killed in a car accident. However, a bad conscience drives a young Algerian policewoman to at least tell the truth to the daughter of the murder victim in Sweden .

One year later, in September / October 1994, three gruesome and apparently meticulously planned murders occurred within a short period of time in the southern Swedish province of Skåne , which even put Kurt Wallander, an experienced policeman, before an apparently unsolvable riddle: an old man is found impaled on nine bamboo poles in a pit. A second man was held captive for three weeks, tied almost naked to a tree, and strangled. The third victim, trapped in a sturdy sack of weights, was pushed into a lake where he drowned. The murdered men seem to have nothing in common. These are decent citizens - a retired car dealer who wrote poetry, a florist and a researcher on milk protein allergies at Lund University  - who are obviously unrelated.

But gradually the flawless facade of the victims is cracking and Wallander comes across one thing in common: All three men were brutal people who had cruelly abused their wives. Two of the victims even murdered their wives or drove them to their death. Wallander is now convinced that the murderer is a woman. Through one of the abused women, they finally get on the trail of the murderer, who works for the railway company and who left specific clues that point to a female perpetrator. Wallander decides to examine this woman more closely. But in their apartment they only find a mysterious notebook with a list. When Wallander saw the first names on the list, there was no longer any doubt. The names match those of the victims, and the date of death was noted. But another name is marked with a red exclamation mark. At the last minute, Wallander and his colleagues succeed in preventing the next brutal murder.

The murderess can be expected. She is the daughter of the tourist who was murdered in Algeria over a year ago. As a result, she began single-handedly to take revenge on brutal men. She had set up a secret network of help for abused women a long time ago and knew so many names and addresses. She chose her victims, all violent criminals, at random. In the end, the murderer commits suicide in police custody.

characterization

The fifth woman forms the counterpart to the previous episode The Wrong Track . In both novels, the murders are committed by a person who wants to take revenge on the mistreatment or murder of a close relative (sister or mother) and who returns to the site of the first murder before arrest. Ultimately, Mankell is targeting Swedish society itself, which produces such violent criminals. Jan Feddersen also points to this in a contribution to Mankell's Wallander crime novels: "In this respect, his [Mankell] crime novels are impossible to read as otherworldly horror: Behind every cozy door there can be a humiliated person who seeks revenge." In contrast to The Wrong Track , For the first time ever in the entire Kurt Wallander series, in the novel The Fifth Woman, the deeds are not committed by a man, but by a woman. The perpetrator, the dining car waitress Yvonne Ander, does not take revenge for crimes that were perpetrated against herself, but for acts of brutal violence that have become known to her and not atoned for. As in the premodern criminal justice system or in ancient Greek conceptions of the afterlife , the type of murder, which the perpetrator herself sees as execution, depends on the type of acts of violence committed by the men. The arrest leads to a double paradox : Kurt Wallander's colleague Ann-Britt Höglund became a police officer because she was raped in her youth. Now she has to arrest a woman who brings down men who have committed serious acts of violence against women. The serial killer Yvonne Ander, on the other hand, who sees herself as the avenger of all abused women, seriously injures Ann-Britt Höglund, a woman who is herself a victim of male violence (see the episode The Man Who Smiled ).

Film adaptations

The novel was in 2002 in a Swedish - Norwegian - Danish co-production as a TV thriller filmed (see The Fifth Woman ), starring actor took over again Rolf Lassgård , directed by Birger Larsen . The German version was dubbed by ZDF in 2002 and broadcast as a two-parter in December of the same year. The film is the fifth adaptation of Wallander, as the more recent films deviate from the chronology of the books, and was released on February 17, 2003 as a DVD version including the documentary Die Welten des Henning Mankell .

In addition to the new actors employed by Wallander's colleagues for the second time, Maya Thysell also appears in the films for the first time, a colleague of Wallander's with whom he has an affair but who does not exist in the literary original.

In 2010 the novel was filmed again (Swedish / British / German) In the title role: Kenneth Branagh .

Reviews

  • “A simply breathtaking book. A direct hit with no blemishes! Complex. psychologically consistent, crystal clear observation. ”- Bremer
  • “Refined and cautious, at the same time extremely exciting, the Swedish author develops an unmistakable, oppressive atmosphere that goes far beyond what an average thriller has to offer. Mankell not only describes the gradual approach to a sick soul of the perpetrator - he immediately puts the whole broken society on the couch with him. ”- Der Spiegel
  • “A commissioner to love” (Rating: 82%) - Krimi-Couch.de

Web links

  • www.wallander-web.de (Kommissar-Wallander-Fan-Homepage) with a summary, reviews, references to films, radio play adaptations etc.

Individual evidence

  1. Jan Feddersen: Tödliches Heimweh, in: taz-archiv .
  2. Krimi-Couch.de