Wallander

The first volume in Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy of novels was published in 2005, the year after the radical Swedish investigative journalist's suddenly died of a heart attack. His heroes, philandering journalist Mikael Blomkvist and cyber-hacking outcast Lisbeth Salander, made two more annual appearances and earned millions of readers worldwide. Sweden was a new star on the map of international book publishing, whose agents soon realised that Larsson had been preceded by playwright Henning Mankell, another left-winger with connections to Communist parties and a very successful crime-writing franchise, the Wallander series.

The eighth in the series of crime thrillers had been published in Sweden in 1999; all of them had been adapted for local TV (1997-2007). Mankell began planning an English-language series, choosing to join forces with the BBC (its Scotland unit, for unpublished reasons that surely include logistics and funding) and, most important, with actor Kenneth Branagh eager for the title role.

Twice making three films in summertime in the fictional police inspector's home town of Ystad, in 2007 and 2008, the production achieved its goals of creating a popular new TV crime solver (filling gaps left by the end of Morse, Prime Suspect's Jane Tennison, Cracker and others), while maintaining the unglamourous reality of Mankell's books.

The key multi-award-winning factor was Branagh, forgoing theatricality for a restrained presentation of a divorced workaholic middle-aged detective whose father (David Warner) is getting dementia, and sole child, a daughter, is also estranged. His warts-and-all Kurt Wallander is a troubled soul, as concerned about modern Sweden's national character as Larsson's Blomkvist was. His cases bring him into contact with female abuse, serial murder, racism,sexual exploitation, sale of human body parts, perhaps leading Larsson to push the envelope of gore and sensationalism further with Blomkvist's exposes.

The strength of the BBC TV series lay in its production team's creation of a distinctive style (combining cinematography, set design, music and editing) to showcase a credibly bleak and beautiful environment in an isolated town and its wild rural surroundings. Just as Oxford's pretty quaintness was an ideal backdrop for Morse, Ystad looks just as pleasantly chilly as Mankell made it feel in words. The city was wise to invest in the film production company, and reportedly happily awaits Branagh's availability for a third set of movies.

Holes can be picked, of course, in Mankell's plots and/or the screenplay adaptations. Crime thrillers and detective fiction are natural targets for viewer scrutiny far above the level given to family dramas or soaps. There's a major irritant in the over-used reliance on cellphone rings to announce plot developments, and the police station five regular detective team of back-up characters are little-defined and never look in obvious places where Wallander finds clues.

Yet, for just one example, The Man Who Smiled, the fifth 90-minute movie in the UK TV series, is as coldly effective, well-directed and character-driven as a top-notch cinema release such as Insomnia, Christopher Nolan's 2002 remake of a Norwegian detective movie. TV movies are too often wrongly under-rated, their existence and quality not even acknowledged by movie critics who only worship the big screen.