In his recent news letter James Naughtie at BBC commented on Henninng Mankell's appearance in the BBC Book Club:

"I confess to having been slightly surprised when Henning Mankell
revealed on this month's programme that his detective, Wallander, owed
so much to Sherlock Holmes. Yet when you think about it, the link is
quite obvious. There's the melancholy, the contrast between a mind
that can unravel unimaginable complexity but can't quite cope with the
world, an emotional life that is impenetrable. So it's probably more
appropriate to take Wallander out of the contemporary crop of
detectives - Rebus, Brunetti and co - so many of whom do share a
slight melancholy about the world and a weariness with its ways, and
think about Conan Doyle, whom Mankell reveres. He spoke in our
discussion - many of you will have heard the first transmission
yesterday (Sunday) - about how one of his tasks as a writer was put
his detective in an empty room, let him think for ten pages, and keep
readers interested. The trick is giving your detective a mind that
fascinates the reader, and a gift for doing the unexpected. If you can
manage that, you're home and dry.

As a character, what struck me most strongly about Mankell was the
extent to which his own passions are involved in Wallander's
character. Here is a detective whose name was taken from the Malmo
telephone directory, who was created simply to let Mankell tell a
story - he can pinpoint the date precisely - yet who carries with him
a complicated set of attitudes and feelings (failures with women, a
sense of the incomprehensibility of evil) that turn him from a means
of telling the story into the story itself. As with Holmes, whose
personal mysteries are greater than any he encounters in the world
around him, so with Wallander, whose journey into Sweden's dark places
- in Sidetracked¬  the witnessing of a young girl's death and the
discovery of how the young can be drawn into evil - changes him.

As the programme reveals, however, Mankell is not at all gloomy
despite his fascination with the dark side of life. He laughs quite a
lot, and has an endearing straightforwardness about the writer's
craft. He has one page to get the reader hooked, he says. If you can
do that, you're on the way. Fail on page one, and it's over. He told
us that first pages are very difficult and last pages easy.

Here's what he said about Wallander's appeal. I think it's probably a
good message for any writer. "We all struggle, how to run our lives.
And I believe that what has made him popular is he's openly struggling
with these things.  Sometimes people ask me if he is a very moralistic
man and I say yes, he is, the same as I am.  If I have a story to tell
and if I have an opinion that we are living in a world with a lot of
problems then I think I should say that.  But I shall not give the
answers; I shall raise the questions. And Wallander is a man with a
lot of questions." Not a bad explanation of the secret of Wallander's
success."