GOTHENBURG (Sweden): Plagued by foul weather, stomach trouble, a drinking problem, a broken marriage and existential malaise, the fictional Swedish detective Kurt Wallander must be the world’s most miserable policeman.

So when author Henning Mankell say he ‘doesn’t believe in happiness’ despite selling 25 million books and being Sweden’s best-selling writer ever, it should come as no surprise.

But Mankell does share Wallander’s gruff idealism.

Interviewed under a leaden Gothenburg sky straight out of one of the bleak Nordic crime novels now in vogue, the author says he is on a literary and social mission that goes beyond churning out whodunits.

Wallander, a small-town cop from real-life Ystad, known only for a ferry port, stumbles across global conspiracies involving terrorism, Aids and even a plot to kill Nelson Mandela.

Mankell’s social engagement — unusual for the murder-mystery genre — runs through the nine Wallander books and his latest novel Kennedy’s Brain, published in Swedish this year and due out in 2006 in Germany, where Mankell outsells ‘Harry Potter’.

In Kennedy’s Brain, an archaeologist mystified by her son’s apparent suicide uncovers a plot involving Aids vaccine research and infected blood. The title refers to conspiracy theories about the autopsy of the assassinated US president.

“Whatever I write, whatever I do, there is a certain thread through it — my strong belief in the idea of solidarity,” said the 57-year-old with unruly silver hair and stormy features.

Laconic, hard-drinking detectives have been a staple of the murder-mystery genre from Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe to Colin Dexter’s Inspector Morse, while Georges Simenon pioneered the bleak, realist crime novel with his Maigret series.

But Wallander, who lacks Marlowe’s laconic wit and Morse’s sharp-tongued irony, plumbs new depths of depressing realism.

Unlike Hollywood cops who think nothing of wasting ‘perps’ by the score, Wallander is so upset by killing a Russian hood in “The White Lioness” that he takes months of sick leave, which he spends brooding on a windswept Danish beach.

The latest Wallander, “Before the Frost” of 2002, was made into a movie this year as part of a series of Wallander films being shot on location in Ystad.

Mankell, who three decades ago made Mozambique his adopted homeland and runs a theatre in Maputo, has vowed to crusade against the Aids epidemic in Africa “until the end of my life”.

He hopes to help correct the West’s view of Aids as “a question of ‘them’ and ‘us’”.

He sat for weeks by the bedsides of dying Ugandan parents, jotting down their stories for a “Memory Book” to give their children something to remember them by.

“A book cannot change the world but you cannot change the world without culture,” he said. “The day I stop believing that I will stop writing and stop living.”—Reuters