It is a heartbreaking task
to embark on a beloved crime story after the author has passed away.
Just ask David Lagercrantz, who not without scars managed to make a successful sequel to Stieg Larson's Millennium trilogy.
The books about the tired criminal police Kurt Wallander have sold 40 million copies in over 100 countries, so a potential giant audience is out there.
The British in particular are crazy about the adventures of the Ystad police.
And when Young Wallander premieres on Netflix, it is by all accounts the British audience that will be seduced.
Namely, it is only Britons,
without any local knowledge of Sweden / Scania, who would not notice the quirks.
For example, they would not react to the strange wallpapers in the young Wallander's bedroom (no contemporary Swedish home has such wallpapers).
Nor would they react to the fact that everyone in Sweden speaks English, or that the series is not even recorded in Malmö (but in Lithuania).
The newly graduated police constable Kurt Wallander (Adam Pålsson) witnesses a hate crime-smelling murder in the Rosengård district in Malmö where he lives.
A kid he knows from the stairwell is suspected of the murder but Kurt insists he is innocent.
One leads to the other and soon Kurt is upgraded to detective and can devote himself to chasing the real killer.
There is something about Adam Pålsson.
He manages to be charming in bar scenes so thrashed that one does not think it is true: when he is tenderly re-plastered by his Mona instead of going to the hospital, or when he fumbles with the tie before the party and has to ask for her help.
It can not be easy.
But he also has a very enthusiastic intensity in the more thrilling scenes and it is not impossible that Netflix's Swedish PR company has a point when they talk about Young Wallander as Pålsson's international breakthrough.
Why not?
The rest of the series does not have the same quality.
The parallel reality in which it takes place is rough-hewn and insensitively sketched.
Sweden is on the verge of some kind of racial war whose black and white nature is repeated in the case Wallander tries to solve: all the boys in Rosengård (except Kurt himself) are gang members, all billionaires are skimmers.
According to the production company, Young Wallander received Henning Mankell's blessing before he passed away in 2015. It would undoubtedly have been interesting to hear what he had thought of the result.