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Henning Mankel and Kenneth Branagh discuss Kurt Wallander

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On location with the BBC team

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What connects the shocking suicide of a young woman and the vicious murder of a government minister? Inspector Kurt Wallander's investigation uncovers wrongdoing and corruption that extends to the heart of the Swedish establishment.

Well, he's the hero of BBC1's new crime drama starring Kenneth Branagh (9pm tomorrow BBC1). But what shaped this melancholic Swedish detective, and why have more than 25 million copies of the novels featuring him been sold worldwide? Crime writer John Harvey travels to Sweden to find out, talking to people on the streets, shadowing a cop and tracking down Wallander's reclusive but lucid creator, Henning Mankell.

By examining Mankell's anti-hero Wallander, it reveals the hidden angst affecting present-day Sweden, a country with an excellent welfare system yet one which has suffered two shocking recent political assassinations. The film tries to grasp what Mankell's characters say about Sweden and how his books inform the rest of the world about Scandinavia's largest country.

A body is found at a cash point, the apparent victim of a heart attack. Two teenage girls are arrested for the brutal murder of a cab driver. The girls confess to the crime, showing no remorse. Two open and shut cases.

At first these two incidents seem to have nothing in common, but as Wallander delves deeper into the mystery of why the girls murdered the cab driver, he begins to unravel a plot much more involved complicated than he initially suspected. The two cases become one, and lead to a conspiracy that stretches beyond the borders of Sweden.

Three youngsters are shot dead whilst having a woodland picnic in fancy dress. The corpses are found, and a friend of the victims is also slain, having told Wallander that his workmate was really gay, and that he is a transvestite, and a wholly murderous one, who adds to his toll of dead by killing a further trio of innocents.

Wallander investigates the brutal slaying of an elderly couple at an isolated farmhouse.

Wallander decides to resign from the police after killing a man in the line of duty. A solicitor-friend asks Wallander to investigate the suspicious death of his father in an apparent car accident.

Wallander investigates the murder of an elderly bird-watcher, found impaled on sharpened bamboo poles. When another man is reported missing, Wallander realise he is looking for a serial killer.

Wallander moves into a dream home with his new girlfriend. But his happiness is shattered when the skeleton of a girl is discovered in the garden. Wallander must try to get his new life back on track by finding her killer, but the case is not as cold as he thinks.

After two Eastern European corpses are washed ashore on a raft in Ystad, Wallander travels to Latvia on the hunt for the killers. Thrown into a cold, alien world of police surveillance and lies, Wallander soon finds himself entangled in a web of corruption with no-one to trust.

A friend of Wallander's daughter comes begging for his help but then disappears. Meanwhile, an elderly woman's body is found cremated in a shallow grave. Killed by a seemingly religious obsessive, Wallander must catch the culprit before he strikes again.

Wallander becomes involved in the search for a missing Swedish woman while in South Africa for a police conference. At the same time, he finds himself experiencing worrisome blackouts and dizzy spells.

A woman’s knife-slashed corpse leads Wallander on a chase for the victim’s missing daughter, inciting him to a grievous oversight. In his private life, he bonds with Linda’s father-in-law, a retired naval officer, who gets a menacing birthday greeting. Convinced that something is not right with his brain, Wallander sees a doctor.

His memory is going to pieces and he is no longer officially on duty, but Wallander draws on all his resources to find Linda’s missing father-in-law, a former top official in the Swedish navy, obsessed with a decades-old submarine mystery. Slowly losing his grip on reality, Wallander is desperate to solve this one last case.