Why Mankel''s Faceless Killers is still timely 25 years later

The immigrant angle to the story in Henning Mankell's Faceless Killers, the first in his Kurt Wallander series, is what keeps in interesting and, sadly, what makes it meaningful and timely even 25 years after publication: the way in which an ambiguous early clue to the double-murder - the murdered woman muttering the word "foreign" on her hospital bed, when leaked from the police (we don't know who leaked this info or why) to the press provokes a wave of immigrant bashing, threats, and ultimately at least one killing. Wallander's pursuit of the killer and his following up on some clues and tips - some of them that really stretch credibility but never mind for the moment - leads him to a retired policeman who definitely has something to hide, and W follows him one night and quite fortunately for the plot the guy is bound for a meeting with a man who fits the description of the immigrant killer, so we know or presume that the retired cop is a racist and xenophobe who's taken a major role in the attacks on the immigrant community, mostly refugees from Africa and Eastern Europe seeking asylum. Sweden has a long and proud history of taking in refugees, but that open-door policy was strained in the '90s when a new wave of immigrants from the 3rd world showed up at the doorstep - far less educated than the previous waves of immigration, and many of them people of color. Mankell's right on this story and good for him, it lifts typical crime fiction to a higher level. As noted in yesterday's post though, the writing is serviceable but hardly literary - sometimes it feels as if I'm reading a draft of a screenplay, directed action and dialog only w/ little or no introspection, establishment of scene or mood, reflection. I shouldn't expect a novel, esp a crime novel, to necessarily exceed its own goals and ambitions, but I did have hopes that Mankell would be a writer of mood not of crime only. I may go further in the series, however - maybe the first one was more conventional and his style evolved and matured?