Georges Simenon and Henning Mankell

US mystery writer Hilary Waugh, whose late 1940s novel Last Seen Wearing is often cited as the original police procedural, once wrote, "If you have something to say, don't write a mystery."

I think that's a pretty strict definition of what constitutes suitable subject matter for a mystery novel: Mystery and nothing but a mystery. Nothing that will unhinge the careful, haiku like precision and compactness of the mystery novel's construction.

I don't know how true that statement is. Two authors who are regarded as masters of the mystery novel, Georges Simenon and Henning Mankell, often bring a sense of social and even political observation to their brilliantly crafted mystery tales. There are certainly more things said and statements made in their books than are dreamed of in Waugh's purist dictum and yet, they are great mystery writers whose novels are bench marks of the genre.

It could be argued that these writers aren't, strictly speaking, hardboiled either. I would take issue with that too. If hardboiled fiction can be defined as an action, suspense or mystery story that takes a cold-eyed, unflinching, yet still compassionate view of the more unpleasant and sordid aspects of existence, then both of these authors could still be considered hardboiled.

Georges Simenon was, of course, the legendary author of the Maigret mystery novels, s series that spanned more than thirty years and almost two hundred novels. He also pioneered the romain dur or "hard novel" genre of unsparingly realistic and candid suspense stories. I've read two Maigret novels so far, as well as six of the hard novels, and I was impressed with how well crafted all of these books were. Even the Maigret novels were fine pieces of work, not at all hack entertainments tossed off as contractual obligations.

A Maigret novel I've read lately is Maigret at the Coroner's, a 1949 book that sees the Parisian police detective in a classic fish out of water scenario: he is visiting the US on a police exchange junket and is a guest of the FBI and other US law enforcement agencies. At the outset of the book, Maigret is in a Tucson Arizona courtroom, observing a coroner's inquest into the death of a young woman whose decapitated body was found on a lonely stretch of railroad track. She had been partying with four young men and died after being hit by a train.

Maigret is bewildered by the line of questioning taken by the coroner and other investigators at the inquest. Questions he thinks should be asked are completely ignored. He is mystified by the differences in American and French police procedure.

As the novel unfolds, Maigret follows the inquest and makes some informal investigations of his own. He meets the victim's brother and talks to the police investigating the case. He wanders about Tucson and marvels at how clean and comfortable the people's lives are. They live in beautiful, tidy homes and have all the consumer goods they could want, yet, something is wrong.

Maigret learns the city is dotted with plush social clubs stratified by income and profession. He contrasts this with the constant swilling of liquor at cheap bars to assuage the pain of living in a society of enforced cheerfulness and Babbitt-like pep and zip. He visits pool halls and arcades decorated with pictures of nude pinup girls and is bewildered to find at the same time a constant Puritanical dread and contempt for prostitution and sex outside of marriage. As Maigret observes drily to himself, "They have everything", yet they also seem to have nothing at all.

This is, of course, as Hilary Waugh would have undoubtedly reminded us, a mystery novel and Maigret stays on the case and eventually finds out whodunit. Yet, along the way, fascinating sociological observations and comments are made which make the book richer and more memorable, which make it much more than a facile copy and paste genre workout.

Henning Mankell is the Swedish mystery author who created the Kurt Wallander series of police procedural novels. Recently, I read The Pyramid, a collection of short stories and novellas detailing the early years of Wallander as a police detective, first in the Swedish city of Malmo, and later on in Ystad, the setting of all the later Kurt Wallander novels, from Faceless Killers onward.

The story that captured my attention the most was "The Death of the Photographer", in which Wallander investigates, well, the murder of a photographer in his shop late at night. While searching for clues in the shop, Wallander happens upon an album containing pictures of politicians and celebrities, which the photographer had, pre-Photoshop and computer photo manipulation software, had distorted into horrible, grotesque parodies of themselves. Wallander, who once had had his picture taken by the photographer, is chilled to find in the album a newspaper picture of himself twisted and distorted into a gargoyle-like caricature.

Wallander is horrified and puzzled by what he had found. The photographer had always struck him as a pleasant enough man, perhaps plain and banal, yet still a good person. During his investigations, Wallander meets the man's widow and learns that the man was anything but caring or kind. He was a harsh authoritarian who strictly limited how she could lead her life.

He learns more details about the photographer's secret past, but these are best left for you to learn of when you read the story.

I was struck by how Mankell picked up on the idea of photo manipulation as a symbol for the photographer's private kinks and cruelty. The story is set and I think was written in the early nineties, just before the Internet and photo manipulation software became, for better or worse, so ubiquitous. Now, anyone can be like the photographer and post online distorted pictures representing their whims, their resentments, their lusts. Everywhere the Web is littered with fake porn pictures of celebrities or even everyday people for everyone to see.

"The Death of the Photographer" is a eerily prescient and troubling story which diagnoses a social phenomenon which is now all too visible, and all too common.