Henning Mankell's ability to write anything anywhere saw him to the end

The achievements in their different fields of Abba, Björn Borg, Volvo and Ikea testify to a pattern whereby Swedish products make international impact rarely, but massively. Another example of this phenomenon was Henning Mankell, the crime writer who has died at the age of 67 from lung cancer, the diagnosis and treatment of which he recently documented in a diary published in newspapers including the Guardian.

In the history of Swedish crime writers, Mankell was neither entirely a pioneer – he always acknowledged the example of the Martin Beck stories by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö – nor the most commercially successful, ultimately outsold by Stieg Larsson’s posthumously published Millennium trilogy.

Mankell, though, created one of the indelible figures of modern detective fiction: Inspector Kurt Wallander, based in Ystad near Malmö, featured in a dozen Mankell novels and was portrayed in three hit TV dramas, two Swedish and one Anglo-Swedish, the latter starring Sir Kenneth Branagh.

In Wallander, Mankell took what already risked being a stereotype – the near-alcoholic divorced cop, haunted by the ghosts of the murders he has investigated – and refreshed it as a classic archetype, which has huge influence. Anyone inventing a male detective now, in print or on television, has to negotiate a way around the looming figure of Wallander.

The character had two separate waves of success, because the novels were published in Sweden from 1991 but not translated into English until the end of the decade and, though popular in the US, particularly engaged critics and readers in the UK for reasons often attributed to the prevalence in Sweden and Britain of gloomy weather and depression. I think also that the Wallander actors – Branagh, and Rolf Lassgård and Krister Henriksson in the Swedish versions – captured an exhaustion of faith and morals that many viewers found politically topical.

Mankell was always bemused to be known in the UK and US as a cop novelist, a misunderstanding caused by English language publishers having picked the detective fiction from an output that covered numerous forms and genres of fiction. His Swedish self included about 20 historical, literary and political novels and a series for children. A contemporary writer he particularly admired was John le Carré, with whose experience of being abandoned by his mother as a child he identified.

Mankell had also written 40 plays– more, he liked to point out, than Shakespeare – in a theatrical career so industrious that he often spent half the year in Africa, co-running the Teatro Avenida in Maputo since 1987 and undertaking much charitable and campaigning work, especially in education about HIV/Aids.

He was also a prolific journalist and screenwriter, and must have been one of the few authors to have scripted a four-part biographical TV drama about his father-in-law, who was the great Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman. That Bergman’s daughter Eva was Mankell’s fourth wife suggests the prickly independence that was a part of Wallander’s personality may have been shared with his creator.

Mankell was a man of personal courage. In 2010, when he joined a flotilla of Swedish ships attempting to deliver aid to Gaza, his boat was ambushed by Israeli troops and he was at one point reported dead, although he was only arrested. Mankell could also be personally combative. At a public Q+A with him that I chaired in London, he reacted to an inquiry from a reader, whose devotion was shown by the stack of English editions on her knee: “No! Boring question – someone ask me another.” This approach is not recommended by publicists and it was noticeable that the thwarted questioner did not join the queue for signing.

The writer was often irritated by what he interpreted as a certain glee, in the UK and the US, about the perceived failure of the liberal dream of Swedish politics after the murder of the country’s prime minister, Olof Palme, and more recent tensions over immigration and welfare. For Mankell, the previous highs and subsequent lows of Swedish liberalism had been exaggerated in their international presentation.

Priding himself on being able to write about anything and to do so anywhere, Mankell found it natural to report on what turned out to be a terminal illness, sometimes scribbling in hospital waiting rooms. The prognosis was at one point hopeful, but a writer who had preferred to deny his characters happy endings – Wallander faces Alzheimer’s in the brilliantly bleak final novel in the sequence – was not to be granted one.

Mankell would prefer to be remembered as an author, theatre-maker and campaigner, although English obituaries will tend to categorise him as a crime writer. It is hard for fans of the genre not to note, with a Wallanderesque melancholy, that the giants of detective fiction are dying too fast: PD James, Ruth Rendell and now Mankell, within the space of 11 months. He, like the previous two, will live on in reprint and as a classy example to those who follow in the form.