Henning Mankell plagiarism story–an update

When I first heard about the news a couple of weeks ago, I asked my friends over at the Literary Saloon to keep an eye out on the story, and finally, some mention of it appears in the Telegraph–and it gets quite interesting:

In her review of Arnaldur Indridason’s Jar City last Sunday, Susanna Yager suggested that his Icelandic detective, Erlendur, had something in common with Henning Mankell’s Swedish detective, Kurt Wallander: “both are prone to depression and are instinctively loners”. Their surnames are similar too.

Now further evidence has emerged that the two authors think alike – so much so, in fact, that Mr Mankell has been accused of plagiarism. In Mr Indridason’s novel Murderhole, the detective discovers a partly buried hand dating back to the Second World War, finds another corpse by some currant bushes and solves the case by coercing the son of former immigrants. In Mr Mankell’s The Grave – which was written specifically for a Dutch marketing promotion called “Thriller Month” and given away free – the detective makes exactly the same discoveries and solves the case in the same way.

Mr Mankell, apparently, claims not to have read Mr Indridason’s work. Even so, he must be glad that the Dutch publisher of Murderhole has decided against taking legal action.

Well, they probably aren’t taking legal action because plot similarities are awfully hard to prove as outright plagiarism–and since there’s no mention of copied paragraphs or sentences, well, it’s not impossible that Mankell could have come up with the idea independently or subconsciously without actually having read Indridason’s book.