Mördarjakt i Ystad

The actual place for the murder cases is the small town Ystad in the south of Sweden. This is the scene for the films and books about the police inspector Kurt Wallander, created by the Swedish author and playwright Henning Mankell. Ystad is also the place where a new regional centre for film production is situated, and the Wallander movies play an important part in the economic conditions of this centre. Cultural tourism is mixed with a film studio system. The empirical dimension of the study is important since here the “murder walks” is in fact the empiricism of the touristic experience. The point of the article is to show how fiction and concepts of authenticity interact within the limits of a specific – and growing – cultural genre, the murder walk. The concept of authenticity is revised during these murder walks, since fictitious characters and places are mixed with real ones, e.g. in the hybridization of the hero of the crime stories and their author. The geography – fictitious as well as real – is embodied by the participants in the murder walks; they place themselves in the fiction, and do thereby transgress the traditional border between fantasy and reality, otherwise upheld in crime stories and movies. This makes the walk into the central trope of the argument; only through this walk the embodiment – and thus the rethinking – is possible to achieve