"The Dogs of Riga" (original Swedish title: "Hundarna i Riga"), by the well-known Swedish author Henning Mankell (1948-2015), is a detective story set largely in Riga, the capital of Latvia. It is the second book in the author's popular "Kurt Wallander" series and the only one in the series to be set mainly outside Sweden. Published in 1992, shortly after Latvia regained its independence, the novel is also a striking example of how a Western writer perceived post-Soviet Latvia. Focusing both on the text itself and on the two film adaptations of the novel (a 1995 Sveriges Television version starring Rolf Lassgaard as Wallander and a 2012 British adaptation with Kenneth Branagh as the lead character), the paper will address three main questions: 1) What image of Latvia and Latvian society does Mankell present in his novel? 2) What led the author to set a large part of his novel in Riga? 3) How do the two film adaptations portray Latvia and Riga in particular - what do they have in common and where do they differ? Although it is clear that a detective story is not intended to provide a historically accurate image of places or countries, and that readers and viewers probably do not expect (and perhaps do not want) it to do so, it should not be underestimated how much a popular work of fiction and its film adaptations can contribute to the public perception of a country that is geographically not so distant - both from a Swedish and a European perspective - but at the same time still unknown and somewhat exotic due to historical events and especially the occupation of Latvia by the Soviet Union.
