Henning Mankell, author of 'Nordic noir'

Henning Mankell, 67, a Swedish writer whose Kurt Wallander detective novels sold tens of millions of copies and were translated into 40 languages, introducing readers around the world to the genre of jaded investigators and snow-covered corpses that has become known as "Nordic noir," died Monday in Gothenburg, Sweden.

His publisher, Leopard, announced the death. Mr. Mankell revealed he had cancer last year, and he chronicled the disease's progression in a newspaper column that was translated into English by the London Guardian.

A wide-ranging author of approximately 40 books and 40 plays, Mr. Mankell's international reputation soared with the publication of Faceless Killers, the first Wallander book, in 1991.

The novel introduced the police inspector Wallander, a melancholic man in full: heavy-drinking, overweight, fond of opera, quick to rage, a failure at relationships, diabetic, and (eventually) developing dementia - and able to solve intriguing murder cases set near the real-life southern Swedish town of Ystad.

More than a writer of standard police procedurals, Mr. Mankell saw himself writing beyond the boundaries of a particular genre, someone who, like the spy novelist John le Carré, "investigates the contradictions inside man, between men, and between man and society." Faceless Killers, for example, was the story of an elderly couple whose torture and murder are blamed on foreigners.

Wallander was featured in 10 novels between 1991 and 2009, as well as two Swedish TV series and a BBC show starring Kenneth Branagh. The books were widely praised for their austere style and biting criticism of problems afflicting contemporary Sweden, with Mr. Mankell being described in one review as "one of the most impressive crime writers at work in Europe today."