One of the most important books Henning Mankell ever read in his life was a few bent pages in the hand of a Ugandan child.

Though he's written nearly 40 books and stage plays, 59-year-old Mankell is best known for nine crime novels featuring dour Swedish police inspector Kurt Wallander. They are cult hits in North America but huge bestsellers internationally, adapted for European film and television many times since they debuted in the early nineties. For decades he has divided his time between Sweden and the Mozambican capital Maputo, where, never idle, he is also artistic director of an African theatre company – living with “one foot in the snow and one in the sand.”

Several years ago he heard about a project helping Africans with AIDS assemble “memory books” to leave to their children after their deaths. Puzzled at how a mostly illiterate population could accomplish this, he went to Uganda and spent “some weeks I will never forget,” he said earlier this month in Toronto, where he was promoting his most-recently translated book, Kennedy's Brain.

“I was visiting a village that was very profoundly hit. While talking to some people, I saw a little girl, maybe 12 years old. I heard that she had lost her parents to AIDS. And I realized that she wanted to have some kind of a contact with me,” he recalled in his Nordic-accented but fluid English. “Eventually we were left alone, and she had a little booklet she wanted to show me.”

At this, the windswept, grey-haired author reached a sturdy arm across the table and appropriated his interviewer's notes. He folded them in half and used the prop to perform the rest of his story: “I took it … and I opened it … and there between the pages I found a dead, pressed, blue butterfly.

“And she said: ‘I had a mother who loved blue butterflies.' ” Such memory books, now numbering hundreds, often contain artifacts or photographs instead of words. (Mankell has campaigned to distribute cheap disposable cameras.) “You understand what we are talking about: A tragedy, a huge tragedy, but something that might leave, over thousands of years, perhaps some of the most important books that are ‘written' in our time. It says that even people who cannot write letters can tell stories.”

Mankell's career has been moulded by his faith that storytelling, the only job he ever wanted, can help reshape a deformed world. While fans dote on Kurt Wallander's grumpy, dogged pursuit of justice – dragging his diabetic, overweight and often hungover body through icy Swedish landscapes – the violent horrors the somewhat old-fashioned cop confronts are always reverberations of broader injustices: xenophobia, colonialism, corruption.

“I work in probably the oldest literary tradition that exists,” Mankell said, “the tradition of crime and punishment. If you go back to the ancient Greek playwrights, what is a play like Medea about? A woman killing her two children because of jealousy. … When people ask me what's the best crime story I've ever read, I honestly say it is Macbeth. You use the mirror of crime to look upon the contradictions in society, inside man, between reality and dreams, et cetera.”

His non-genre fiction grapples with social problems more directly. His 1995 children's book Secrets in the Fire and its sequels made a real-life Mozambican girl named Sofia, who lost her legs in a mine blast, a hero to a generation of Swedes, after the government gave free copies to all schoolchildren. (The proceeds also helped Sofia and her village improve their lives – she's now a mother of two.) With the Maputo theatre, he helps write and direct plays about local issues.

After a tough childhood – abandoned by his mother at age 2 and raised by his father and grandparents in a “devilishly cold” remote village – Mankell first went to Africa in the idealistic early 1970s, seeking “a perspective from outside European ethnocentrism … to understand what kind of times I'm living in.” Thirty-five years later the dual viewpoint has made him “a better European,” and he hopes a better human being, “and, if so, a better writer.”

Kennedy's Brain is a hybrid of Mankell's sides, part family saga, part global crime story, with no police character but no shortage of guilty parties. It is itself a kind of reverse memory book: Its protagonist is middle-aged Swedish archaeologist Louise Cantor, whose research on shards of pottery in Greece is halted when an unnatural catastrophe, a young person's death, strikes her already broken family.

Unable to swallow official explanations, she sets out on another kind of dig, for pieces of information, that leads her to Spain, Australia and ultimately Maputo, where she unearths the link between her grief and the African AIDS crisis. The narrative is designed so that the reader shares Louise's gradual realization of the depths of her own ignorance. It is almost a parable – a contemporary Pilgrim's Progress.

The title refers to the true, unsolved disappearance of a piece of John F. Kennedy's grey matter after his assassination and autopsy: “If the brain of the President of the United States can vanish,” Mankell told an audience at the Harbourfront Centre during his Toronto visit, “then anything can be made to disappear.” But it also indicates the book's entanglement with what some might call conspiracy theory, particularly about present-day pharmaceutical companies. Both book and author stop short of claiming to know the whole truth – indeed, some readers have been angry about the story's lack of resolution, a choice Mankell made because “you know that in reality at no time is there definitely an ending.” Still, he seemed sure that his fictional investigation bears a close resemblance to what happens in secret in Africa today.

“This book is about what poor people are prepared in desperation to do,” he said, “and what other people that for sure are not poor are absolutely prepared to do with these poor people. And this relates to a more profound idea I have about the world, that the only real problem is poverty. I don't know of any problem that is not connected to poverty. And that does not only go for Africa, but for Latin America, for millions of people in Canada and the United States. … What are the Islamic fundamentalists prepared to do? They may not be poor, but they are working in a poor environment. You cannot change anything without facing the question of poverty.”

This missionary urgency, however rightful, makes Kennedy's Brain less subtle than the best Wallander books. But like them, it offers rising tension; characters who feel lived-in, always thinking, hesitating, changing; unpredictably philosophical dialogue; and for all its globetrotting, a firm sense of place. In prose or in person, Mankell is no scold. Photos make it seem he shares his most famous character's glum disposition, but he is loose, warm and expansive – he just doesn't like getting his picture taken.

“I've been married four times,” he joked with the Toronto crowd. “So obviously I am an optimist.”

His current (“and last”) wife, theatre director Eva Bergman, is a daughter of the late film legend Ingmar, and Mankell has four grown children from previous relationships. Indeed, it's in people just coming-of-age that he now invests his hopes. (Perhaps this is one reason why the Wallander series lately shifted focus from jaded Kurt to his police-rookie daughter Linda.)

“The younger generation today, in many cases, know more than earlier generations did. They know more about the globality of everything. … The young intellectuals of the western world are more critical of what they are offered by the media. And they will hopefully demand something else. They know enough to say, ‘Hey, this is not working out. One plus one is making five.' ”