Call it the case of the aging roués.

One after another, distinguished gentlemen of Sweden, in particular those with a yen for very young women, are turning up dead. Not only have they been slain violently with a sharp instrument, they’ve been stripped of their scalps.

The detective on the case is Kurt Wallander, a welcome newcomer to the PBS “Masterpiece Mystery!” series. Wallander, the unfailingly lugubrious hero of a series of novels by Swedish writer Henning Mankell, always believes the fullest glass is 10 percent empty.

As Wallander, Kenneth Branagh, often seen in tights portraying Shakespearean noblemen, looks like the defeated remains of a bender of historic proportions, his eyes rheumy, his beard a forest of stubble, his hair the wreckage left by a tornado. When he calls upon a farmer who’s been working in the fields, the farmer is the better dressed man.

“He’s so melancholy,” observes “Mystery!” host Alan Cumming, “he makes our beloved Inspector Morse seem like Mary Poppins.” When Wallander finds an antidepressant in a suspect’s medicine cabinet, he knows precisely what it is. Not that he’s getting much benefit from whatever he’s taking.

“Mystery!” is dramatizing three of Mankell’s works, beginning with his third, “Sidetracked." It starts with the suicide of a teenaged girl, in front of Wallander’s unbelieving, horrified eyes. Standing in a field of flowers, she drenches herself with gasoline and sets herself ablaze before the detective can reach her. (“Sidetracked” begins at 9 p.m. Sunday, May 10, on KPBS/Cable 11. It will be followed by “Firewall” on May 17 and “One Step Behind” May 24.)

Translated into 40-odd languages, Mankell’s Wallander mysteries have become an international phenomenon, thanks to their dense plots, Wallander’s fascinating personality and his complex private life. Necessarily, but no less unfortunately, much of the texture and richness of the 349-page “Sidetracked” has been thinned to keep the essentials of the rapidly developing plot within the screenplay’s allotted 90 minutes.

We do meet, however, Wallander’s aged father, Povel (David Warner). The moody, newly temperamental dad, a painter of spare landscapes, is just beginning a descent into what he defiantly describes as “dementia, senility, Alzheimer’s, whatever they call it now.” It is only in front of the old man, though, that Wallander can bare his soul, let his tears flow.

But first Wallander has to do his job. The first victim is a high government official, one whose artistic tastes run to porn. “Small axe, I'd say,” observes the first crime scene investigator. “Dead before he hit the ground.”

The second is an art dealer, one Wallander’s father knows and despises. The dad calls him “crook, con man. Good riddance. What color were his brains, the color of money?”

Wallander wants to pursue the death of the girl, but his superiors dismiss it as an unfortunate suicide but not a crime. In the ancient tradition of police higher-ups in fiction everywhere, they want him to ignore the girl and concentrate on the lengthening string of bloody killings of elderly men. He thinks the two cases are connected somehow.

Do you think he might be right and the bosses might be wrong? You’ve been peeking!

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You say you lost everything in Bernard Madoff’s little shell game? You think you might have been wiser to invest your lunch money in one of W.C. Fields’ beefsteak mines? Well, you might as well get some entertainment out of your misfortune.

The PBS “Frontline” investigative series looks into Bernie’s labyrinthian operation in “The Madoff Affair” airing on KPBS at 10 p.m. May 12.

“Frontline” digs backs to the 1960s, years when the operation was, in the words of one of his accountants “easy, easy-peasy, like a money machine.” Did he ever ask Madoff how the system worked? “Never,” says the accountant. “Why would I ask him? I wouldn’t understand it if he explained it.”

Apparently nobody else ever asked, either.