Review of The Fire Engine That Disappeared by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo (1969, Harper)

A man commits suicide leaving a note that simply says ‘Martin Beck’, a chief detective inspector in the Stockholm murder squad.  Later that day, Beck’s colleague Gunvald Larsson is observing a small apartment block as a favour to another department when it explodes violently.  Larsson manages to rescue a number of people from the block before it collapses, but three are left dead.  It also appears to be a suicide, the victim leaving the gas running, which later ignites.  The case seems pretty straightforward, though there are some niggling questions, such as why the small-time criminal committed suicide and why the fire department was so late to arrive. 

The Fire Engine That Disappeared is the fifth book in the Martin Beck series.  Like the preceding novels, Sjowall and Wahloo tell the tale using a measured, understated voice.  The focus is very much on the everyday group dynamic of a murder squad, the various personalities, petty jealousies and rivalries, and how the police go about identifying and solving the crime.  And again, the timeline is stretched over many months involving lots of laborious and routine work.  However, the usual realism seems a little less believable in this tale than the others with a seemingly perfect crime being picked apart with a certain amount of luck and coincidence, the tale itself felt a little flat, and the social and political commentary about Swedish society is much less pronounced.  Nonetheless, it’s a solid addition to what has so far been a strong series.

Review of The Laughing Policeman by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo (1968 Swedish, 1971 English, Pantheon)

Late 1960s Stockholm.  On a cold winter night as a bus nears the end of its route a gunman opens fire killing the eight passengers and the bus driver.  Amongst those killed is Åke Stenstrom, a young detective in Martin Beck’s team.  Beck is assigned the high profile case and immediately comes under pressure from politicians and the media for a quick solution.  However, clues are thin on the ground.  Working on the assumption that Stenstrom’s presence on the bus is not a coincidence, Beck and his team chase down all leads, however tenuous they might seem seeking the vital breakthrough that will reveal the killer’s identity.  But to solve one mystery they discover they must solve another.

The Laughing Policeman is the fourth book in the much praised Martin Beck series.  In my opinion it’s a masterclass in how to write a realist police procedural novel that does not rely on coincidence or plot devices to move the story along, nor does it concentrate on a non-conformist, lone cop (plus sidekick) who singlehandedly solves the case whilst coping with all kinds of personal issues.  Instead, the case is solved through patient, diligent investigative work by a team of cops, involving a lot of footwork, collaboration, probing, leaning on informers, petty criminals and suspects, and wandering down blind alleys.  It doesn’t get any racier with respect to the cops’ home lives, which are relatively humdrum and mundane.  Yet despite this everyday realism the story is completely gripping as the dyspeptic Beck and his team inch towards solving the death of their colleague and eight other passengers shot late at night on a Stockholm bus.  In my view the best book in the series so far.  

Review of The Man Who Went Up in Smoke by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo (1969, Harper)

Detective Martin Beck manages one day of holiday with his wife and two children on the Stockholm archipelago before he is called back to the office and asked to investigate an unusual case. A Swedish journalist has vanished in Budapest and the authorities want to travel to the city to see if they can discover what has happened to him. Beck arrives in the sweltering city to find himself trying to track a ghost. Despite the Hungarian police being suspicious about his presence, he methodically pieces together various clues, seemingly to little benefit. The journalist was clearly involved in criminal activity, but he’s as difficult to grasp onto as a wisp of smoke.

The Man Who Went Up in Smoke is a curious book. The edition I read is 198 pages long and for the first 80 or so very little happens. The narrative focuses on mundane, everyday life – Beck’s increasingly distant relationship with his family, his ambivalence towards his job, getting to know a new city. There are no dramatic events, no sudden revelations or twists and turns, no quickening of the pace. In this sense, the pacing and observations mimic Beck himself, who finds it difficult to summon any interest or enthusiasm for the case. And yet the story is captivating. Sjowall and Wahloo’s prose has a calm but insistent cadence as they immerse the reader in Beck’s world and the cities of Stockholm and Budapest. They portray a terrific sense of atmosphere and place. In the second half of the book, there is a shift in pace as the clues start to be aligned and people start to react to Beck’s investigation. A wonderfully under-stated police procedural.

Review of Roseanna by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo (Vintage Crime, translated 1967, published in Swedish in 1965)

The body of a young woman is dredged from a canal on the inland waterways of Sweden, roughly halfway between Stockholm and Gothenburg. The case is assigned to Martin Beck, First Detective with Homicide Squad of the National Police, based in Stockholm. Initially, identifying the woman and how she ended up in the lock is a complete mystery. Slowly, Beck and his colleagues start to piece together who she is and her final couple of days, but identifying her killer proves to be a more difficult task given the lack of eye witnesses or forensic evidence.

Roseanna forms part of my Classic Crime Fiction Curriculum Challenge; one of a set of ten must-read crime novels published before 1970. It was recommended because it’s credited with introducing a new kind of crime writing – socially realist police procedurals that provided accounts of the everyday lives of ordinary police officers, the interlinking of various agencies, the banal politics of personal and institutional interactions, the mundane and tedious practices of detection, and the role of crime in society. The police officers are, for the most part, ordinary people doing difficult jobs, trying to balance home commitments with the demands of being a detective. And this is what is striking about Roseanna. There is a sense of progression, but it is not driven along at breakneck speed, with an endless succession of cliffhangers. Instead the story meanders along at a relatively sedate pace, detailing how the case is patiently and dogmatically investigated, eventually reaching a relatively understated climax. In fact, the whole book feels a little understated, telling the story in a quite functional style, with little to no back story concerning the characters, and no excess description. The characterisation is fine, although I never really felt I got to know any of them to any great extent, and the plotting is carefully constructed. I suspect that if Sjowall and Wahloo were to seek publication for Roseanna today they would be encouraged to spice up the story, rev up the pace, and add in a whole lot of tension, and I guess I’m so attuned to that now that I spent the first fifty pages wondering when things were going to change gear. But the gear change is really not needed; sometimes less is more. Nevertheless, I find it quite difficult to conceive Roseanna as a book that broke the mould and started a new way of writing crime fiction given the vast quantity of work that follows in their path, some of which advances what they started and branches off in new directions. That said, it is a fine piece of work that reads just as well now as it no doubt did forty years ago.