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Sjöwall and Wahlöö

Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö are a well-known husband-and-wife team of detective writers from Sweden. As a team they planned and wrote a series of ten novels (police procedurals) about the exploits of detectives from the homicide section of the Stockholm police department, with the character Martin Beck as the main protagonist. They also wrote novels separately. For the Martin Beck series, they plotted and researched each book together, and then wrote alternate chapters.^[1]

Martin Beck series

From the beginning, the pair planned the series as a sequence of ten novels, collectively titled The Story of a Crime. The novels revolve around a team of police investigators, led by Martin Beck.

1. Roseanna (Roseanna, 1965)
2. The Man Who Went Up in Smoke (Mannen som gick upp i rök, 1966)
3. The Man on the Balcony (Mannen på balkongen, 1967)
4. The Laughing Policeman (Den skrattande polisen, 1968) (Edgar Award, Best Novel, 1971)
5. The Fire Engine That Disappeared (Brandbilen som försvann, 1969)
6. Murder at the Savoy (Polis, polis, potatismos!, 1970)
7. The Abominable Man (Den vedervärdige mannen från Säffle, 1971)
8. The Locked Room (Det slutna rummet, 1972)
9. Cop Killer (Polismördaren, 1974)
10. The Terrorists (Terroristerna, 1975)

Per Wahlöö described their goals for the series as to "use the crime novel as a scalpel cutting open the belly of the ideologically pauperized and morally debatable so-called welfare state of the bourgeois type."

Characters

Homicide Section

• Martin Beck, chief
• Sten Lennart Kollberg, Beck's most trusted colleague: a sarcastic glutton with a Socialist worldview; served as a paratrooper and now refuses to carry a gun – after having shot and killed a person while in the line of duty. He is newly married in the second book and fathers two children over the course of the series. In The Fire Engine That Disappeared he refers to Gunvald Larsson as "the stupidest detective in the history of criminal investigation", and in The Abominable Man Larsson informs him, "I've always thought you were a fucking idiot." He resigns from the force at the end of the penultimate book, Cop Killer, but still has the last word in the final instalment.
• Frederik Melander, noted for his flawless memory and for always being in the lavatory when anyone wants him
• Åke Stenström, a young detective noted for his shadowing skills
• Gunvald Larsson, a former member of the merchant marine and the black sheep of a rich family; he has a liking for expensive clothes and pulp fiction including the work of Sax Rohmer. He is also one of very few outside DDR who owns and drives a sports car manufactured by EMW. He is somewhat lacking in interpersonal skills and is disliked by most of his colleagues. He and Kollberg share a particular antipathy, but are capable of working together efficiently when the occasion demands it.
• Einar Rönn, Larsson's friend, from the rural north of Sweden
• Evald Hammar, Beck's boss in the early books. He is mild-mannered, trusts his men's judgement and dislikes the political infighting which increasingly accompanies his job.
• Stig Malm, Hammar's successor. A politician with little understanding of police work.
• Benny Skacke, a young ambitious, overzealous and often hapless detective.

Others

• Kurt Kvant and Karl Kristiansson, lazy and inept partner patrolmen from Skåne
• Per Månsson, a leisurely but very competent Malmö detective who becomes involved in several of Beck's cases.
• Oskar Hjelm, a highly competent but temperamental pathologist

Overview

The series is noteworthy for how the lives of its characters change over the books. Beck gets divorced, Kollberg quits the force, a third detective gets killed. The leitmotif of the series, written from the authors' clearly defined socialist viewpoint, is to indicate how Sweden, as a country which champions social democracy, nevertheless has the same problems of inequality and crime as other capitalist countries. The political events of the times often play a significant role as backdrop for the plots, such as the Greek dictatorship, the Vietnam War, and so on. Because the authors intended the books as a critique of capitalist society, all the titles in the original edition were given the subtitle "report of a crime"; on purpose an ambiguous phrase.

The plots tend to develop slowly, as the sort of difficult cases the books describe are lean on clues. In the end, epiphanous finds help solve several cases. These finds would sail dangerously close to the shore of deus ex machina if they were not often the result of hard police work.

Filmography

All of Sjöwall-Wahlöö's original books have been put to film at least once (Roseanna twice), in different parts of the world. Since 1997, a popular movie series has been co-produced by Germany and Sweden. Many of these films have gone directly to TV.

• The Laughing Policeman at the Internet Movie Database, a 1973 American film by Stuart Rosenberg, set in San Francisco instead of Stockholm
• Mannen på taket at the Internet Movie Database (The Man on the Roof), a 1976 Swedish film based on The Abominable Man
• De gesloten kamer, a 1993 Belgian-Dutch film by Jacob Bijl, set in Antwerp.
• Martin Beck, a 1993 Swedish TV serial with Gösta Ekman as Martin Beck
• Martin Beck, a series of 1997 Swedish TV films with Peter Haber as Martin Beck

References, sources and endnotes

1. ^ Interview with Maj Sjowall: [1]