the Authors
Also by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö
About the Publisher
I first went to America in 1979. I had to buy another holdall to bring home the books. Discovering dedicated mystery booksellers was a bit like going to heaven without having to die first. There were so many crime writers whose books were available in the US only – ironically, some of them British – and in those pre-Internet days, the only apparent way to acquire them was physically to go there and buy them. Which I did. In industrial quantities.
Among the books in the holdall were ten paperbacks in the black livery of Vintage Press. They comprised a decalogue of crime novels written by the Swedish husband-and-wife team of Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö. They'd been on my must-read list since I'd read about them in Julian Symonds' definitive overview of the genre, Bloody Murder. He said, ‘they might come under the heading of “Police Novels” except that the authors are more interested in the philosophical implications of crime than in straightforward police routine … [They] are markedly individual and very good’. I suppose it was a bit of a gamble to buy all ten on that recommendation alone. But it's a gamble I've never regretted.
Reading the Martin Beck series with twenty-first-century eyes, it's almost impossible to grasp how revolutionary they felt when they first appeared almost forty years ago. So many of the elements that have become integral to the point of cliché in the police procedural sub-genre started life in these ten novels. So many of the features we take for granted and sigh over in a world-weary way have their roots in the work of a couple of journalists turned crime writers.
In the mid-sixties, when Sjöwall and Wahlöö started writing, there were plenty of examples of the police procedural novel around. Going back to the golden age of the 1930s, Ngaio Marsh's Inspector Alleyn and Freeman Wills Crofts' Inspector French were among those who led the way, but they were followed in a steady stream by the likes of J. J. Marric's Gideon and, on the other side of the Atlantic, Ed McBain.
What these examples of the roman policier have in common is that they are wedded to the status quo. Their world is divided into black and white, good and evil, right and wrong, with no uncomfortable intervening grey area. Bad men – and very occasionally bad women – do bad things and thus are bound to come to a bad end. Their police officers are honourable, upstanding family men who believe in the rule of law and the delivery of justice by their own hands. A bent cop is almost unthinkable; an incompetent one only a little less so.
And while the star of the series may have a sidekick, invariably less gifted and often more brawny, little more than lip service is paid to the rest of the squad, whose legwork goes mostly unrecognized. (McBain later became an exception to this, but in the earlier 87th Precinct novels Steve Carella is invariably centre-stage.) The police procedural was home to a singular hero. There was no room to share the limelight.
The books of Sjöwall and Wahlöö are different. Although they are generally referred to as the Martin Beck novels, they're not really about an individual. They're ensemble pieces.
Beck is not some solo maverick who operates with flagrant disregard for the rules and thinly disguised contempt for the lesser mortals who surround him. Nor is he a phenomenal genius blessed with so extraordinary a talent that mere mortals can only stand back in amazement as he leads them unerringly to the solution to the baffling mystery. He's not glamorous either. Not the scion of some high-society family, not the husband of an acclaimed portrait painter, nor the flamboyant solver of baffling mysteries with an upward flick of a single eyebrow.
No, Martin Beck is none of these things. He's a driven, middle-aged dyspeptic whose marriage slowly disintegrates during the series. Not because of some cataclysmic infidelity or clash of belief systems, but rather because of the quiet desperation that builds between two people who once loved each other but now have nothing in common but their children and their address.
He's also something of an idealist whose job forces him to confront the gulf between what should exist in an ideal world and what exists in actuality. His awareness of that gap colours his life, making him depressed and sometimes fatalistic about whether what he does can ever make any difference.
But more than this, he is part of a team, each member of which is a fully realized character. His strengths and weaknesses are balanced by those of his colleagues. He relies on them as they rely on him. This is a world where ideas are kicked around, where no individual has the monopoly on shafts of brilliant insight. Nor are the repetitive tedious tasks carried out offstage by minor minions. Both action and routine are shared between Beck and his underlings. Friendships and enmities are equally tested in the course of the ten books, and everyone is portrayed as an individual who has virtues and vices in distinct measure.
Of itself, that would be enough to mark these books out as different from the run of the mill. But Sjöwall and Wahlöö add other elements to the mix which demonstrate the uniqueness of their vision.
Their plots, for example, are second to none, both in terms of structure and subject. Sometimes it's the starting point which is surprising, a seemingly eccentric moment that leads cunningly to the heart of something much darker. Sometimes it's the choice of the underlying issue which confounds us; lulled into thinking we're getting one kind of story, we suddenly find ourselves in a very different place. Wherever their stories take us, Sjöwall and Wahlöö find ways to catch the reader on the back foot, making us reassess our take on the world.
Then there is that aspect that Julian Symonds picked on so astutely – their interest in the philosophical aspects of crime. These days, it is a given that the crime novel is capable of shining a light on society, of illuminating us to ourselves. At its best, the contemporary crime novel tells us how our society works, revealing its social strata and its patterns. It can strip away the surfaces, leaving the malign and the benign exposed, and it can use both characters and storylines to excoriate us for our sins.
But back when Sjöwall and Wahlöö started writing, those jobs were left to literary novelists. Crime writers were supposed only to entertain. The Swedish duo demonstrated that there was a different way to write about murder. Through the eyes of Martin Beck and his colleagues, they held a mirror up to Swedish society at a time when the ideals of the welfare state were beginning to buckle under the realities of everyday life. They write unsparingly and unswervingly about social ills and problems, but they never forget that they are writing novels, not polemics. They dress up their social concerns in fast-moving storytelling, never losing sight of the need to keep their readers engaged.
The end product, though serious in its intent, is far from gloomy. Sjöwall and Wahlöö are blessed with the gift of humour. It manifests itself in the sly, dark wit of Beck, but also in the knockabout farce that erupts from time to time, generally through the characters of Kristiansson and Kvant, a pair of patrol cops who are as stupid as they are unlucky. Their slapstick interludes are as funny to the reader as they are frustrating to the detectives. Before Sjöwall and Wahlöö, such a pair of Keystone Kops would have been unthinkable, undermining as they do the seriousness of police investigation and bringing it squarely into the realm of normal human behaviour.
In many respects, however, The Man Who Went Up in Smoke is an exception to the rest of the novels. It takes place mostly outside Sweden, in Budapest, at a time when the cold war was still an unnerving backdrop to everyday life. For much of the book, Beck is on his own in a strange land, without back-up and without any visceral understanding of the society he's trying to operate in. His investigation into the disappearance of a Swedish journalist seems to run into brick walls at every turn, growing more and more baffling with each successive revelation.
Soon we come to understand that Beck can't crack the case on his own. He has to draw on help both from his colleagues at home and from unexpected sources in Budapest before the pieces can finally fall into place, revealing a truth that manages to be both banal and original.
Sjöwall