The Story of a Crime

The Story of a Crime

Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo

Never heard of this one? Nor have most crime fiction readers. You won’t find it listed on Amazon either. But it exists.

In 1965 two Swedish partners, Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo began a unique collaboration, which was planned as a series of ten books, to be published one a year for ten years. Both had been published before, and Maj is still alive and writing, although she has never attained the same success. Per died of cancer aged just 49 just as the proofs of the final book, The Terrorists, were coming from the typesetter.

You might have seen these novels they are often marketed in English as the ‘Martin Beck books’ and indeed, there is a handsome series now available from Fourth Estate in the UK. These come complete with introductions and essays from fans including Henning Mankell, Jo Nesbo, ‘Nicci French’. Colin Dexter and Lee Child. These help to set the books in their historical context.

Starting with Roseanna (1965) the books follow the adventures and misadventures of a number of Swedish police officers, mainly in Stockholm, but also around Sweden, across into Denmark and even (in The Man Who Went Up In Smoke, 1966) to Hungary, then only ten years on from the 1956 uprising and firmly under Moscow’s thumb.

Central to all of the books is Inspector Martin Beck, who is gradually promoted over time. He is an honest policeman, but flawed, as they all are these days, depressed, alienated, unenthused and dyspeptic; his marriage is failing (cases are sometimes embraced so he can cut short his holidays). He contrasts with his best friend Lennart Kollberg, fat, uxorious, a former soldier who can identify any gun, but who refuses to carry one. (Now I know why Karin Fossum’s Inspector Sejer has a pet dog called Kollberg!). Other characters include the dandy thuggish Gunvald Larsson, and two bumbling uniformed cops, Kristiansson and Kvant, one of whom meets a sticky end somewhere in the series.

The individual novels can be read individually but are best read in sequence.  None is ever less than very competent and all are pacy and often nerve racking. But what is the overarching feature, you might ask, what makes it ‘The Story of a Crime’?

The crime is the fate of Sweden, the country held out as peaceful, the model Welfare State, liberal on sex, cool on drugs, held up as the model for a good and just society. The alienation of ordinary people, the rise of drug culture, the criminalisation of society, the tearing down of cities in the interests of modernity all feed into the idea that Sweden’s Third Way has failed. The contrast between this anomie and a nice countryside is encapsulated by one policeman’s comment in Cop Killer (1974) that ‘Sweden is a shithole, but it’s a very pretty one’.

The other crime is the nationalisation and politicisation of the police into a paramilitary force, thuggish yet incompetent – when things go awry, the national police commissioner’s mantra is ‘None of this must get out!’ But Sjowall and Wahloo, through their disembodied omniscient narrator, are determined that it will.

Martin Beck is particularly aware of the void between appearance and reality. In The Locked Room (1972), a murderer is found not guilty of his crime, but guilty of another murder that he didn’t commit. Having failed to convict, Martin Beck is punished by being denied a promotion he dreaded getting in the first place. Life’s little ironies don’t escape Sjowall and Wahloo’s satirical edge.

Every book in this series has been filmed, but only one in English: The Laughing Policeman (1968) was filmed with Walter Matthau, Beck renamed Jake Martin for some reason, and there is a bizarre film version of The Man Who Went Up In Smoke with a German title, dialogue in Hungarian with Derek Jacobi as Martin Beck. The BBC has dramatised all the books on the radio in the last couple of years. You can hear echoes of Martin Beck in Wallander (indeed, Krister Henrikkson from the Swedish second version of Wallander is my mental picture of Beck).

Some features do date. There are few women on the force, and the idea of using one as a provocatrice in Roseanna would never be allowed today. There are a lot of guns and few if any computers; in fact a distrust of technology is a running theme, as technology often enables the police to go off in entirely the wrong direction. The protest of the Swedish people against the Vietnam War runs through the books, when Americans today seem barely to remember it. The reader has to accept that these books were written in the period 1965-75 when policing was different to today.

Worth a read? I may have made the series sound worthy, but the books are good fun as well as thought provoking, and a hundred times better than The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. Be prepared to invest; read one and you’ll want to read them all.

Martin Nichols is a former magazine journalist, former charity manager, former cancer research manager and now a tutor in classics and linguistics at the UK’s Open University. He lives in Suffolk.