![]()
MAJ SJOWALL (1935-) and PER WAHLOO (1926-1975) were husband and wife. They were both committed Marxists and, between 1965 and 1975, they collaborated on ten mysteries featuring Martin Beck, including The Terrorists, The Fire Engine That Disappeared and The Locked Room. Four of the books have been made into films, most famously The Laughing Policeman, which starred Walter Matthau.
From the reviews of the Martin Beck series:
'First class' Daily Telegraph
'One of the most authentic, gripping and profound collections of police procedural ever accomplished
MICHAEL CONNELLY
'Hauntingly effective storytelling'
New York Times
'There's just no question about it: the reigning King and Queen of mystery fiction are Maj Sjöwall and her husband
Per Wahloo'
The National Observer
'Sjöwall/Wahloo are the best writers of police procedural in
the world'
Birmingham Post
Also by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahloo
Roseanna
The Man Who Went Up in Smoke
The Man on the Balcony
The Fire Engine That Disappeared Murder at the Savoy
The Abominable Man
The Locked Room
Cop Killller
The Terrorists
MAJ SJOWALL AND PER WAHLOO
The Laughing Policeman
Translated from the Swedish by Alan Blair
INTRODUCTION
The Laughing Policeman is the only Swedish novel ever to have been made into a Hollywood movie. The film appeared in 1973, five years after the book's Swedish publication, and starred Walter Matthau, transposing the story to San Francisco. It's not hard to see what attracted Hollywood's attention. In an austerely realistic setting, Sjöwall and Wahloo begin their story with a tour de force. A bus crashes in a quiet Stockholm street On board are the driver and eight passengers. All of them are dead, except for one critically injured passenger. They have all been shot. One of the dead is Åke Stenström, a young police detective. He was off-duty but carrying a pistol.
What was he doing on the bus? Was his presence there a coincidence? He was sitting next to a young nurse: did he know her? Was he having an affair with her? (Absurdly, the filmmakers dispel much of the mystery in advance by beginning not with the bus crash but with the events leading up to it, answering questions in the opening sequence that, in the book, are only answered late in the story. )
The first clues are equally tantalizing. When Sjöwall and Wahloo's regular detective, Martin Beck, searches Stenström's desk, he finds an envelope containing nude photographs of the dead man's girlfriend. Why did Stenström take them? 'To look at,'
Martin Beck comments. But why did he keep them on his desk and not at home? The injured passenger regains consciousness for a few seconds and gives the following interview, recorded by one of the detectives:
'Who did the shooting?’
' Dnrk '
'What did he look like?' 'Koleson:
Then he dies. The police listen to the tape over and over again. Are they meaningless syllables?
These are all, in their very different way, the sort of enigmas that Agatha Christie might have conceived, and there is no doubt that Sjöwall and Wahloo took pleasure in the conventions of classic crime fiction. They even based a later book on that most artificial of forms, the 'locked room mystery' (in The Locked Room, 1973). But the Golden Age detective stories of Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr had a semi-mythical setting in which the mystery is everything. Christie's Murder on the Orient Express is plainly based on the Lindbergh baby kidnapping, but the author has no interest in motivation or social context beyond what is necessary for the plot. For Hercule Poirot, a murder scene has the abstract interest of a crossword puzzle or a chess problem.
