Sjöwall and Wahlöö

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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. They also wrote novels separately.

Contents 1 Martin Beck series 2 Characters 2.1 Homicide Section 3 Overview 4 Filmography

[edit] Martin Beck series

From the beginning, the pair planned to write no more than ten novels together. 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 about their goals with the series: "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."

[edit] Characters

[edit] Homicide Section

• Martin Beck, chief
• Lennart Kollberg, with a Socialist worldview; refuses to carry a gun
• Frederik Melander
• Åke Stenström
• Gunvald Larsson, a former member of the merchant marine
• Einar Rönn, Larsson's friend, from the rural north of Sweden
• Kvant and Kristiansson, lazy and inept partner patrolmen
• Evald Hammar
• Benny Skacke, a young ambitious, overzealous and often hapless detective.

[edit] 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 weren't often the result of hard policework.

[edit] Filmography

• 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
• 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

Sjöwall and Wahlöö novels, featuring Martin Beck
Novels: Roseanna | The Man Who Went Up in Smoke | The Man on the Balcony | The Laughing Policeman | The Fire Engine That Disappeared | Murder at the Savoy | The Abominable Man | The Locked Room | Cop Killer | The Terrorists
Authors: Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö