Sjöwall and Wahlöö

Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, a common-law[1] wife and husband team of detective writers from Sweden. Together they conceived and wrote a series of ten novels (police procedurals) about the exploits of detectives from the special homicide commission of the national police in which the character of Martin Beck was the main protagonist. Both authors also wrote novels separately. For the Martin Beck series, they plotted and researched each book together then wrote alternate chapters.[2]

Contents

Martin Beck series

The couple originally 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

Primary characters

Other major characters

Minor recurring characters

Overview

The series is noteworthy for the way in which the lives of its characters change over the timespan covered by the ten 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, a country that championed social democracy at the time they were writing, nevertheless had the same problems of inequality and crime as other capitalist countries. Political events of the time, such as the creation of the Greek dictatorship and the Vietnam War, often play significant roles as backdrops for the plots. Because the authors intended the books as a critique of capitalist society (the last word in the final volume The Terrorists is "Marx"), all the books in their original editions were given the subtitle "Report of a Crime" as a purposefully ambiguous phrase.

Filmography

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

External links

References, sources and endnotes