http://tinyurl.com/byn8z5

I guess long ago they didn't call these mystery novels or crime stories, they called them police procedurals. Or at least they did for stories like those written by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, set in Stockholm and starring Martin Beck, police detective.

For some people, their stories may seem plodding because they detail the work performed by the police while solving the crime. Every bit of detail. But if you read closely, you find humor, different and engaging personalities and above all, their description of how the world has been changing. I like how Sjöwall put it, that their intent was 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." A chance to describe their feelings about Sweden, or any major socialized society for that matter.

This is my third of their decalogue, and I'm not reading them in order. I'm also not terribly worried about that, for while the personalities age and change, each story stands on its own. I think their first, Roseanna, is still my favorite but this one grabs you from the get-go and doesn't let off until the final line. As with all their novels, the last line is well worth reaching. ( )

A naked woman was dredged up from the bottom of Sweden's beautiful Lake Vattern one July day. Where had she come from? How had she got there? And why? . . . a rash of brutal muggings and child sex-murders with the elusive mugger perhaps the only person in Stockholm to have seen the murderer . . . the search for a hard-drinking well-known Swedish journalist in Budapest, who has vanished without a trace . . . eight people were shot to death in a Stockholm bus, with one of the dead being an ambitious young detective whose private life was both perverse and mysterious . . . an incendiary device blows the roof off a Stockholm apartment house one cold winter night interrupting the small, peaceful orgy underway inside, and for reasons nobody could satisfactorily explain - the fire department didn't arrive until too late. How could a regulation-sized ladder truck vanish in the center of Stockholm? . . . the peculiar death of a 46-year-old bachelor whose cryptic suicide note consisted of only two words: 'Martin Beck'? . . . the murder of a powerful Swedish industrialist during his after-dinner speech in the elegant Hotel Savoy with a shot in the head . . . the bloody murder of a police captain in his hospital room by a demented and deadly rifleman exposing the particularly unsavory history of a man who spent forty years practicing brutality and force . . . a decayed corpse with a bullet through its head is found inside a locked room. Suicide? Perhaps - but inside the locked room there is no gun. A young blonde in sunglasses holds up a bank and shoots the hapless citizen who moves to stop her . . . a blond woman in her middle thirties in a small Swedish town is brutally murdered and left buried in a swamp. Some weeks later her decomposing body is found accidentally by a group of hikers. Prime suspects are the convicted sex murderer who was her only neighbor on a lonely country road, and her former husband - a rough, drunken retired sailor. Meanwhile, on a quiet suburban street in another part of Sweden, a midnight shootout take place between three cops and two teenage boys. Dead: one cop and two teenage boys. Wounded: two cops. Escaped: one kid . . . an American senator visits Stockholm and Martin Beck tries to protect him from an international gang of terrorists, while they decide that Beck too should be removed from the scene . . . a millionaire pornographer bludgeoned to death in his own bathtub . . . a young girl, a Swedish hippie, caught up unexpectedly in the maze of police bureaucracy . . . and of course, a homicide detective who is a chain smoker with a graveyard cough and an abused stomach; a 'weekend' sailor who likes to spend what time he has making model ships, living in a gray suburban apartment with his once pretty wife and two children with whom he has few points of contact and little in common. ( )

I can’t really explain the circumstances that led me to read a Swedish police procedural published in 1970, but I’m glad I discovered this gem of a book. It is written in a straightforward style with spare, precise language that propels the story along. The mystery begins with the discovery of a bus on which all of the passengers have been brutally shot. One of the passengers is a police detective who didn’t belong on the bus in the first place. A team of detectives take on the case, and despite the absence of leads, eventually work out the convoluted solution. The resolution may seem like a bit of a stretch, but it’s the getting there that provides all of the enjoyment. I had some difficulty following the plot with all of the unfamiliar Swedish names and the roundabout way the case was solved, which only means that this may be worth rereading someday. ( )

Best yet. 4th book so the series and the authors are beginning to really hit their stride.

In the days of Vietnam war protests the police have their hands full with civil issues. When someone guns down a busload (nine) passengers the homicide team led by Martin Beck once again have their hands full to try and trace the culprit when there are few clues to be found. It's all made more complicated when it is discovered that one of the dead is a policeman from the homicide squad.

The writing is much better. There is a distinct build up of tension in the early sections and the character development proceeds through the book. Particularly noteworthy is the contrast between Beck's family and his colleagues'. There is also plenty of commentry on how the police are viewed by the citizens and what actions they can take to change this - something that still rings true 40 years later.

Liek all of the serie sos far the plot itself is very slow moving. Much of the policeowkr is hampered byt he modern high speed communications we take for granted, but even so cases proceed slowly over weeks and months with the coppers involved not seeming to do anything inbetween. A chance thought sparks a new line of inquiry and eventually Martin beck laughs. ( )

The fourth in Sjowall and Wahloo’s Martin Beck series is as complex and accomplished as its predecessor, The Man on the Balcony. It’s the most successful of the series internationally, winning several awards and becoming the basis for a film starring Walter Matthau.

This time Martin Beck and his colleagues are trying to solve the mass murder of nine people, gunned down on a bus late on a rainy Stockholm night. One of the victims is a young murder detective. What was he working on? Why was he armed while off duty? Was he, despite being married, somehow involved with the nurse sitting next to him or are the killings connected to the one passenger nobody seems able to identify?

With such a high profile case, detectives are drafted in from across Sweden to assist, allowing Sjowall and Wahloo to reflect on the harsh, chaotic nature of Stockholm compared to the more rural areas of the country. The welfare state is a theme too, with the Marxist authors observing the corrupting effect of failures in the system.
Full review: http://www.26books.com/?p=265