A very high level police procedural novel from Stockholm, Sweden. The names of all the streets and the districts will drive you crazy to some degree (all of them seem to have 20 letters in the name), but the solving of the mass murder that happens on a double decker bus is exceptionally good. The 7 homocide detectives from Stockholm and the 3 rural detectives assigned to the case are a pretty depressed, cantankerous bunch even before 9 people are shot to death on a bus. The lack of clues and suspects adds to the strain that the oncoming winter and constant rain have already done to their collective mood. But slowly they began to check every thing they can possible think of to pursue only to find that there may be a link with a 16 year old unsolved murder case that one of the people on the bus may have been looking into. All the detectives have different personalities and special abilities that are brought to bear on both the mass murder and then the 16 year old unsolved murder of a prostitute.

The pacing is exceptionally good as is the plot. There is an ebb and flow to the pacing that helps the reader feel the frustration and then the excitement every time things slow down for the detectives and then speed up again for them. The plot juggles the two cases, the stories of the 9 dead riders on the bus and the personal stories of the 10 detectives without ever becoming confusing. It is a very entertaining mystery. ( )

The Laughing Policeman by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo is considered a classic of detective fiction, a prime example of the police procedural. The book's reputation is well deserved. Sjowall and Wahloo populate their novel with characters that run the gamut of Stockholm society circa 1970. A multiple murder, the worst on in Stockholm's history, with random victims allows the authors to send their detectives into many levels of society. It's surprising who one will find on a bus late at night. Everyone has a story.

Of course, the investigation eventually takes the reader into Stockholm's underworld. If you think Scandinavia is a land of clean, well-ordered people, that's not what you'll find in The Laughing Policeman. The dead detective was using his free time to investigate the murder of a sixteen-year-old Portuguese prostitute. He hoped to solve this decade old case thereby making is reputation. Now, his work is the only possible lead Beck has into his own murder.

The Laughing Policeman satisfies on several levels. It is expertly plotted. A crime without any clues is a tough place to start from, but the authors create a plot that remains entirely believable as it becomes more complicated. The characters are all those one expects to find in a detective novel, but while familiar they are fully fleshed and likable--well, enjoyable if not always likable. The prose, translated from the Swedish by Alan Blair is as terse as it should be--to the point, no nonsense, full of dialogue that illustrates the procedure used to solve the crime. There are no quirky characters in The Laughing Policeman. If you want a mystery with recipes or funny next door neighbors, look elsewhere.

The Laughing Policeman gives the reader a glimpse into life in Sweden. Not the life one will find in a guidebook. Scandinavia looks like it may soon become the next big thing in literature, detective literature at least. The other day I saw a counter display of Swedish mysteries at my local bookstore. I've not read enough of them to say how important The Laughing Policeman is in the world of Scandinavian mystery novels. I can say that it is an excellent book and a very entertaining read. ( )

Fourth in the Martin Beck series. Police are stunned when someone boards a bus and commits mass murder. This sort of thing might happen in Austin, Texas, but Stockholm? And what was a young detective doing on the bus? The brass wants it solved quickly, but nothing moves fast in these thoughtful, well-plotted, slyly funny but not at all comic mysteries. It doesn't help that police are too busy battling war protesters to do their jobs. Though the authors are critics of society, their stories are far from lugubrious or glum.

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. ( )