Per Wahlöö (1926–1975)

The crime itself isn't particularly mysterious and the ending sort of whiffs out a bit. But it keeps your interest enough and as others have said it's mainly about the characters, which are well written and believable.

The book is full of a sort of understated and sometimes grim humour which makes it pretty enjoyable to read. The characters feel very real and a lot is made of their daily routine, their home life, what they like to eat and drink, their frustrations with police work... it show more gives it an edge over much of the "gritty" stuff that usually turns me off because it's super unrealistic and macho. Also I feel justified in thinking some of the characters are utter pricks and bad and I feel the author agrees with me on that. I dunno, it's just a refreshing change of style. There's a few crappy moments here and there but nothing too awful.

Also it's really interesting reading a book where the Greek junta is talked about as present but without it being a plot point. A lot of late 60s politics appears as background in these books and it interests me show less

Who is the cop killer?

Cop Killer, the ninth volume in The Story of A Crime series, starts with an investigation that takes police detective Martin Beck out of Stockholm to a small town on Sweden's southernmost coast. There he befriends the head of the local police department, a bachelor who lives above the police station. Over the days and then weeks he spends investigating the disappearence of a local woman, Beck comes to see that the detectives who choose to live and work far removed from show more Stockholm are probably better than the detectives in the city. Not what he expected to find at all.

Midway through the search for the missing woman a pair of small time hoods, stopped for a traffic violation, open fire on three police officers. One police officer dies several days later, due to a wasp sting incurred when he fell in a nearby ditch trying to avoid the gun fire. The other officers survive the shooting. One of the hoods is killed.

Afterwards, the media circus that had been following Beck's case, moves on to the search for the cop killer, the higher brass in the national police force having made sure the story of the wasp sting did not get out to the press. The Sweden's press follows the bungled search for a petty criminal who never fired a gun in his life, while the reader follows the story of Beck's professional police work as he continues to search for the woman's killer.

At this point in the series, Sjowall and Wahloo are openly dealing with political and social issues in their books. They take care to keep the events of the story uppermost in the reader's mind, but they are willing to pause the twin searches for a page or two when needed to complete their critique of Swedish society. The story itself now serves the project, too. The press who hound an innocent man accused of the woman's murder, for example, an "innocent" man was recently released from prison in spite of murdering the girl in the first book Roseanna. Sjowall and Wahloo are thus able to critique a justice system that let a killer walk free after serving only a few years in prison while simulaneously attacking a press corp and a police force that rushes to judgement without any evidence, even that of a corpse.

The National Police Force has borne the brunt of Sjowall and Wahloo's critique. With its incompetant, politically appointed upper brass who has militaized the police force giving him a small army to arrest a petty thief and the cops who confronted speeding drivers guns drawn in the first place, I'm starting to wonder what the crime is in The Story of a Crime. Why isn't it The Story of Crime? Why "A" crime? The crime seems to be the nature of the Swedish police force once it was nationalized. The real criminal in Sjowall and Wahloo's series appears to be the Swedish government charged with protecting its citizens and enforcing the law. The government commits a crime on its police force who then become part of the crime committed on the people of Sweden.

This is not a comforting thought in America circa 2011.

Towards the end of the novel, Beck complains to a compatriot that the helicopters and heavy weaponry the police for now owns will have to be used to justify their purchase, even though they are not needed to arrest a single, unarmed, frightened young man. Sjowall and Wahloo drive this point home when the failed show of force is followed by a pair of old-time professional police officers who simply find and arrest the young man.

Meantime, some 40 years after Cop Killer was published, the Department of Homeland Security is sending tanks like the one pictured here to police departments across the United States at a time when violent crime rates are at record lows throughout the country.

It's this intermixing of classic police procedural and social critique that helped make The Story of a Crime the trendsetting success the books became. It's also what makes them unsettling reading today. show less

According to Henning Mankell’s introduction, ‘Roseanna‘, the first of ten Martin Beck books, re-wrote the rules for Swedish crime novels by making the plot more realistic and the policemen more human, paving the way for the emergence of Nordic Noir.

I think the realism part worked better than the making the policemen more human part. The novel offered a realism that might have crossed the threshold into mind-numbingly dull had it not been for how much fun it was to see how times have show more changed since 1965. Everyone smokes all the time. When Becks wants to know where Lincon Nebraska is, he has to visit a reference library and consult and atlas. When he gets a call from the US, he's given a thiry minute warning before the connection is made. The only female police officer is seconded in to act as bait. For some reason, the authors seem to have decided that the best way to make Beck more human was to have him feel sick most the time. Even drinking coffee can knock him off his game. He is almost phobic about using the train, is unable to communicate with his wife and seems unable to sleep through the night. He also has no ability to talk to his colleagues about anything. If making Beck seem like he needs counselling made him more human then this was a comlete success.

The adoption of realism means that for long periods of time, nothing much happens and when it does happen it takes forever to cross check and verify. I chafed at the pace at first Then, I realised that the book set out to show that a key virtue for a policeman was patience. In doing so, it requited the same virtue of the reader.

I enjoyed the painstaking effort Beck and his team put in over many months to gather evidence of a murder for which there were no witnesses and for which they had no viable suspects. I liked the use of transcripts of interviews conducted in Americ and the examination of holiday snaps for clues. I suspect both were innovative at the time.

I slow and realistic relating of events reminded me of the Maigret stories, except without Maigret's gnomic mutterings and inexplicable insights. Beck does do insight, he does facts.

I liked the unfiltered picture that Beck built up of Roseanna as a young woman who mostly enjoyed her own company, needed solitude but liked to have sex with an attractive man from time to time as long as he didn't get too clingy. Beck seems to make no judgement on her character or her lifestyle. For him, it seems all to be data to be ground through his analytical mind. I wonder how Roseanna was viewed by readers in 1965.

In the last fifteen per cent of the book, the pace changed. The tension rose. The action happened quickly, offering the possibility of a disastrous and violent ending. This was well done and gave the book an exciting finish, but I was a little disappointed that the denouement didn’t maintain the slow but inexorable pace of the pursuit of justice that made the book so distinctive. show less

This review contains spoilers.

****

In this suspenseful final novel in the Martin Beck series, the Swedish police and security forces have their work cut out for them: preventing a terrorist attack during the visit of a U.S. senator to Sweden. It will require diplomatic manoeuvring and keeping the idiots out of harm’s way. There are a couple of other cases as well: a young woman accused of robbing a bank holds the entire capitalist system up to the light, and a sleazy filmmaker is found show more murdered (and probably not much mourned).

I was so relieved that Martin Beck didn’t die at the end! I feared he would because this was billed as the “last” novel in the series, but it is the last novel because one of the authors (Wahlöö) died. Plot-wise, this ranks as a 4, but I deducted half a star for the excessive descriptions of women’s breasts. Too much male gaze in those chapters. show less