Review: THE TERRORISTS, Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo

• English translation first published 1975
• this edition published by Fourth Estate 2011
• ISBN 978-0-00-743920-1
• translated from Swedish by Joan Tate
• 324 pages
• #10 (final book) in the Martin Beck series

Synopsis (Good Reads)

An 18-year-old woman is accused of a bank robbery she never intended to commit. Later, a producer of pornographic films is found murdered at the home of his mistress. Meanwhile, Martin Beck is placed in charge of Swedish security ahead of the visit of a US senator whom a group of international terrorists is determined to assassinate.

My take

Dennis Lehane wrote a wonderful introduction to this title, well worth reading, in which he talks about the chaotic forms of terror described in this story.

Martin Beck, head of the Murder Squad, seems to have risen as high as he can go, and he seems to have managed to get life in some sort of perspective, thanks to Rhea, his lover. But he still doesn't always get it right. A police procedural with a really different approach. 

This is a series worth reading, in order, if you have never tackled it. Vintage crime fiction.
1. Roseanna (1965)
2. The Man Who Went Up in Smoke (1966)
3. The Man on the Balcony (1967)
4. The Laughing Policeman (1968)
     aka Investigation of Murder
5. The Fire Engine That Disappeared (1969)
6. Murder at the Savoy (1970)
7. The Abominable Man (1972)
8. The Locked Room (1973)
9. Cop Killer (1975)
10. The Terrorists (1976)

My rating:  4.5

I've also reviewed
4.7, ROSEANNA
4.7, THE MAN WHO WENT UP IN SMOKE
4.5, THE FIRE ENGINE THAT DISAPPEARED
4.5, MURDER AT THE SAVOY
4.7, THE ABOMINABLE MAN

Review: THE ABOMINABLE MAN, Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo

• Kindle (Amazon)
• File Size: 2010 KB
• Print Length: 288 pages
• Publisher: Harper Perennial (April 3, 2009)
• Sold by: HarperCollins Publishers
• Language: English
• ASIN: B002RI9QWG
• Source: I bought it

Synopsis (Amazon)

The seventh classic instalment in this genre-changing series of novels featuring Detective Inspector Martin Beck.

On a quiet night a high-ranking police officer, Nyland, is slaughtered in his hospital bed, brutally massacred with a bayonet. It's not hard to find people with a motive to kill him; in fact the problem for Detective Inspector Martin Beck is how to narrow the list down to one suspect. But as he investigates Nyland's murder he must confront whether he is willing to risk his life for his job.

Written in the 1960s, these masterpieces are the work of Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo – a husband and wife team from Sweden. The ten novels follow the fortunes of the detective Martin Beck, whose enigmatic, taciturn character has inspired countless other policemen in crime fiction.
The novels can be read separately, but do follow a chronological order, so the reader can become familiar with the characters and develop a loyalty to the series. Each book will have a new introduction in order to help bring these books to a new audience.

My take

This was a thoroughly enjoyable read. It both analyses what makes people commit horrendous crimes, and what constitutes good policing.

We learn early on that the high ranking police officer killed was not a good policeman. Martin Beck's colleague Kollberg says "he was a barbaric son of a bitch of the very worst sort." His name was never discredited, and complaints against him never got past the submission stage. And many of the current personnel in the Stockholm Police force were incredibly loyal to him because he had trained them.
As the blurb indicates, there is no shortage of people who would be glad to see this person dead, but just one has reached the point of no return, deprived of both his wife and his daughter by this man.

The authors also make some interesting commentary on what happened to the city of Stockholm in the 1960s when 90% of the old city was demolished to make way for "modern" development.

This series follows the changes in Martin Beck's personal life as he rises in the force. He is now the chief of the National Murder Squad, his marriage has collapsed and he unashamedly lives for his work.

One of the most enjoyable aspects of these novels is the amount of descriptive detail included, and small nuances in relationships between the men who make up Beck's team. Beck is very demanding, but he does not demand any more from them than he does of himself.

My rating: 4.7

Other reviews on MiP
4.7, ROSEANNA
4.7, THE MAN WHO WENT UP IN SMOKE
4.5, THE FIRE ENGINE THAT DISAPPEARED
4.5, MURDER AT THE SAVOY

Review: MURDER AT THE SAVOY, Maj Sjöwall & Per Wahlöö - audio

• audio book available from Audible.com
• length 6 hrs 32 mins
• Narrated by Tom Weiner 
• #6 in the Martin Beck series
• first published in 2970
• source: I bought it

Synopsis (from Audible)

When Viktor Palmgren, a powerful Swedish industrialist, is shot during his after-dinner speech in the luxurious Hotel Savoy, it sends a shiver down the spine of the international money markets and puts the tiny town of Malmö on edge.
No one can identify the gunman when Martin Beck takes over the scene and finds a web so despicable that it's hard to imagine who wouldn't want Palmgren dead.

My take

The introduction to this audio book (and the Kindle version) was written by Michael Carlson, book reviewer and film critic. In it he talks about what ground breakers Maj Sjöwall & Per Wahlöö were, how they paved the way not only for today's Scandinavian writers but how they changed the conventions and direction of crime fiction forever, particularly that of the police procedural.

The thing that strikes you about MURDER AT THE SAVOY is how much detail there is, whether it is description of the main players, police procedures, settings, and interview transcripts.

In the introduction Carlson alerts you to look out for reflection of the authors' socialist views as well as how Sweden's economy is being manipulated by industrialists and magnates. Martin Beck is told to tread carefully in this case because Viktor Palmgren is so powerful, influential with members of the government. There is pressure on Beck and his team to not only catch the murderer quickly but also to avoid releasing any details that might reflect badly on the Swedish government.

In the long run, when the murderer is charged Beck feels that while justice appears to have been served the real criminals have remained free.

My rating: 4.5

Other reviews on this blog

4.7, ROSEANNA
4.7, THE MAN WHO WENT UP IN SMOKE
4.5, THE FIRE ENGINE THAT DISAPPEARED

 The Martin Beck series (courtesy Fantastic Fiction)
I have now read *
1. Roseanna (1965) *
2. The Man Who Went Up in Smoke (1966) *
3. The Man on the Balcony (1967) *
4. The Laughing Policeman (1968) *
     aka Investigation of Murder
5. The Fire Engine That Disappeared (1969) *
6. Murder at the Savoy (1970) *
7. The Abominable Man (1971)
8. The Locked Room (1972)
9. The Cop Killer (1974)
10. The Terrorists (1975)

Review: ROSEANNA, Maj Sjowall & Per Wahloo - audio

• available from Audible.com
• Narrated by Tom Weiner and translated from Swedish by Lois Roth
• length: 6 hours 35 mins
• source: I bought it
• Originally published 1965, the first of ten books in the Martin Beck series.
• also available in Kindle edition from Amazon 

Publisher's Summary (Audible)
 
On a July afternoon, the body of a young woman is dredged from Sweden's beautiful Lake Vättern. Three months later, all that Police Inspector Martin Beck knows is that her name is Roseanna, that she came from Lincoln, Nebraska, and that she could have been strangled by any one of 85 people.

As the melancholic Beck narrows down the list of likely suspects, he is drawn increasingly to the enigma of the victim, a free-spirited traveller with a penchant for the casual sexual encounter, and to the psychopathology of a murderer with a distinctive - indeed, terrifying - sense of propriety.

With its authentically rendered settings, vividly realized characters, and command over the intricately interwoven details of police detection, Roseanna is a masterpiece of suspense and sadness.

My take

I have been promising myself to read this, the first in the Martin Beck series. I have read a number of the series (see the list below) and enjoyed them. Fifty six years on from the publication of ROSEANNA, it would be easy to dismiss the signals in the book that crime fiction was embarking on a new style of police procedural, one that not only focussed on the crime committed but also on the way the policeman felt about his job, the way the investigation gnawed at the detective's consciousness,  affected his family life, and even how well he felt.

The introduction to both the Audible and Kindle versions is the same, written by Henning Mankell who pays tribute to how the authors thought they could use "crime novels to form the framework for stories containing social criticism. ... They wanted to use crime and criminal investigations as a mirror of Swedish society... Their intent was never to write crime stories as a form of entertainment."

In ROSEANNA Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo experimented with a number of formats. Parts of the novel are simply narrative while in other sections we have verbatim transcripts of interview.

In 2009 an article in The Guardian titled The queen of crime said

When Maj Sjöwall and her partner Per Wahlöö started writing the Martin Beck detective series in Sweden in the 60s, they little realised that it would change the way we think about policemen for ever.

Tom Weiner does an excellent job of the audio version. (Just a personal anecdote - about two chapters before the end, my iPod ceased to work, and I was forced to read the last two chapters on my Kindle.)

My rating: 4.7

The Martin Beck series (courtesy Fantastic Fiction)
1. Roseanna (1965) - rated: 4.7
2. The Man Who Went Up in Smoke (1966) - my review: rated 4.7
3. The Man on the Balcony (1967) - mini-review: rated 4.8
4. The Laughing Policeman (1968) - mini-review : rated 4.7
     aka Investigation of Murder
5. The Fire Engine That Disappeared (1969) - review: rated 4.5
6. Murder at the Savoy (1970)
7. The Abominable Man (1971)
8. The Locked Room (1972)
9. Cop Killer (1974)
10. The Terrorists (1975)
I now have the remainder of this series on my Kindle and may set myself a mini-challenge in 2012 to complete reading it.

I am also making this post my contribution to this week's Pattinase's Friday's Forgotten Books

Review: THE FIRE ENGINE THAT DISAPPEARED, Maj Sjowall, Per Wahloo

• Format: Kindle Edition
  originally published in 1969
  translated from Swedish by Joan Tate
  Introduction by Colin Dexter
• File Size: 553 KB
• Print Length: 288 pages
• Publisher: Harper Perennial (August 20, 2009)
• Sold by: HarperCollins Publishers
• Language: English
• ASIN: B002RI9EZ0
• Source: I bought it

Also available from Audible.com

Product Description (Amazon)

The excellent fifth classic installment in the Martin Beck detective series from the 1960s – the novels that have inspired all crime fiction written ever since.
Widely recognised as the greatest masterpieces of crime fiction ever written, these are the original detective stories that pioneered the detective genre.

Gunvald Larsson sits carefully observing the dingy Stockholm apartment of a man under police surveillance. He looks at his watch: nine minutes past eleven in the evening. He yawns, slapping his arms to keep warm. At the same moment the house explodes, killing at least three people.
Chief Inspector Martin Beck and his men don't suspect arson or murder until they discover a peculiar circumstance and a link is established between the explosion and a suicide committed that same day, in which the dead man left a note consisting of just two words: Martin Beck.

Written in the 1960s, they are the work of Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo – a husband and wife team from Sweden. The ten novels follow the fortunes of the detective Martin Beck, whose enigmatic, taciturn character has inspired countless other policemen in crime fiction. The novels can be read separately, but do follow a chronological order, so the reader can become familiar with the characters and develop a loyalty to the series. Each book has a new introduction in order to help bring these books to a new audience.

My take

THE FIRE ENGINE THAT DISAPPEARED is a perfect illustration of the concept that solving homicide cases is a mixture of accumulating evidence through painstaking and methodical sleuthing with flashes of intuition. In any investigative team the role of some will be the sleuthing, but it will often be the intuition that solves the case. The problem is that without the painstaking sleuthing little intuition is possible, and the accumulation of evidence is often necessary to both break the perpetrator and for for successful prosecution to take place. There is also often a problem in getting all the essential information into one brain. It takes all kinds to form a good team of detectives: plods, cynics, workaholics, as well as those who carefully compartmentalise their lives. Successful resolution requires testing theories, discarding those that don't fit, following the occasional red herring, and often, as in this case a long passage of time. The threads that make up a case often first present separately but as the plot develops they begin to converge.

One of the things that this novel clearly shows too is that each of the team has a private life. In THE FIRE ENGINE THAT DISAPPEARED Martin Beck's marriage appears to be on the point of collapse. This seems to be something so common to the modern detective that we almost take it for granted.

The Martin Beck series was written in the late 1960s and now five decades later we can still appreciate how cleverly they were constructed.

My rating: 4.5

 The Martin Beck series (courtesy Fantastic Fiction)
I have now read *
1. Roseanna (1965)
2. The Man Who Went Up in Smoke (1966) *
3. The Man on the Balcony (1967) *
4. The Laughing Policeman (1968) *
     aka Investigation of Murder
5. The Fire Engine That Disappeared (1969) *
6. Murder at the Savoy (1970)
7. The Abominable Man (1971)
8. The Locked Room (1972)
9. The Cop Killer (1974)
10. The Terrorists (1975) 

See also
THE MAN WHO WENT UP IN SMOKE

Review; THE MAN WHO WENT UP IN SMOKE, Maj Sjowall & Per Wahloo

• Format: Kindle Edition
• File Size: 434 KB
• Print Length: 288 pages
• Publisher: HarperPerennial (January 16, 2010)
• Sold by: Amazon Digital Services 
• Source: I bought it

Originally published 1966.
Translated from Swedish.

Product Description (Amazon)

Martin Beck has just begun his holiday: an August spent with his family on a small island off the coast of Sweden. But when a neighbour gets a phone call, Beck finds himself packed off to Budapest, where a boorish journalist has vanished without a trace. Instead of passing leisurely sun-filled days with his children, Beck must troll about in the Eastern Europe underworld for a man nobody knows, with the aid of the coolly efficient local police, who do business while soaking at the public baths - and at the risk of vanishing along with his quarry.

My take:

Martin Beck could not remember ever being given such a hopeless, meaningless assignment and there are several times after he arrives in Budapest when he feels useless, directionless, as if there is something he ought to be doing, but has no idea what. He contrasts it with his previous case where his involvement in solving a murder had become a personal need.

Inwardly he cursed the strange impulse that had made him take on this pointless assignment. The possibilities of his solving the case became more and more remote. He was alone and without an idea in his head. And if, on the other hand, he had had any ideas, he would have lacked resources to implement them.

He knows of course why he has taken this case on - "a kind of occupational disease that forced him to take on all assignments and do his best to solve them."
 
And then he realises he is being followed and the followers make the mistake of attacking him. Beck realises he is on the track of something even though at that point he is not sure what. What he refers to as his "policeman's soul" kicks in, and he begins to see connections, and ideas begin to generate.

This is a fascinating read. At about the same time as Martin Beck comes alive with this case, the author tricks the reader into seeing what Beck sees, coming to a similar conclusion. It is hard to explain how this happens, but the story proceeds with pace from that point. And then it all comes together!

My rating: 4.7

 The Martin Beck series (courtesy Fantastic Fiction)
1. Roseanna (1965)
2. The Man Who Went Up in Smoke (1966)
3. The Man on the Balcony (1967)
4. The Laughing Policeman (1968)
     aka Investigation of Murder
5. The Fire Engine That Disappeared (1969)
6. Murder at the Savoy (1970)
7. The Abominable Man (1971)
8. The Locked Room (1972)
9. The Cop Killer (1974)
10. The Terrorists (1975)

Mini-reviews from my records

THE MAN ON THE BALCONY (1967), my rating 4.8
Written with Per Wahloo and set in Stockholm. The introduction in THE MAN ON THE BALCONY, written by Andrew Taylor, comments on the fact that the Martin Beck series has stood the test of time, as fresh now as when this one was written 40 years ago. The man on the balcony is observed, as he constantly watches children in the street, by a neighbour who decides to report him to the police. But he hasn't done anything and the report disappears in the swamp of more pressing cases - a mugger who attacks elderly women in the dark and steals their money, and a series of murders of young girls. The mugger is caught and it is discovered that he probably saw the killer.  Andrew Taylor points out how Sjowall and Wahloo pioneered a new trend in crime fiction veering away from the whodunnit towards the whydunnit. For me what was also interesting was how their Communist/Marxist background coloured their view of what was causing the breakdown of society and the resultant crime.

THE LAUGHING POLICEMAN (1968), my rating 4.8
One blustery November evening someone guns down eight occupants of a Stockholm bus - one of whom was a detective. Eight people together purely by coincidence - perhaps. But, above all, why was that policeman - a solitary and ambitious man - on that bus? An intriguing many stranded mystery, written with co-author (husband) Per Wahloo. A very unexpected ending. Police procedural which takes a very candid look at how organised detection in Sweden actually works. But their procedures do seem very different. The Laughing Policeman won the Edgar in 1971 - the only translated novel ever to do so. Maj Sjöwall (1935--) and Per Wahlöö (1926-75) were husband and wife. They were both committed Marxists and, between 1965 and 1975, they collaborated on ten mysteries featuring Martin Beck. Four of the books have been made into films, most famously The Laughing Policeman, which starred Walter Matthau Worth looking out for.