Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö

• Born: September 25, 1935
• Birthplace: Stockholm, Sweden
• Died: 1975

• Born: August 5, 1926
• Birthplace: Göteborg, Sweden
• Died: June 22, 1975
• Place of death: Malmö, Sweden

Type of Plot: Police procedural

Principal Series: Martin Beck, 1965-1975

Contribution

The ten novels in the Martin Beck series, written by husband-and-wife team Per Wahlöö and Maj Sjöwall, chronicle the activities of the Stockholm homicide squad from 1965—the year in which the Swedish police force was nationalized—to 1975. Conceived as one epic novel, Beck’s story was written and published at the rate of one installment per year—documenting the exact happenings of the years in which they were composed, down to flight numbers and departure times, political events, and the weather.

The books trace the changes in the police force and its relationship to Swedish society as well as the personal lives of the homicide detectives themselves. Marked by dry humor and painstaking attention to detail, they capture both the interplay among the principal characters and the exhaustive amounts of routine research that go into solving a crime. Writing in a detached, clinical style, Sjöwall and Wahlöö paint a portrait of Sweden in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s as a bourgeois welfare state in which crime is steadily on the rise and the police are seen increasingly by the public as tools of the government rather than as allies of the people. Using the crime novel as a mirror of the ills of the socialist state, Sjöwall and Wahlöö transformed the genre into a vehicle for addressing wrongs, rather than diffusing social anxiety. Until their work, the police procedural had been little appreciated in Sweden; the Beck series influenced Swedish successors such as K. Arne Blom, Olov Svedelid, Kennet Ahl, and Leif G. W. Persson to adopt a similar approach of social awareness.

Biography

Per Wahlöö was born Peter Fredrik Wahlöö on August 5, 1926, in Göteborg, Sweden, the son of Waldemar Wahlöö and Karin Helena Svensson Wahlöö. He attended the University of Lund, from which he was graduated in 1946, and began a career as a journalist. Throughout the 1950’s, Wahlöö wrote about criminal and social issues for several Swedish magazines and newspapers before publishing his first novel, Himmelsgetan, in 1959. Also deeply involved in left-wing politics, Wahlöö was deported from Francisco Franco’s Spain in 1957 for his political activities.

Before his success as coauthor of the Martin Beck books, Wahlöö’s published novels were translated into English under the name Peter Wahlöö. Like the Beck books, Wahlöö’s other novels are chiefly concerned with philosophical and sociological themes, examining through fiction the relationship of people to the society in which they live. Wahlöö is the author of two detective novels—Mord paa 31: A vaaningen (1964; Murder on the Thirty-first Floor, 1966; filmed as Kamikaze 1989 in 1984) and Staalspraanget (1968; The Steel Spring, 1970)—featuring Chief Inspector Jensen, a police detective in an unnamed, apathetic northern country clearly intended as a bleak projection of Sweden’s future. Wahlöö also wrote scripts for radio, television, and film, and translated some of Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct novels into Swedish.

Maj Sjöwall (sometimes transliterated as Sjoewall) was born in Stockholm, Sweden, on September 25, 1935, the daughter of Will Sjöwall and Margit Trobaeck Sjöwall. After studying journalism and graphics in Stockholm, she became both a magazine art director and a publishing-house editor.

While working for magazines published by the same company, Sjöwall and Wahlöö met and found their social views closely matched. Married in 1962, they composed a monumental outline for the Beck series, conceived as a single epic three hundred chapters long, divided into ten books for the sake of convenience. Sitting across the dining room table from each other, they simultaneously wrote alternate chapters while their children (Lena, Terz, and Jens) slept.

Perhaps because of journalistic backgrounds that fostered spare, disciplined writing with precise details, their styles meshed seamlessly. The couple shared a desire to use the format of the detective novel to examine deeper issues within Swedish society; Wahlöö said they intended 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.” The first Martin Beck novel, Roseanna (English translation, 1967), appeared in 1965. Sjöwall and Wahlöö collaborated on other projects as well, including a comparison of police methods in the United States and Europe and the editing of the literary magazine Peripeo. Maj Sjöwall is also a poet.

The Martin Beck series was published and acclaimed in more than twenty countries, garnering such awards as the Sherlock Award from the Swedish newspaper Expressen in 1968, the Edgar from the Mystery Writers of America in 1971, and the Italian Gran Giallo Città di Cattolica Prize in 1973, all for Den skrattande polisen (1968; The Laughing Policeman, 1970). The novel was filmed in 1973, with its setting transposed to San Francisco. Den vedervardige mannen fran Saffle (1971; The Abominable Man, 1972) was filmed as The Man on the Roof in 1977. Six books were adapted for television in Sweden.

Wahlöö died of pancreatic disease on June 22, 1975. Afterward, Sjöwall wrote one other novel, Kvinnan som liknade Garbo (1990), coauthored with Tomas Ross.

Analysis

The ten novels that constitute the Martin Beck series represent a remarkable achievement in the realm of mystery and detective fiction. Begun in 1965 and completed in 1975, the year of Per Wahlöö’s death, the books chronicle a decade in the lives of the members of the Stockholm Police homicide squad, focusing primarily on detective Martin Beck, who becomes the head of the squad by the end of the series. The nationalization of the Swedish police force in the early 1960’s—an event to which Sjöwall and Wahlöö refer in Polismordaren (1974; Cop Killer, 1975) as the creation of a state within the state—led the couple to plan a series of ten books that would reflect the changes taking place in Swedish society. Using crime as the basis for their examination, they planned the books as one continuous story told in ten segments, each of which constitutes a separate novel, with characters who recur throughout the series and whose lives change as it progresses.

In choosing the crime novel as the setting for their study, Sjöwall and Wahlöö selected a medium that would allow their characters to interact with all strata of Swedish society, and the cases in the Martin Beck books involve criminals and victims who are drug addicts, sex murderers, industrialists, tourists, welfare recipients, members of the bourgeoisie, and—in a plot that eerily foreshadowed subsequent events—the Swedish prime minister. The police force in most countries, perhaps more than any other group, deals directly with the end result of social problems, both as they affect the social mainstream and as they relate to those who fall through society’s cracks, and the crimes that form the plots of the Beck novels are often a direct outgrowth of existing sociological conditions.

Roseanna and The Terrorists

The arc that the series follows moves from fairly straightforward, although horrifying, murders and sex crimes to cases that increasingly reflect the growing violence in most Western societies throughout the 1960’s and early 1970’s. The first book in the series, Roseanna, details the squad’s efforts to track down the lone, disturbed murderer of a young American tourist, and the final entry, Terroristema (1975; The Terrorists, 1976), finds the detectives attempting to thwart the plans of an international assassin during the visit of a right-wing American senator. (The fact that both characters are Americans is almost certainly intentional, as the books often make mention of the level of crime and the availability of guns in the United States, which is seen as a cautionary model of an excessively violent society.)

The decaying relationship between the police and Swedish society is depicted in the series as an outgrowth of the role the nationalized police force came to play in Sweden’s bureaucratic welfare society. This position is outlined in the final pages of The Terrorists by Martin Beck’s closest friend, Lennart Kollberg, who has left the force: “They made a terrible mistake back then. Putting the police in the vanguard of violence is like putting the cart before the horse.” Kollberg’s comment puts into words the implied criticism throughout the series of the use of police violence to combat rising social violence.

Murder at the Savoy

The source of that violence is seen by Sjöwall and Wahlöö as a by-product of Western economic systems. In the same book, another character remarks, “For as long as I can remember, large and powerful nations within the capitalist bloc have been ruled by people who according to accepted legal norms are simply criminals.” In the series’ sixth book Polis, polis, potatismos! (1970; Murder at the Savoy, 1971), the murder of a wealthy business executive and arms trafficker is traced to a former employee who lost his job, his home, and his family as a result of the executive’s ruthless policies. As the story unfolds, it becomes clear that the crime has removed a despicable man from the world, although his “work” will be carried on by his equally unsavory associates. The book ends with Martin Beck unhappy in the knowledge that the man he has caught will spend years in prison for murdering a corrupt man whose callousness Beck despises. As Kollberg notes near the end of The Terrorists, “Violence has rushed like an avalanche throughout the whole of the Western world over the last ten years.” The book ends with the former police detective playing the letter X in a game of Scrabble and declaring, “Then I say X—X as in Marx.”

The Laughing Policeman and The Locked Room

The climate of the 1960’s, with its antiwar protests and generation-based schisms, also fuels the negative view of the police. In The Laughing Policeman, Beck’s teenage daughter, Ingrid, tells him that she had once boasted to her friends that her father was a police officer, but she now rarely admits it. The general mood of the 1960’s, combined with the easy availability of drugs and the growing number of citizens living on social welfare rolls, places the police more and more often at odds with ordinary men and women. Sometimes driven by desperation, these citizens commit crimes that were once the province of hardened criminals: A young mother robs a bank in Det slutna rummet (1972; The Locked Room, 1973); a middle-class teenage boy in Cop Killer becomes the object of a manhunt after a crime spree leads to a police officer’s death; and a naïve young girl living on the fringes of society shoots the prime minister in The Terrorists.

Yet the corruption filtering down through Swedish society from its upper echelons also leaves its peculiar mark on those crimes that have always been associated with the general populace, infecting their modus operandi with a shocking disregard for justice and human life. In The Laughing Policeman, a successful businessman who murdered his lover twenty-five years earlier shoots all the passengers on a city bus because two of them have knowledge that might expose him.

Cop Killer

Cop Killer offers a variation on this theme, with its story of a wealthy man who murders his mistress in the manner of a sex crime to throw suspicion on a man once convicted of a similar offense. In both cases, the perpetrators’ only thoughts are to protect themselves—and the comfortable lives they have built within their communities—and they do so at a terrible cost to all notions of justice and the sanctity of human life.

Sjöwall and Wahlöö use not only their plots but also their characters in their dramatization of the changes in Swedish society during the period covered by the series. Beck, a tall, reserved, often melancholy man whose years of police work have not impaired his ability to judge each victim and each criminal individually, is the central figure. The moral complexities of his work often trouble Beck—a fact reflected in his sour stomach and slight stoop—yet he carries on in his profession, seeking a philosophical middle road that will allow him to reconcile those aspects of the job that he abhors with those that he believes fulfill a useful social function. Over the course of the series, his marriage worsens, he separates from his wife, his relationship with his daughter strengthens, and he falls in love with Rhea Nielsen, a good-humored earth mother of a woman whose cooking and companionship go a long way toward improving Beck’s personal life—and digestion.

Beck’s friend and colleague, Lennart Kollberg, also serves as a barometer for the times. Unlike Beck, Kollberg is happily married—he fathers two children during the series—and possessed of a far more effusive personality. The course that Kollberg’s professional life will follow is set in motion during Roseanna, the series’ first book, when he shoots and kills a man. The event has a profound effect on him, and he becomes the most outspoken opponent of the increasing use of police violence throughout the books. In defiance of police regulations, Kollberg afterward refuses to carry a loaded gun, and his growing dissatisfaction with the role of the police in society finally culminates in his resignation at the end of the ninth book, Cop Killer. He appears in The Terrorists as a fat, contented househusband, minding his children while his wife happily pursues a career.

The remaining recurring characters in the series appear primarily in their professional capacities and are used by Sjöwall and Wahlöö to round out the homicide squad and reflect the interplay of personalities that exists in any working situation. Individuals come and go within the structure of the squad: Fredrik Melander is transferred to another division; an ambitious young detective named Benny Skacke opts for a transfer to Malmö after a mistake that nearly costs Kollberg his life; detective Åke Strenström is among those murdered on the bus in The Laughing Policeman; and his girlfriend, Åsa Torell, joins the force as a reflection of the changing role of women during the 1960’s and 1970’s. (The ebb and flow within the force is also carried over into the outside world, with characters who figured in earlier cases reappearing later in the series.) Beck has an amiable, ongoing association with Per Månsson, his counterpart in Malmö.

The Abominable Man

All these characters serve to illustrate the wide range of personality types who choose police work as a career—a theme that takes a dark turn in The Abominable Man, when a former police officer turns murderer and sniper after his wife dies in the custody of a corrupt and sadistic officer. The tragic motive that lies at the heart of The Abominable Man has its roots in the psychological makeup of both the killer and his first victim, a crucial point throughout the Martin Beck series. For Sjöwall and Wahlöö, psychological traits are often inextricably bound to sociological forces. In the case of The Abominable Man, police corruption perpetuated the career of the sadistic officer whose actions drove his future murderer to the brink of madness. The books delve deeply into the social and psychological factors that set the stage for each crime.

The Martin Beck books fall under the heading of police procedurals, and Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s writing style has the clinical, matter-of-fact tone of tough journalistic reporting. The series is characterized by an exceptionally thorough attention to detail that reflects the painstaking process of sifting through vast amounts of information and leaving no lead uninvestigated. Cases often hinge on a remembered shred of evidence or an incorrectly recalled detail, and the role that luck and happenstance sometimes play is never ignored. Sjöwall and Wahlöö frequently present interviews and confessions in the form of typed transcripts, and the books’ descriptions are both vivid and utterly unsensationalized.

Given the serious nature of the series’ themes and the somber tone of its individual plots, the books’ considerable wit and humor come as a pleasant surprise. Droll asides and dryly ironic exchanges of dialogue alleviate the atmosphere of Scandinavian gloom that permeates the novels, with flashes of humor becoming more frequent as the writers progress further into the series and develop a surer grasp of their themes and characters. The Locked Room contains a comically executed SWAT-style raid that could easily have been lifted from a Keystone Kops film, and there are sly references throughout the series to the characters’ reading preferences, which run to Raymond Chandler and Ed McBain. (In one of the final books, Beck is referred to in a newspaper article as “Sweden’s Maigret.”) The dour, dismally unphotogenic Gunvald Larsson is also a recurring source of amusement as his picture finds its way into the newspaper several times—with his name always misspelled.

Best among the series’ running jokes, however, are two radio patrolmen named Kristiansson and Kvant, memorable solely for their inexhaustible capacity for bungling. They are the bane of Larsson’s existence as they mishandle evidence, lose suspects, and even catch a murderer while answering nature’s call in the bushes of a city park. Nothing in the lighthearted manner in which they are portrayed prepares the reader for the shock of Kvant’s death by sniper fire in The Abominable Man. He is replaced in the next book by the equally inept Kvastmo, but the effect of his shooting brings home the degree to which Sjöwall and Wahlöö have successfully created a world that mirrors real life—a world in which crime and violence can alter the course of a human life in an instant. The role that the police should play in such a world is a complex issue, and it constitutes the heart of Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s work.

Principal Series Characters:

• Martin Beck , a member and eventually the head of the Stockholm homicide squad, is tall, reserved, and sometimes melancholy. Fortyish and unhappily married when the series begins, Beck is intelligent, painstaking, patient, and conscientious. He is a skilled police detective who is often troubled by the role that the police play in Swedish society.
• Lennart Kollberg , Beck’s colleague and closest friend, is good natured, stocky, and a devoted family man. A pacifist by nature, his growing disillusionment with changes in the police system after its nationalization in 1965 eventually leads him to resign.
• Gunvald Larsson , a member of the Stockholm homicide squad, is tall, brawny, taciturn, cynical, and often short-tempered. Unmarried and a loner, he is fastidious in his dress and efficient in the performance of his job. He is a hardworking professional with little time for interpersonal relationships.
• Fredrik Melander , originally a homicide-squad detective, later transferred to the burglary and violent crimes division. Married and a father, he is valued by his colleagues for his computer-like memory and is notorious for his frequent trips to the men’s room.
• Einer Rönn , a member of the homicide squad, is an efficient but unremarkable detective. Rarely promoted, he is one of Gunvald Larsson’s few friends.

Bibliography

Benstock, Bernard. “The Education of Martin Beck.” In Art in Crime Writing: Essays on Detective Fiction, edited by Bernard Benstock. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983. Critical study of the character of Martin Beck and the role of developing knowledge in his adventures.

Hausladen, Gary. Places for Dead Bodies. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000. This study of the settings of mystery and detective novels includes a section on the Stockholm of Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö.

King, Nina. Crimes of the Scene: A Mystery Novel Guide for the International Traveler. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997. A reading of setting in detective fiction that analyzes the importance and representation of Sweden in Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s novels.

Maxfield, James F. “The Collective Detective Hero: The Police Novels of Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö.” Clues: A Journal of Detection 3 (Spring/Summer, 1982): 70-79. Examination of Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s anti-individualist themes and their consequences for the fiction.

Palmer, Jerry. “After the Thriller.” Thrillers: Genesis and Structure of a Popular Genre. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979. Traces the origins and conventions of the thriller genre. Sheds light on Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s works.

Symons, Julian. Mortal Consequences: A History, from the Detective Story to the Crime Novel. London: Faber and Faber, 1972. This history of detective fiction, written by a successful novelist in his own right, places the Martin Beck stories in the context of the evolution of the genre.

Van Dover, J. Kenneth. Polemical Pulps: The Martin Beck Novels of Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö. San Bernardino, Calif.: Brownstone Books, 1993. Focused study of the Martin Beck series, comparing the books to the pulps of the 1930’s and 1940’s.