It is no secret that by the 1960s the Golden Age Mystery puzzle in its cosy body-in-the-library form had largely given way to a more realistic crime-and-solution narrative. In America and abroad, the police procedural developed into the preferred genre for crime fiction. Indeed, some Golden Age authors who continued their mystery series into the 1950s and beyond, such as George Goodchild, Michael Gilbert, and Henry Wade, found a natural progression by focusing on the routines and team resources of a police department. Crime writers beginning their careers and launching their detectives in the second half of the 20th century quickly embraced the procedural, both because it was a popular story type and because it allowed for a greater experience of verisimilitude for the reader (even with fictional liberties taken).
Authors in Europe were certainly interested in using the police procedural to investigate not only contemporary crimes but also regional and social attitudes toward a variety of subjects, from class and gender inequalities to law enforcement and the psychological makeup of citizens, criminals, and victims. I have a personal affinity for the thoughtful novels of Nicolas Freeling, who contributed two series featuring Dutch detective Piet Van der Valk and, later, French police inspector Henri Castang. Recently, while listening to Professor David Schmid's entertaining Great Courses lectures on mystery and suspense fiction, I was reminded of the set of ten crime stories featuring Swedish detective Martin Beck and written by the wife-and-husband team of poet Maj Sjowall and journalist Per Wahloo. I was also reminded that I had not read a single one, so I decided to address that oversight.
The first Martin Beck mystery, 1965's Roseanna, is a solid and quite simple story that deliberately tamps down any flamboyance or peculiarities that often make the Golden Age puzzles of three decades prior such amusing reads. No egghead-shaped detectives with fussy mustaches or slang-speaking, upper-class amateur detectives are found here. Martin Beck – always referred to in the third-person narration by his full name, never just Beck – is aggressively ordinary, neither particularly inspired nor incompetent as a detective. Sjowall and Wahloo seem to prefer a sketch to a full composite, at least with this book: we know Martin Beck has a wife and two children, and that the marriage has staled; we know that an inability to resolve a case can haunt him; we know he is middle-aged and in average shape. But the authors barely allow Beck to be more intriguing or accessible to the reader than the other characters, including his colleagues in the division. And that choice is okay, but it certainly keeps one dispassionate, even when the crime under investigation earns anger and pathos from the reader.
A woman's naked body is found in the canal waters, and investigation of missing persons in Sweden yields no success. Beck and his colleagues, including the sardonic, talkative Kollberg and the quieter Melander, are forced to wait as inquiries are made globally. (One principal theme seems to be the act of waiting, or the reliance on factors beyond a person's control, in this novel.) A break comes with contact from a sheriff named Kafka in Lincoln, Nebraska. The woman is identified as Roseanna McGraw, an American who was a passenger on a tour boat. Through interviews and examination of vacation photos and film, Beck and his colleagues identify a potential suspect, and then wait once more when they hope that patient and prolonged surveillance may be enough to catch the person in another act of assault.
The first Martin Beck mystery, 1965's Roseanna, is a solid and quite simple story that deliberately tamps down any flamboyance or peculiarities that often make the Golden Age puzzles of three decades prior such amusing reads. No egghead-shaped detectives with fussy mustaches or slang-speaking, upper-class amateur detectives are found here. Martin Beck – always referred to in the third-person narration by his full name, never just Beck – is aggressively ordinary, neither particularly inspired nor incompetent as a detective. Sjowall and Wahloo seem to prefer a sketch to a full composite, at least with this book: we know Martin Beck has a wife and two children, and that the marriage has staled; we know that an inability to resolve a case can haunt him; we know he is middle-aged and in average shape. But the authors barely allow Beck to be more intriguing or accessible to the reader than the other characters, including his colleagues in the division. And that choice is okay, but it certainly keeps one dispassionate, even when the crime under investigation earns anger and pathos from the reader.
A woman's naked body is found in the canal waters, and investigation of missing persons in Sweden yields no success. Beck and his colleagues, including the sardonic, talkative Kollberg and the quieter Melander, are forced to wait as inquiries are made globally. (One principal theme seems to be the act of waiting, or the reliance on factors beyond a person's control, in this novel.) A break comes with contact from a sheriff named Kafka in Lincoln, Nebraska. The woman is identified as Roseanna McGraw, an American who was a passenger on a tour boat. Through interviews and examination of vacation photos and film, Beck and his colleagues identify a potential suspect, and then wait once more when they hope that patient and prolonged surveillance may be enough to catch the person in another act of assault.
Sjowall and Wahloo succeed in stripping their description of police work down to its unglamorous essentials of routine, repetition, and legwork. For their first series novel, they chose to present a case that is the opposite of surprise-a-minute; when there is a lead, weeks and months have often gone past, and (we are told) the failure of Martin Beck to solve the case—or even to advance it through his own agency—has left him restless and numb. Roseanna provides interesting characterization through the words in transcript form of witnesses and suspects, and it does build to a recognizable crime fiction climax where the police rush to stop the villain Before It's Too Late. But it is also a very subdued introduction to this series, with a determinedly unremarkable detective at its center.
It has been said that the authors had intended from the start to approach the ten Martin Beck books as an epic extended story that examines Sweden, its law enforcement, and the inherent social problems of its time. I will give Sjowall and Wahloo the benefit of the doubt as I equally dispassionately obtain the second entry in the series, The Man Who Went Up In Smoke.
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