Lately, I’ve been reading some old crime fiction, in particular the Martin Beck novels by the amazing Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo. Sjowall and Wahloo were husband and wife whose ten books, written between 1965 and 1975, are all set in their native Stockholm. The books are classic police procedural, with the cases developing step by tiny step and Beck himself as the forerunner of more famous Kurt Wallander.
These novels are a wonderful mix. The plots are highly contemporary – the crimes are thoroughly modern and remind readers that brutality is nothing new – but the puzzles are solved in a pre-internet, pre-mobile phone world. The difficulty in getting and exchanging information is fascinating. Take Roseanna, for example, the first Beck case. The body of a naked and strangled young woman is dredged out of a canal. It proves almost impossible to identity her and even more tricky to find her killer. Finally, Beck discovers that she is American and so has to liaise with a Detective Kafka in Nebraska. Beck has to leave his office, go to the library and look at an atlas to find Nebraska. He fails to find anything about Lincoln, where the girl is from because, “he couldn’t find any books containing information on North American cities.” From the Central Telephone Office, Beck gets half an hour’s notice of calls coming from the United States, while it takes ten days for information about the victim’s family and friends to be sent from Lincoln to Stockholm. This is before we get started on DNA, or the lack of it, or, indeed, the poor policeman who ends up trailing the suspect, but having to find call boxes every hour in order to report in.
Give Sjowall and Wahloo a try though. The honey-trap at the end of Rosanna is as tense as they come.
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