The Man Who Went Up in Smoke

From 1965 to 1975, the husband and wife team of Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö wrote ten crime novels about the lugubrious Swedish detective Martin Beck. Forgotten by many (although not afficionados of the genre), the books are now being reissued two at a time throughout 2007 by the canny publishers at Harper Perennial.

As Val McDermid notes in her excellent introduction to the second book, The Man Who Went Up in Smoke, Sjöwall and Wahlöö were not the first writers to pen a series of police procedural novels. What made their books so original - and so influential - was that Beck does not act alone; nor does he benefit from sudden flashes of insight that crack the case wide open.

Rather, Beck works with a small team of colleagues, whose personalities, like Beck's, we come to know better as the series progresses. Wedded to their jobs, these men plod methodically through the boring investigative work necessary to solve serious crime, sharing their ideas and hunches with Beck.

This routine but vital work forms the core of the novels: sifting through the list of passenger names on the ferry from which the body of Roseanna was thrown; sitting for hours in a bar, listening to journalists gossip, for clues to the disappearance of fellow hack Alf Matsson in The Man Who Went Up in Smoke.

Sjöwall and Wahlöö describe scenes and people as the policemen would see them - in forensic detail. Although this may sound dull, the accumulation of detail is almost mesmeric: telephone calls back and forth; working day after day in stifling heat, every lead coming to naught; returning time and again to the lock where Roseanna was found. Gradually, this painstaking detection begins to yield results. Scenarios and suspects are eliminated from the enquiry until the truth emerges.

Not that it gives Martin Beck much satisfaction - he is a gloomy detective, wearyingly unsurprised by the crimes he investigates. Like an addict who wants to quit, he nevertheless is unable to turn down cases, no matter how unpromising they appear. As his wife rightly points out, ' "There must be other policemen besides you. Do you have to take on every assignment?" '

The weary detective and his crumbling home life is, of course,  one of the staples of modern crime fiction to have made an early appearance in the Martin Beck novels. The other is the crime novel's backdrop of the society within which it set; in this too, Sjöwall and Wahlöö were pioneers. Henning Mankell notes in his introduction to Roseanna that 'the authors had a radical purpose in mind for the books they were planning about the National Homicide Bureau. They wanted to use crime and criminal investigations as a mirror of Swedish society - and later on include the rest of the world.' This was radical at the time, but for readers today, the books' period details are part of what makes them special.