I’m working my way through the fabulous Martin Beck police mysteries by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo. Here’s what Margo Jefferson wrote about the series:

“Sweden has produced some of the best crime writers of the last several decades, and they couldn’t be more different from ours. American power has grown since the 18th century. Sweden, once an imperial force rivaling England and Russia, has had to master the paradox of reduced international power and increased economic prosperity. It is proud of its reputation as a just and practical utopia. So when Sweden looks at itself through the lens of crime, what does it see?

By 1967, when Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo published the first of 10 now celebrated Martin Beck mysteries, Sweden was struggling to integrate its Old World Lutheran morality (gloomy and fervent) with a New World of youthful, no-nonsense sexual freedom. ‘Roseanna’ begins when the body of a young American tourist who believed in free love and free will is dragged from a canal. Women, dead or alive, keep the crime novel in business — they’re vulnerable and threatening. What writers do with their characters and corpses makes all the difference. As the Stockholm police, led by the shrewd, slightly dour Beck, investigate Roseanna’s past they become obsessed and depressed. And you realize, though it’s never strenuously pointed out, that all of them have dreary-to-disastrous marriages or catch-as-catch-can relations with women.

Sweden is stalked by the leftover complicities of World War II and by the continuing hypocrisies of the cold war. By the 1970’s, when Sjowall and Wahloo’s superb novel ‘The Laughing Policeman’ came out, there was the Vietnam War, along with Sweden’s first mass murder. (’Mass murders seem to be an American specialty,’ says one officer.) Benevolent socialism notwithstanding, the poor still exist, while a certain ruthless greed, especially among the prosperous, feels new. Sjowall is a poet; her husband, who died in 1975, was a journalist, playwright and scriptwriter. Their mysteries — five are currently available in the Vintage Crime/Black Lizard series — don’t just read well; they reread even better. Witness, wife, petty cop or crook — they’re all real characters even if they get just a few sentences. The plots hold, because they’re ingenious but never inhuman. The writing is lean, with mournful undertones. American detectives are stoic and hard-boiled; Swedish ones are stoic and melancholy. And they’re physically fallible. When they drink too much liquor they tend to act stupid. When they drink too much coffee their stomachs hurt.

The atmosphere is beautifully done and without excess. (We’ve all read those show-offy ‘They’ll see I’m a real writer’ paragraphs.) ‘The Man on the Balcony’ opens like this: ‘At a quarter to three the sun rose. . . . The street-sweeping machines had passed, leaving dark wet strips here and there on the asphalt. . . . Five minutes later the tinkle of broken glass had been heard as someone drove a gloved hand through a shop window; then came the sound of running footsteps.’ As it moves into a tale of pedophilia and murder, we realize that scenes like this have the quiet, fatal exactness of Fritz Lang’s still astounding 1928 film on the same subject, ‘M.’”

Here is a list of the ten Martin Beck mysteries; I highly recommend them!

• Roseanna
• The Man on the Balcony
• The Man Who Went Up in Smoke
• The Fire Engine That Disappeared
• Murder at the Savoy
• The Abominable Man
• The Locked Room
• The Laughing Policeman
• Cop Killer
• The Terrorists