The Laughing Policeman

MAJ SJOWALL (1935-) and PER WAHLOO (1926-1975) were husband and wife. They were both committed Marxists and, between 1965 and 1975, they collaborated on ten mysteries featuring Martin Beck, including The Terrorists, The Fire Engine That Disappeared and The Locked Room. Four of the books have been made into films, most famously The Laughing Policeman, which starred Walter Matthau.

From the reviews of the Martin Beck series:

'First class' Daily Telegraph

'One of the most authentic, gripping and profound collections of police procedural ever accomplished

MICHAEL CONNELLY

'Hauntingly effective storytelling'

New York Times

'There's just no question about it: the reigning King and Queen of mystery fiction are Maj Sjowall and her husband

Per Wahloo'

The National Observer

'Sjowall/Wahloo are the best writers of police procedural in

the world'

Birmingham Post

Also by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo

Roseanna

The Man Who Went Up in Smoke

The Man on the Balcony

The Fire Engine That Disappeared Murder at the Savoy

The Abominable Man

The Locked Room

Cop Killller

The Terrorists

MAJ SJOWALL AND PER WAHLOO

The Laughing Policeman

Translated from the Swedish by Alan Blair

INTRODUCTION

The Laughing Policeman is the only Swedish novel ever to have been made into a Hollywood movie. The film appeared in 1973, five years after the book's Swedish publication, and starred Walter Matthau, transposing the story to San Francisco. It's not hard to see what attracted Hollywood's attention. In an austerely realistic setting, Sjowall and Wahloo begin their story with a tour de force. A bus crashes in a quiet Stockholm street On board are the driver and eight passengers. All of them are dead, except for one critically injured passenger. They have all been shot. One of the dead is Ake Stenstrom, a young police detective. He was off-duty but carrying a pistol. What was he doing on the bus? Was his presence there a coincidence? He was sitting next to a young nurse: did he know her? Was he having an affair with her? (Absurdly, the filmmakers dispel much of the mystery in advance by beginning not with the bus crash but with the events leading up to it, answering questions in the opening sequence that, in the book, are only answered late in the story.)

The first clues are equally tantalizing. When Sjowall and Wahloo's regular detective, Martin Beck, searches Stenstrom's desk, he finds an envelope containing nude photographs of the dead man's girlfriend. Why did Stenstrom take them? 'To look at,'

Martin Beck comments. But why did he keep them on his desk and not at home? The injured passenger regains consciousness for a few seconds and gives the following interview, recorded by one of the detectives:

'Who did the shooting?’

' Dnrk '

'What did he look like?' 'Koleson:

Then he dies. The police listen to the tape over and over again. Are they meaningless syllables?

These are all, in their very different way, the sort of enigmas that Agatha Christie might have conceived, and there is no doubt that Sjowall and Wahloo took pleasure in the conventions of classic crime fiction. They even based a later book on that most artificial of forms, the 'locked room mystery' (in The Locked Room, 1973). But the Golden Age detective stories of Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr had a semi- mythical setting in which the mystery is everything. Christie's Murder on the Orient Express is plainly based on the Lindbergh baby kidnapping, but the author has no interest in motivation or social context beyond what is necessary for the plot. For Hercule Poirot, a murder scene has the abstract interest of a crossword puzzle or a chess problem.

For the Swedish couple, however, the contrivances of detective fiction must always be grounded in reality. The discovery of the bus occurs only in chapter two of The Laughing Policeman - for this book was published in 1968 and chapter one describes, brilliantly and amusingly, an anti-Vietnam War demonstration outside the American embassy in central Stockholm. It is often pointed out that Sjowall and Wahloo were Marxists, and, while the Martin Beck novels are far from being works of agitprop, they are embedded in history. A relevant quotation might be from the famous opening of Marx's essay, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte: 'Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances of their own choosing...'

It is these circumstances - unpredictable, messy, confusing -that define the fiction of Sjowall and Wahloo. When Beck arrives at the bus, the incompetent police officers have already tramped all over the scene, obscuring evidence. Even the more competent policemen are for from being detached investigators. They bring their own problems and experiences into the investigation. Some are simply biased or politically reactionary. Others are from the provinces, in the north and the south, uncomfortable in the rough cosmopolitanism of Stockholm. Stenstrom's sexual explorations, as expressed in his photographs, infect Kollberg and his own relationship. One thinks of Ingmar Bergman's priests, distracted from their pastoral duties by their own spiritual problems. Sjowall and Wahldoo's policemen are plagued by doubts about what it is to be policemen and what they are for: 'There's a latent hatred of police in all classes of society,' says one of them. 'And it needs only an impulse to trigger it off.'

Above all there is Martin Beck, the prototype of the brilliant tormented detective: Thomas Harris's Will Graham, Ian Rankin's John Rebus, Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander, and many others, owe their existence to him. Beck's malaise is all the more effective for being only partially articulated. There is almost a surfeit of causes: his weariness after years as a detective, his failures as a family man and, suffusing everything in all the books, a sense that something has gone profoundly wrong in social democratic Sweden, as if the crimes he faces are superficial symptoms of a much deeper historical crisis.

As a simple feat of storytelling, the arranging of events and the marshalling of clues, this is a marvellously accomplished piece, but it all occurs in a vividly evoked setting. This narrative doesn't exist in a capsule. There are always tendrils extending in other directions, suggesting a world elsewhere. Nor is this mere decoration. It is a part of the meaning of the book. The victims on the bus - the driver (a man from northern Sweden), a nurse, a widow, an Algerian immigrant worker, a philandering businessman with a pocketful of cash - form a snapshot of a society in transition, a society of secrets and hypocrisies and punctured myths. The investigation is an exercise in disenchantment, of poking beneath the surfaces of Swedish complacency and discovering what's beneath, and it's invariably something corrupt or depraved, whether racism, commercial exploitation or sexual perversion.

If there is any aspect of the book that has dated, it may be aspects of its sour portrayal of Swedish sexuality. Apart from Bergman films and Volvos, Sweden in the late sixties was most notorious or famous for its supposed sexual freedom. This was always more complicated and compromised than the legend suggested, and Sjowall and Wahloo were certainly having none of it In a corrupt society, they suggest, sex cannot remain uncorrupted, and this novel features not just one but two 'nymphomaniacs' - a term and a diagnosis that most of us probably now feel is itself a part of the sexual confusion and oppression that Sjowall and Wahloo were attempting to expose.

But this is just a cavil. It's hard to think of any other thriller writers (apart from Simenon, perhaps) who can