The Laughing Policeman

'Where are you?'

‘I’m out at Vastberga at the moment I've found that sheet of paper.' ‘Where?'

'On Stenstrom's desk. Under the blotter.' Martin Beck said nothing.

'I thought you said you'd looked here,' Mansson said reproachfully,'And-' 'Yes?'

'He's made a couple of notes on it in pencil. In the top right-hand corner it says: 'To be replaced in the Teresa file.' And at the bottom of the page he has written a name. Bjorn Forsberg. And then a question mark. Does that tell us anything?'

Martin Beck made no reply. He just sat there with the receiver in his hand. Then he began to laugh.

Out of the Past

by Richard Shephard

PUBLISHED IN 1968, Sjowall and Wahloo's fourth novel was the first of their books to gain commercial success in America, and it remains to date the only foreign book to have won the prestigious Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Mystery Novel, which was presented to the pair in April 1971, in New York

Perhaps the reason for its appeal to American tastes was that it actually features two crimes: the mass murder on the bus that occurs early in the novel and the years-old, unsolved murder of a nymphomaniac brought to light in its wake.

With its solution eluding Beck and his cohorts for sixteen years, the Teresa Camarao case, while a fictitious crime, has echoes of the notorious Black Dahlia affair, the most famous unsolved murder in the history of Los Angeles. Both incidents concern the murder of an attractive young woman of supposedly easy virtue, and both point to other killings.

Sjowall and Wahloo's most complex novel so far, The Laughing Policeman is also about money, position and status, staple fare in more conventional crime fiction that would have been familiar to American readers. But it also offers them the satisfaction of experiencing the solution of two rather than one crimes, a narrative ploy that occurs in the work of writers such as Ross Macdonald, much admired by the Swedish scribes and whose excellent books invariably had an earlier murder being uncovered during the investigation of a subsequent crime.

Just as Macdonald's books have been described as intense family dramas doubling as crime novels, so the work of Sjowall and Wahloo could be described as political indictments doubling as crime novels. The Laughing Policeman opens with a scene that immediately places it in the late 1960s, specifically 1968, the year of the student riots in Paris, demonstrations in London's Grosvenor Square and anti-war protests, marches and demos all across America and various parts of the Western world.

On a rain-swept, wintry night in Stockholm, the police are busy clashing with peaceful and-Vietnam demonstrators outside the American embassy. Outnumbered by roughly two to one, the police are obliged to bring to their assistance a highly impressive arsenal of 'tear gas bombs, pistols, whips, batons, cars, motorcycles, shortwave radios, battery megaphones, riot dogs and hysterical horses', wielding them against demonstrators armed to the teeth with'a letter and cardboard signs'. In case we don't get the joke, Sjowall and Wahloo helpfully inform us that the latter 'grew more and more sodden in the pelting rain'. Although this incident helps to date- stamp the novel and is an amusing aside, it also allows the authors to set their pro-Marxist stall out as early as possible and imbues the comical proceedings with a darker hue as they note that one demonstrator, a thirteen- year-old girl, is grabbed by a trio of hefty cops who dragged her into a squad car, where they twisted her arms and pawed her breasts'. Well, that'll give her something to protest about.

More importantly the scene acts as a prelude to another confrontation that is the crux of the novel, for while the scene at the embassy is being played out, and while Beck and Kollberg are engaged in a game of chess in the latter's apartment, a few miles away in yet another part of Stockholm, a double-decker bus, along with the driver and passengers, is shot to smithereens by a man with a machine gun, who leaves behind nine victims, eight of them dead and one seriously wounded. One of those killed happens to be Ake Stenstrom, a young colleague of Beck and Kollberg's whose now lifeless hand is still holding his service pistol. Why was he on the bus? Just to get from A to B? Then why have his gun with him? These questions lead Beck into one of the most difficult cases of his career since, like the fateful bus, it too is a double-decker, leaving him with not one but two crimes to solve.

While the slaughter on the bus initially seems a random act of appalling violence, Beck and his team, after weeks of frustration and effort, are rewarded with a glimmer of hope. Having methodically examined Stenstrom's work load, they come across the legendary Teresa Camarao case and it gradually dawns on them that the two incidents might be connected. The carnage, they deduce, might have been carried out by a rational and shrewd individual, a person with something to hide.

In procedural scenes masterfully staged by Sjowall and Wahloo, the police begin to peel back the years to reveal their secrets. What has always been opaque now grows more distinct, more visible, and as the truth slowly emerges, the past joins up with the present and the two cases become one.

Outside the office, it's life as usual for Beck (in other words, he doesn't have one).

The marital void depicted in the earlier novels continues to expand in The Laughing Policeman: Beck has actually distanced himself from his long-suffering and often insufferable wife, Inga, by moving out of their room and sleeping by himself on a sofa bed. A terse description of their courtship and conjugation - 'He had met her seventeen years ago, made her pregnant on the spot and married in haste' – speaks volumes. Apart from a brief moment where Beck pleasantly bids good night to his daughter, Ingrid, the only member of his family to whom he seems close, domestic bliss seems utterly conspicuous by its absence. Even the usually highly vocal Inga is mosdy silent and remote and, except for momentarily reminding him that he's 'not the only policeman', an admonition that's more like a mantra, she's no longer moved to scold or argue with her husband.

It seems that for Beck there can be little hope for the survival of a marriage - that roundelay of shared intimacies, of mutual displays of trust and kindness, the pleasing routine of mundanities and creature comforts - when one partner has his head full of murder, assault, robbery and deceit, or ) when circumstances, perhaps choice, have compelled him to take on the seemingly impossible task of protecting and serving a society that spurns his help, however much it needs it, and constantly derides and abuses him. In Beck's case, the ties of matrimony and fatherhood have been realigned to form a noose that is tightening around his neck, and the cloying confines, the saccharine strictures of a family Christmas - the one time of year when it's impossible to avoid such proximity - are threatening to choke him.

Conversely, Beck's friend and colleague, Lennart Kollberg, seems to be remarkably content once he is away from his desk and at home. Any potential marital trouble hinted at in the third novel, The Man on the Balcony, where he was tempted by the allures and overtures of a sexy witness, is entirely absent here and he is full of love and longing for his wife, 'a long-legged girl of normal build and sensual nature' who enticingly tells him that she'll see him in bed. 'Or on the floor or in the bathtub or wherever you goddam like.' Gazing at her as she stands naked at the kitchen sink, making the feed for their baby's bottle, a seemingly perfect combination of maternal care and desirability, he reflects that she 'was exactly what he wanted, but it had taken him over twenty years to find her and another year to think it over'.

Never ones to over-egg the pudding, Sjowall and Wahloo discreetly demonstrate the enormous contrast between the two men's marriages by showing Beck at night, waiting until he hears his wife start snoring before he telephones Kollberg, who, we realize, is making love with his wife and still entwined when he answers the call from his fellow officer. Apart from its other attributes, Kollberg sees sex with his wife as a handy way of clearing from his mind 'the thought of Stenstrom and the red doubledecker bus', a diversion of which Beck, alone in his sofa bed, smoking and poring over old cases, is unable, or unwilling, to take advantage. Presumably angry at having been transported away from his wife's charms and dragged back onto the bus, as it were, Kollberg concludes the conversation by telling his colleague to 'Go to hell' and promptly hanging up. Standing there'with the phone to his ear for a few seconds', Beck retreats to the sofa bed and lies down in the dark, 'feeling he had made a fool of himself.

Despite the difference in each man's home life, Beck and Kollberg are professionally as united as ever as they investigate first the bus murders and, eventually, the cold case from the past. There are instances, as in the preceding novel, when they literally think as one, although on one significant occasion when they don't, when Beck has finally grasped that Stenstrom had been working on the Teresa Camarao case and his friend hasn't, the two