The Laughing Policeman
by Maj Sjöwall & Per Wahlöö
How can we account for how
hot Scandinavian mysteries are today? Long before Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo took the
international mystery world by storm, the writing duo of Maj Sjöwall and
Per Wahlöö were ushering in a golden age of Nordic noir. The first of
their series of police procedurals featuring Stockholm police detective Martin
Beck debuted in 1965, but it was not until the fourth book in the
series, The Laughing Policeman, was translated into English in 1971 that the rest of the world fell in love
with mayhem with a far northern accent.
Beck, however, seems the
character least likely to laugh. The joke, if a joke is intended (and nothing these writers did seems unintended) is that depressive, dyspeptic Beck
laughs only once.
Sjöwall and Wahlöö (whose
photo illustrates this post) were exploiting a landscape and culture ripe for
the exploration of crime. Of course there’s the climate, with its months of
cold, damp and darkness that mirror the darkness in the souls of the genre’s
characters. (Not surprisingly, The
Laughing Policeman’s opening sentence (in the English translation of Alan
Blair that I follow) is “On the evening of the thirteenth of November it was
pouring in Stockholm. . . the weather was abominable.”
And beyond landscape is
culture. Or do landscape and culture mirror each other?
“You can find extensive reading
and writing of crime fiction only in very old and stable democracies,” Swedish
crime author Liza Marklund writes in John Connolly and Declan Burke’s anthology
of mystery novels, Books to Die For.
“I spend quite a lot of time in Africa, and when I tell my friends in Kenya
that I write fictional books about crimes being committed, they look at me
strangely and ask: ‘Why?’ You need freedom of speech, law and order, hope, and
prosperity to be able to enjoy fictitious crimes and violence.”
Maybe the audience for crime
fiction is bolstered too by a relatively large population of (possibly)
overeducated Caucasians. Or am I reading too much into Marklund’s additional
statement, that “The whiter and brighter the society, the darker and blacker
the crime appears: the drama is all in the contrast.”
At that cold and rainy
opening of The Laughing Policeman,
Swedish society hardly looks bright. Martin Beck accepts the invitation of his
friend and fellow policeman Lennart Kollberg to a late night chess game. Beck is
a notoriously bad chess player, but the game still beats returning home in the
rain to his uncongenial wife.
And even though most of
Stockholm’s police force is gathered outside the American embassy, battling
demonstrators protesting the Vietnam war, there’s little reason to believe
either Beck or Kollberg will be needed at work. Why would anyone who isn’t
forced into the cold rain by pay or principle would choose to go out?
Little do Beck or his friend
know that as the anti-war demonstration is breaking up, a mass murder is being
committed, a murder that will rock a city unused to such horrors to its core.
Neither do they know that one of the murder victims is a young fellow police
officer working on his own time to solve a sexually-oriented murder that has
puzzled Beck for years.
Is there a connection between
the murders and the political demonstration? Is the young police officer the
target of the mass murderer or only collateral damage? And what is the meaning
of the statement the sole survivor makes immediately before dying?
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