Martin Beck series

Critique

Detecting in the real world

It may be difficult to see what is so groundbreaking about this series of ten detective novels published from 1965 to 1975. Crime writers have copied and built upon its innovations ever since, making them commonplace today.

Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö have been credited with having created the police procedural.

This is not quite true. The procedural subgenre had been around before this Swedish couple got their hands on it. But it had settled into relying upon some hoary cliches. The maverick detective who played by his own moral code. The unflinching cop without normal human flaws, who persisted due to a love of puzzles and a thirst for justice. The genius who singlehandedly solved murders using uncanny intuition or extraordinary reasoning powers. The hapless sidekick or unheralded foot soldiers carrying out routine investigative tasks.

Dispelling these stock characters, Sjöwall and Wahlöö presented Martin Beck and his colleagues as very human. They're flawed like the rest of us. They struggle with moral quandaries. They're not consistently brilliant and often not even smart. They work together in teams, often aggravating each other, as coworkers do in reality. They methodically slog through cases with ups and downs and long unproductive patches. And not always to successful conclusions.

False impressions 

It's regrettable the series has come to bear the Martin Beck name alone, giving the false impression the narrative is all about him. It is somewhat at first, with the series' opener Roseanna (1965) and even more so with the second novel The Man Who Went Up in Smoke (1966) in which Beck spends much of his time investigating in Hungary. But as the series progresses with The Man on the Balcony (1967), the breakout hit The Laughing Policeman (1968) and the rest, other characters in the investigative ensemble increasingly share the limelight. Sjöwall and Wahlöö originally referred to the ten books collectively not as the Martin Beck series but as The Story of a Crime.

"Realism" is a word often used in praise of the books. This description extends beyond the walls of the police department and the people working within them. Sjöwall and Wahlöö are often said to have brought social realism to modern crime fiction. The detectives are not working for some unseen, impartial justice system, seeking the odd miscreant threatening an otherwise fair society. Rather, readers are made well aware of the failures of the social system in which the cops imperfectly ply their trade. Powerful forces pulling strings behind the scenes are implied—and sometimes exposed.

I don't want to take this too far. These are not revolutionary texts. Social commentary is not dwelt on for the most part, usually hinted at in throw-away grumbles by frustrated investigators who seldom stake out positions on the political spectrum. These stories are far less hard-hitting than many works of mainstream literature at the time. And they're only a small advance on some of the hard-boiled earlier crime writing—mainly American—in which anti-hero protagonists operated against a backdrop of corruption. (I'm thinking of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain and Ross Macdonald, of course.)

Yet, Sjöwall and Wahlöö's stories are darker and more socially critical than other crime fiction of their time and from what immediately preceded them. So much so that the term "noir" has been resurrected from that earlier American period to be applied to Beck and his successors. It's common to speak of Scandinavian noir, for instance.

Old ways, new clichés

Such was the influence of this series as it progressed that earlier authors around the world started reshaping the exploits of their detectives to ditch the old clichés and adhere more closely to real-world experience.

Many more beginning crime writers around the world adopted this new approach to crime fiction as a basic requirement of their craft. Popular names who acknowledge having been shown the way by Sjöwall and Wahlöö include Henning Mankell, Val McDermid, Jo Nesbø, Stieg Larsson, Dennis Lehane, Ian Rankin and Michael Connelly, to name just a few.

This influence however has had at least one negative effect. It's created a set of new clichés of the genre. It sometimes seems now every modern detective is dysfunctional, usually alcoholic, divorced or estranged from family, incapable of normal relationships, at continual odds with superiors, and about to bring down a corrupt corporation or social clique they've been warned to stay away from.

I'm not sure this reflects reality perfectly either, but it makes for better drama.

— Eric

 

Critique

See also:

The Long Goodbye

The Galton Case

The Millennium Trilogy

Buy the book:

Roseanna

The Laughing Policeman

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