COP KILLER
by MAJ SJÖWALL and PER WAHLÖÖ
296 pages. Pantheon. $7.95.
At the beginning of The Laughing Policeman, a Stockholm bus is found with eight people sitting in their seats, all shot to death. For thriller readers, a parallel tragedy has just struck. Last month Per Wahlöö died at 48 of pancreatic disease. Since his widow does not intend to continue their Martin Beck series, the literary toll seems higher than the one in the bus. It is as if an entire family of friends were abruptly wiped out. Few thriller writers have interwoven so many good recurring characters with their plots; only the late Margery Allingham comes to mind.
One thinks first of Beck himself, chief (since The Abominable Man) of Sweden's National Homicide Squad. A laconic fellow with bad digestion and a fear of flying, he has only two diversions: building model boats and working jigsaw puzzles. In The Man on the Balcony, Beck considers his close associates: "He disliked Gunvald Larsson and had no high opinion of Rönn. He had no high opinion of himself either, for that matter." That is one of Beck's few mistakes in judgment. The dyspeptic, broody official is that rarest creation, an ideal policeman.
Keystone Klutzes. His best friend, Lennart Kollberg, is nearly as important to the series as Beck. Kollberg is a paunchy, garrulous perfectionist. Like Holmes and Hercule Poirot, he deeply believes that "chance has no part in police work"—but his hunches tend to be inspired. These two are supported by a sturdy cast: Fredrik Melander, who has a prodigious memory and spends much of his day in the bathroom; Gunvald Larsson, an impetuous dropout from what he calls "upper-class riffraff;" Einar Rönn, who writes execrable official reports; Per Mänsonn, who is chief in Malmö, where trouble often occurs (and where the Wahlöös lived). Finally, there are the Keystone Klutzes, Kvant and Kristiansson—patrolmen stuck with each other because neither can get along with anyone else. They impede every investigation, but when Kvant is killed in The Abominable Man, the authors award Kristiansson a virtually identical replacement called Kvastmo.
These characters do more than provide incidental entertainment. Kollberg's sexy wife Gun, Larsson's billingsgate, Beck's wretched rides on the subway are points of reference and stability in books that have become increasingly radical.
The early ones, such as Roseanna (1967) and The Man on the Balcony (1968), are about sex crimes against innocent people. In later books the victims are as villainous as the killer. In Murder at the Savoy (1971), a tycoon is shot during an after-dinner speech, his death mask etched in mashed potatoes. He turns out to have been a major white-collar crook with, among other things, a far-flung gunrunning empire. The eponymous Abominable Man is, of all things, a police superintendent. After someone slices the man in half with a bayonet, Beck compiles an appalling dossier of his brutalities. Many instances are easily available in the Ombudsman's files, all marked "No action."