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Before starting the Martin Beck series, Per Wahlöö was a prolific writer of both novels and journalism—much of it markedly leftist. His wife Maj Sjöwall, 39, is also a journalist and poet. The Wahlöös called their work total collaboration, but for the most part, the terse prose in the Beck books is resonant of Wahlöö's earlier fiction.
The cooperative venture is most profoundly felt in their personal, acrid critique of Sweden's bourgeois welfare state. The Wahlöös' command of police procedure has always been formidable, but they have a deep knowledge of more elusive territory: the people for whom socialism does not work. The books are full of divorced women who cannot get jobs because there is no room for their children in day-care centers and pitiable alcoholics chased from park to park by patrolmen who cannot think of anything better to do. In The Locked Room (1973), probably the best book in the series, Beck ruminates about Sweden, which has problems surprisingly similar to those of capitalistic countries: "The so-called welfare state abounds with sick, poor and lonely people, living at best on dog food, who are left uncared for until they die in their rathole apartments." In fact, the Wahlöös delight in pointing out that supermarkets stock row upon row of pet food for just these consumers.
Mentholated Toothpick. The mysteries also follow a growing public distrust of police. As a little girl, Beck's daughter boasts about her daddy; as a teenager, she keeps quiet about his work. The cops, all in middle age, feel their lives no longer have definition. The police force has been nationalized, structured, streamlined—and paralyzed. Recruits are fewer and worse each year. In The Locked Room, the major criminals escape conviction, and Beck loses a promotion—not that he is sure he wants it—because the results of his painstaking investigation are simply not believed by the technocrats who have become his superiors.
The new book, Cop Killer, is in some ways an exercise in nostalgia. Much of the plot concerns a man who killed an American girl, Roseanna McGraw, in the first book and who may or may not have committed another similar crime At the time of Cop Killer, Wahlöö knew he was dying; he and Maj completed just one more book, as yet untranslated. Unhappily, few of their works are likely to make their way to the screen. The sole film adaptation (of The Laughing Policeman, starring Walter Matthau) might have been made by Kvant and Kristiansson. As time passes, the novels will probably be taken more seriously as literature because of their biting social comment and the shrewdness with which it animates the plots.
But mystery lovers, a sentimental, savoring lot, will miss less portentous things. There are, for instance, the times when the Wahlöös kid their Swedish publisher, Norstedt, in print. Or funny throwaway scenes like Beck's feverish preparation for a dinner party that he gives to mark the end of his 18-year marriage. Or even Larsson's mentholated toothpick. There was a rumor that Beck dies in the just completed book. The only consolation that can be offered now is that he does not.