set in 70's Sweden, one of the "Martin Beck" Mysteries (there are 10 of them I think). Although they were Swedish, they made it into mainstream American Paperback print. Racy covers with contradictorily reasonably serious themes and decent writing.

"And just why is it not longer in print?" one of the bureaucrats might ask.

"Ridiculous" Beck might think under his breath.

These books give me the feeling that the authors really had a lot of experience in the world of police detective work. I don't know if they did or not. I think perhaps they were journalists who covered some criminal investigations.

There isn't a gunfight on every other page, and they don't get the guy who did it quite as easily as all that.

The work is methodical and frustrating, but in the end things get done and in the end the book is a satisfying read with small insights into both the work and the lives of the men.

This particular one has a good bit of Gunvald Larsson (not exactly Beck's favorite colleague, but definitely my favorite character) and the brick walls he very nearly runs into in trying to solve this case.

The comic relief, like the more serious moments, is reserved but very well done. I've reread some of the Larsson scenes many times.

jl

The fifth Martin Beck novel. When an apartment building under police surveillance mysteriously explodes in the middle of the night, it's up to Beck to solve the crime. Was it terrorism? Assassination? Or just a gas leak?

One of the better novels in the series, this is the first one to deal seriously with organized crime and the underworld. It also gives more time to the hilarious Gunvald Larsson, introduced in earlier novels but here playing a major supporting role.

An excellent crime thriller.

A look into the world of Swedish Homocide Bureau Chief Martin Beck. The book is well plotted and gives the reader a realistic look into the procedures of the police, as well as a glimpse into the steamy side of life (and crime) in Sweden in the late sixties.

The second book in the Martin Beck detective series. ... the emphasis is more on the police procedural than the social and political commentary which would dominate the authors' later works.

The crime in this one is again sexual in nature, although even more barbaric: the serial rape and strangulation of little girls, whose bodies subsequently turn up in parks all over Stockholm. Beck is on the case (with his trusty partner Kollberg), and the two thoroughly investigage every lead, but to no avail. The tension in the book is simple, but palpable: ... As the detectives begin to feel the heat from their superiors and the public, the killer prepares to strike again...

And then the anticlimactic ending. No car chases, no shoot-outs, no ingenious breakthroughs, no sudden flashes of psychic insight: just simple police work and a healthy infusion of old-fashioned dumb luck.

One of the better novels in the series, again to be praised for its attention to details and realism.

The Martin Beck stories written by the gifted husband and wife writers, Wahloo and Sjowall are well written and will hold your attention. Guaranteed. These are crime novels with a social conscience of the 60's era. The authors bemoan the disintegration of the Swedish and western society, where everything is worse than it used to be. Martin Beck is a cop who is no villain, and who does his job because somebody has to do it. We look at the evils of the 60's society almost with nostalgia today. If only today's society could be as bad as the one Martin Beck had to face every day. Had he been able to see into the future, Martin Beck would have indeed been thankful that he didn't have to live in 2001. When I first bought the Black Lizard edition in a Berkeley bookstore years ago, I must confess it was strictly for the slick cover of a dead man with a face in a spaghetti plate (in "Murder At the Savoy"). Soon I had to have all ten of the Wahloo-Sjowall books. I still have them, and still occasionally go back to read them again!

Serial-killer novels with the detective in hot pursuit are a dime a dozen... This is a primary source for the genre, and a literary work of the first magnitude. One of those rare books with the ring of truth, making it all the more terrifying... The protagonist Martin Beck and his colleagues are in a league of their own, among the most compelling characters in modern fiction. The Martin Beck mysteries as a whole dwarf almost any other literary achievement of the last fifty years. If you've made it this far in this review, do yourself a favor and read one of these books. You won't regret it.

Laughing Policeman puts Martin Beck on the same page as the very best literary detectives of all times. The novel is quick paced, engaging, full of dry wit and not so much full of social commentary as some other Martin Beck books (e.g. otherwise great plot of Terrorists is too often punctuated by anti-capitalist, anti-Vietnam war, anti-government rhetoric - don't get me wrong, I am as much for anarcho-syndicalism as the next guy, just put it in a separate book). The novel is centered around a fictional mass-murder taking place in a Stockholm city bus. Right, if it was Boston or Philly nobody would even care to write a book about it... Anyways, the story is rich with details of actual investigative work - customary to Sjowall-Wahloo tandem - as it is with dumb cops, constantly threatening to riun the whole thing. Fans of Beck stories will find all the usual trappings - door breakings by Gunvald Larsson, the red nose of Einar Rohn, toothpick-chewing Per Mansson, and of course still surviving tandem of crime-busting heavyweights Beck and Kolberg. People who are not yet fans run a grave danger of becoming ones after - or even while - reading this book.

Set against the backdrop of 1960s Socialist Sweden, a gruesome mass killing on a bus shatters the peace of Stockholm. Facing the shock of this seemingly random crime, the likes of which Sweden has never known; homicide detectives Martin Beck and Lennart Kolberg are called in to investigate. Matters are further complicated when amongst the dead is one of their own, a talented, but young detective on the Squad. Persuaded that his death was no accident of coincidence, and left with nothing but questions, Beck and Kolberg must dive beneath the surface of seemingly idyllic Sweden. There, amongst the failures of society they must follow in the footsteps of their deceased maverick comrade in an attempt to explain his presence on the fatal bus. Their quest takes them through the Stockholm underworld, the precinct's unsolved cases file and into the past. Faced with an unsolvable case, years old and nine horrible murders in the present, the clash between the individuality of the detectives and the necessity of teamwork intensifies in this complex police procedural. Led by Kolberg and Beck, the Homicide Squad leaves no stone unturned in their painstaking search for truth, both past and present. As everything comes together towards resolution, the final truth seems less an ending than a cause for more questions, questions this time directed at society itself.

Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo's novel, The Laughing Policeman, is set in Stockholm, Sweden during the 60's. While the genre of detection leads a reader to expect the progression of an investigation into an unsolved crime, this novel presents a twist. The crime in this case has been solved, and the detectives on the job must follow a predecessor to solve the mystery. The clues and evidence in this case are left by this initial investigator and not the actual murderer. Instead of focusing on or leading up to the discovery of the criminal, the novel leads the reader to a closer understanding of the character of one of the victims. The novel also adds dimension to the act of detection by incorporating the narratives of an entire homicide unit. The piecing together of the mystery by multiple detectivies allows the reader the more active role of putting together the clues discovered by the individual detectives. The political issues of the time period are highlighted in the beginning and act as an undercurrent throughout the book. The time-span of the novel, 1967-1968, surrounds the height of an almost universal confrontation between public opinion and government. The novel explores both the public view of police and the detectives' views on the job they serve. While not suggesting that police have the power to bring peace or enforce order, the detectives seem urgent to prove that they can at least find some sort of order. The investigation of the mystery mirrors the detectives' quest to validate their way of life.

Detective Martin Beck is back at work after a near-fatal event at work. A team of colleagues is attempting to solve a series of bank robberies that they are convinced are related. Beck is in the process of solving another case. His work and conclusions are more intriguing than that of the others and finally solved but not prosecuted. All crimes eventually can be all tied together even though they are not officially solved. The crimes are set in the Stockholm of the 70ies and integrated in Sweden's social problems of that era.

While I was expecting a masterpiece along the lines of Henning Mankell's criminal investigator Wallander this book did certainly not live up to my expectations. The stories are very fragmented, the sudden shifts from one story to the other are deliberate but destructive to the reader. I did not get hooked onto the book at all - because of its fragmentation it totally lacks suspense. It is hard to relate nowadays to the social problems of the time and they seem to overshadow the story lines in many instances. I concluded for myself that I could not get interested because of too many contemporary references, which will not make this mystery a classic of its genre. While Martin Beck fills the role of an interesting inspector he is pushed to far into the background even though he is supposed to be the novel's hero.

I have recently become a fan of this series of twelve detective novels, written in the late 1960's and early 1970's in Sweden by husband and wife team Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo. Wahloo, who died in 1975, did some reporting and the no-nonsense style of these novels reminds one of good reporting.

The Locked Room is somewhat unique to the series, in that the authors frequently shift their focus to the minor characters and criminals, in omniscient narrator style, giving the reader more perspective than is usual. The novel involves two crimes, a bold bank robbery in which a bank customer is killed, and the discovery of a retired man's decomposed body in his apartment, which appears to be locked from the inside. Beck, who recently returned to the force after recovering from a shooting, is assigned the locked room case and we see him trying to fit the pieces together of a seemingly impossible crime to solve.

A NY Times critic has recently praised the grim realism of these novels; if Beck drinks too much coffee on an empty stomach, his gets sick. After a broad daylight bank robbery, the police get starkly different eyewitness accounts, leading to a morass of seemingly unrelated clues, some of them way off. The reader is constantly reminded that in the real world, this is how crimes are really solved by big city police forces.

Some readers are a little put off by the Socialist leanings of the authors, which rises to the surface occasionally as they discuss current events of Stockholm 30 years ago including strikes, poor health care/benefits for workers, etc. However the rantings never seemed to me to get in the way of their story, and the novels are all written in a lean, sparse style with few wasted scenes or verbal flourishes. I recommend the series highly, beginning with the great Roseanna.

The seventh Martin Beck novel. Recovering from his misadventures in "The Abominable Man", Beck takes up a seemingly unsolvable case: a friendless, elderly miser, shot one time in the head in a one-bedroom apartment, with locked doors and locked windows, and no gun in sight. Meanwhile, his colleagues are investigating the high-profile shooting of a security guard during a daring bank robbery conducted, apparently, by a beautiful blonde woman.

Although the authors begin to get a little too heavy-handed in their social commentary, this is still one of the better Beck novels (in fact it is regarded by many as the best, though I think its predecessor is better.) The dual plot structure and the improbable connection between the crimes make for a great thriller. The characters are engaging, and the ending is wonderful. Read it.

The ninth Martin Beck novel. Not as good as some of their previous work, but still pretty engaging nonetheless. ... The authors frequently remind us of how much better things were back in the good old days. Funny satire, but pretty cranky, and not much of a thriller.

The book redeems itself with some of Gunvald Larsson's uproarious antics and the shocking revelation of the identity of the title character.

"Cop Killer" is entertaining in parts, but I think Sjowall and Wahloo were beginning to get bored with the police procedural, and it shows.

All of the Martin Beck mysteries (I believe there are 10 in all) are excellent reads that offer a window into the criminal Scandinavian landscape. Sharply etched characterizations and stories that remind one of the Magritte novels of Simenon. It's a shame that they are hard to find!

The third book in the Martin Beck detective series. This one focuses on the mysterious disappearance of a Swedish tabloid journalism in Eastern Europe. Beck is called off his August family holiday to investigate, but is secretly glad to get away from his overbearing wife.

One of the weaker entries in the series. The story never really held my interest. However, I did appeciate the reverse intuition of the plot; though Beck gets involved with criminal underworld and international gun smugglers, things are ultimately much more simple than they first appear.

If this one doesn't capture your interst, keep reading; the series steadily improves from here.

congratulations on stumbling onto one of the best crime/satire series of the 20th century. If you didn't like this one, read some others, especially The Locked Room. Great writing with a moderate slant (they slam liberals and conservatives) makes this a wonderful series.