The Laughing Policeman
The fantastic fourth classic instalment in the Martin Beck detective series from the 1960s – the novels that have inspired all Scandinavian crime fiction.The Martin Beck series is widely recognised as the greatest masterpiece of crime fiction ever written. These are the original detective stories that pioneered the detective genre and inspired writers from Agatha Christie to Henning Mankell; Graham Greene to Jonathan Franzen. Translated into 35 languages, they have sold over 10 million copies around the world.Written in the 1960s, they are the work of Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo – a husband-and-wife team from Sweden. The ten novels follow the fortunes of the detective Martin Beck, whose enigmatic, taciturn character has inspired countless other policemen in crime fiction. The novels can be read separately, but do follow a chronological order, so the reader can become familiar with the characters and develop a loyalty to the series. Each book will have a new introduction in order to help bring these books to a new audience.On a cold and rainy Stockholm night, nine bus riders are gunned down by an unknown assassin. The press, anxious for an explanation for the seemingly random crime, quickly dubs him a madman. But Martin Beck of the Homicide Squad suspects otherwise: this apparently motiveless killer has managed to target one of Beck’s best detectives – and he, surely, would not have been riding that lethal bus without a reason.With its wonderfully observed lawmen, its brilliantly rendered felons and their murky Stockholm underworld, and its deftly engineered plot, ‘The Laughing Policeman’ has long been recognised as a classic of the police procedural.
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MAJ SJÖWALL
AND PER WAHLÖÖ
The Laughing Policeman
Translated from the Swedish by Alan Blair
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
4th Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
This ebook first published by Harper Perennial in 2007
This 4th Estate edition published in 2016
This translation first published by Random House Inc, New York, in 1970
Originally published in Sweden by P. A. Norstedt & Soners Forlag
Copyright text © Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö 1968
Copyright introduction © Jonathan Franzen 2009
Cover photograph © Shutterstock
PS Section © Richard Shephard 2007
PS™ is a trademark of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.
Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö assert the moral right to be identified as the authors of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication
Source ISBN: 9780007242948
Ebook Edition © APRIL 2009 ISBN: 9780007323548
Version: 2016-10-13
From the reviews of the Martin Beck series:
‘First class’
Daily Telegraph
‘One of the most authentic, gripping and profound collections of police procedural ever accomplished’
MICHAEL CONNELLY
‘Hauntingly effective storytelling’
New York Times
‘There's just no question about it: the reigning King and Queen of mystery fiction are Maj Sjöwall and her husband Per Wahlöö’
The National Observer
‘Sjöwall/Wahlöö are the best writers of police procedural in the world’
Birmingham Post
An actual Swedish person, my college roommate Ekström, introduced me to this book. He gave me a mass-market edition on whose cover was a cheesy photograph of a raincoated man in mod sunglasses pointing a sub-machine gun into the reader’s face. This was in 1979. I was exclusively reading great literature (Shakespeare, Kafka, Goethe), and although I could forgive Ekström for not understanding what a serious person I’d become, I had zero interest in opening a book with such a lurid cover. It wasn’t until several years later, on a morning when I was sick in bed and too weak to face the likes of Faulkner or Henry James, that I happened to pick up the little paperback again. And how perfectly comforting The Laughing Policeman turned out to be! Once I’d made the acquaintance of Inspector Martin Beck, I was never again so afraid of colds (and my wife was never again so afraid of how grouchy I would be when I got one), because colds were henceforth associated with the grim, hilarious world of Swedish murder police. There were ten Martin Beck mysteries altogether, each of them readable cover-to-cover on the worst day of a sore throat. The volume I loved best and reread most often was The Laughing Policeman. Its happily cohabiting authors, Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, had wedded the satisfying simplicities of genre fiction to the tragicomic spirit of great literature. Their books combined beautiful, deft detective work with powerful pure evocations of the kind of misery that people with sore throats so crave the company of.
‘The weather was abominable,’ the authors inform us on the first page of The Laughing Policeman; and abominable it remains thereafter. The floors at police headquarters are ‘dirtied’ by men ‘irritable and clammy with sweat and rain.’ One chapter is set on a ‘repulsive Wednesday.’ Another begins: ‘Monday. Snow. Wind. Bitter cold.’ As with the weather, so with society as a whole. Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s negativity towards postwar Sweden – a theme in all ten of their books – reaches its delirious apex in The Laughing Policeman. Not only does the Swedish winter weather inevitably suck, but the Swedish journalists are inevitably sensationalist and stupid, the Swedish landladies inevitably racist and rapacious, the Swedish police administrators inevitably self-serving, the Swedish upper class inevitably decadent or vicious, the Swedish antiwar demonstrators inevitably persecuted, the Swedish ashtrays inevitably overflowing, the Swedish sex inevitably sordid or unappetizingly blatant, the Swedish streets at Christmastime inevitably nightmarish. When Detective Lennart Kollberg finally gets an evening off and pours himself a nice big glass of akvavit, you can be sure that his phone is about to ring with urgent business. Stockholm in the late sixties probably really did have more than its share of ugliness and frustrations, but the
