The Terrorists
The final classic installment in the excellent Martin Beck detective series from the 1960s – the novels that have inspired all Scandinavian crime fiction.Widely recognised as the greatest masterpieces of crime fiction ever written, these are the original detective stories that pioneered the detective genre.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.
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MAJ SJÖWALL
AND PER WAHLÖÖ
The Terrorists
Translated from the Swedish by Joan Tate
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the authors' imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
This ebook first published by Harper Perennial in 2009
This Fourth Estate edition published in 2016
This translation first published by Random House Inc, New York, in 1975
Originally published in Sweden by P. A. Norstedt & Söner Forlag
Copyright text © Random House Inc 1975
Copyright introduction © Dennis Lehane 2010
Cover photograph © Shutterstock
PS Section © Richard Shephard 2007
PS™ is a trademark of HarperCollins Publishers 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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Source ISBN: 9780007243006
Ebook Edition © APRIL 2009 ISBN: 9780007323418
Version: 2017-07-25
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
As one might expect from a novel entitled The Terrorists, terrorism abounds in Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo’s final Martin Beck police procedural. But the chaotic forms that terror takes are not simply that of the political assassinations that bookend the narrative (the first in Latin America, the second in Stockholm). Sjowall and Wahloo are after a much more expansive query of the very definition of terrorism. And so Martin Beck and his Murder Squad of disparate, contentious police officers don’t just engage an impending act of violent insurrection on the streets of Stockholm. They must also solve the murder of a wealthy pornographer and contend with the destruction of an eighteen-year-old naïf, Rebecka Lind, by the teeth of the social welfare system. All the while, their greatest enemy is not bullets or bombs, it’s the bureaucratic apparatus that exalts and rewards its own haplessness.
As this novel – the tenth in the series – is Martin Beck’s swan song, it’s worth noting that in the annals of realistic fictional policemen, Beck stands a full head above most. He carries plenty of psychic scars and admits to a depressive personality, but he’s not gloom laden to the point of masochistic self-pity that so often masquerades as a hard-boiled hero’s tragic worldview. Beck is a dogged worker bee entering his later middle-aged years with a healthy romantic life and no illusions about his place in the larger scheme of things. However exceptional, he is a civil servant. A great cop, yes, but in Sjowall and Wahloo’s vision, a great cop is little more than a great functionary in a hopelessly flawed system. Beck’s talents include ‘his good memory, his obstinacy, which was occasionally mule-like … his capacity for logical thought … [and finding] the time for everything that had anything to do with a case, even if this meant following up small details that later turned out to be of no significance.’ This is what makes a great cop – not the gun, not outsized emotion, not a need to tilt at windmills and otherwise rage against machines. That’s the writer’s job. The cop’s job is to persevere, to examine the evidence, collate the data, push the papers, and work the case to its end. Because what stands in the way of that approach – wholesale bureaucratic incompetence – is a constant in Sjowall and Wahloo’s Sweden of 1975. Any man who can push a vision of the truth, however colorless, however minuscule, through the thornbush of total systematic inefficiency, is a hero. And Martin Beck is that man. So much so that the icy, hypercompetent terrorist, Reinhard Heydt, finds it ‘incomprehensible that such a person would exist in a country like Sweden.’
