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The National Commisioner of Police
smiled.
Opening to
The Terrorists
by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo
Translated from the Swedish by
Joan Tate
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I started reading the Martin Beck series "The Story of a Crime" just over one year ago. I meant to read one book in the ten book series each month and finish in October of last year, but the project took a little longer than I expected.
Last week, I completed book number ten,
The Terrorists. I'm pleased to say that the series holds up right to the end. Each book is as good as the ones that came before; choosing a favorite or the best one should be done by drawing names out of a hat. They're all very good. They'll probably be classics of the genre for generations to come.
And you don't really need to read them in order, either.
The Terrorists is one of the better pieces of plotting you're likely to find in detective fiction. The book opens with a courtroom scene, a young woman accused of robbing a bank at knife point. Martin Beck has been called to testify for the defense. In a scene designed to make Sweden's justice system cringe, the defense is able to prove that a woman who walked out of a bank with a canvas bag full of bills that were not hers was completely innocent of any wrong doing. At first, while I enjoyed the scene, I felt it a bit unfair and a bit artificial, inserting an apparently superfluous subplot just to make the justice system look bad. Were Sjowall and Wahloo extending their critique of Sweden's police force to the judicial system just to get in a few bonus before the series ended? As soon as the girl left the courtroom a free woman, the plot shifted into the story of an American senator, visiting Sweden and the terrorists who have threatened to kill him. I should have trusted Sjowall and Wahloo more. There never was any chance that they would let the reader down in this the final Martin Beck book. The girl comes back in a shocking way that I really should have expected all along. That's the best possible ending for a story like "The Story of a Crime," a shocking finish that should have been expected.
This is not to say that the authors don't allow themselves a little bit of self-indulgence in
The Terrorists. After nine books, I think they're entitled. Chapter 16 opens with an assessment of what makes Martin Beck such a good detective. It's easy to imagine that the authors were responding to critics and fans of their books alike in this couple of pages spent reviewing their detective's career. They admit that some argue he has very few cases and that they are easy to solve. But they also lay out a their case for why he is a good detective, and I imagine by extenstion a good case for what makes a good detective in general. He has a "systematic mind, common sense and conscientiousness," "his good memory; his obstinancy, which was occasionally mulelike; and his capacity for logical thought. Another was that he found 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 significanse. Occasionally these minute considerations led to important clues."
This description of what makes Beck a good detective could easly be a description of what makes Sjowall and Wahloo's detective stories so good. Consider it advice for the would be writer of police procedurals. You won't find anyone escaping from a moving freight car via a hole in the floor, or an intricately planned revenge plot involving bondage and tatoos in anything by Sjowall and Wahloo. What you will find is attention to detail, logical thought, conscientiousne, stories and people much closer to Simenon's Maigret than to the Hollywood plotlines so typical in today's crime fiction-- crime fiction Sjowall and Wahloo helped make possible.
You'll also find a wicked sense of humor. The kind of humor that manages to end a ten volume critique of Sweden's socialist government with the phrase "X as in Marx." I think that's pretty good. Not a bad way to spend a year reading either.
