The Abominable Man by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo

Just after midnight he stopped 

thinking.

Opening to

The Abominable Man

by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo

Translated from the Swedish by 

Thomas Teal

In a ten-part detective series characterized by its social critiques it's inevitable that one volume must address the police force itself.  Who will protect society from those charged with protecting society?  If the police force is corrupt, what is the citizenry to do?

This questions is unfortunatley as relevant today as it was in 1972 when The Abominable Man was first published, at least in the United States.  There is a very good chance that the state of Georgia has just executed an innocent man after the Supreme Court refused to issue a stay last Wednesday and President Obama refused to intervene in any way.  Meanwhile, in Fullerton, California bystanders recently filmed police officers beating a homeless man so severely that he later died.

As bad as both these examples are, the current situation is much better than it was in 1972 when police officers, at least in Sweden as it's depicted in Sjowall and Wahloo's novels, did not have to account for their actions to anyone.  Anyone that mattered at least. 

This is the setting for The Abominable Man, volume seven in The Story of Crime, the Martin Beck mysteries.  

The story opens with the murder of a police officer who lays dying in a hospital bed.  Now retired, former Chief Inspector Nyman was never a beloved police officer.  Few of his coworkers knew anything about his private life; his family knew nothing of his police work.  It's not until he is found knifed to death that anyone takes a serious look at his career.  The detectives working the case have no evidence to go on.  (This has been the case at the start of every Martin Beck novel so far.)  All they know is that Nyman used to be a police, when they force themselves to face facts they know that Nyman was a bad police officer. 

They soon determine their prime suspect to be former detective, Ericksson, who long held a grudge against Nyman. Ten years ago, Nyman arrested Ericksson's wife thinking she was under the influence of narcotics and left her chained in a cell unattended.  She later died, a result of her diabeties and the officers who failed to get her the medical attention she needed.  What they carelessly mistook for narcotic intoxication was actually the need for insulin.  Ericksson, forced to continue working alongside the officers who caused his wife's death, along with many others, eventually lost his job as his life spiraled out of control. He goes on a killing spree once he finally loses custody of his daughter to the state.  

Even with the presence of Sjowall and Wahloo's cast of good police officers, Martin Beck is far from the only one, The Abominable Man is a stinging indictment of a system that left the public unprotected from bad police officers as it encouraged good ones to turn a blind eye whenever they saw a colleague violating the law even in the most extreme circumstances.  It's unfortunate that this story is still so pertinent, but it drives home the point that detective novels need not go to extremes to find subject matter.  There is plenty to be dealt with in the work and lives of the detectives themselves.  Real police work, done in the real world, is fascinating stuff.  Something great mystery writers have always known.