The Terrorists by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö (Harper Perennial 1975)

She looked at him. 'You look absolutely done in. Go to bed.'

Martin Beck really was done in. The day of uninterrupted telephoning and conferring had exhausted him. But for some reason he did not want to go to bed at once. He felt too comfortable in this kitchen, with its plaits of garlic bulbs and bunches of wormwood, thyme and rowanberries. After a while he said, 'Rhea?'

'Yes?'

'Do you think it was wrong of me to take on this job?'

She thought for a long time before answering, then said, 'That would require quite an involved analysis. But I more than understand that friend of yours who resigned.'

'Kollberg.'

'He's a nice man. I like his wife, too. And I think he did the right thing. He saw that the police as an organization devoted itself to terrorizing mainly two categories of people, socialists and those who can't make it in our class society. He acted according to his conscience and convictions.'

'I think he was wrong. If all good policemen got out, because they take on other people's guilt, then only the stupid ones, the dregs, would be left. We've talked about this before, anyway.'

‘You and I have talked about practically everything before. Have you ever thought about that? He nodded.

'But you asked a concrete question, and now I'll answer it Yes, darling, I think you were wrong. What would have happened if you'd refused?'

'I'd have been given a direct order.'

'And if you'd refused a direct order?'

Martin Beck shrugged his shoulders. He was very tired, but the conversation interested him. 'I might possibly have been suspended. But to be honest, that's unlikely. Someone else would simply have been given the job.'

'Who?'

'Stig Malm, probably, my so-called chief and immediate superior.'

'And he'd have made a worse job of it than you? Yes, most likely, but I think you should have refused all the same. That's what I feel, I mean. Feelings are difficult to analyse. I suppose what I feel is this: Our government, which maintains it represents the people, invites a notorious reactionary to come on a visit - a man who might even have been President of the United States a few years ago. Had he been, we would probably have had a global war by now. And on top of all that, he is to be received as an honoured guest. Our ministers, with the Prime Minister in the lead, will sit politely chatting with him about the recession and the price of oil and assure him that good old neutral Sweden is still the same bulwark against communism it has always been. He'll be invited to a damned great banquet and be allowed to meet the so-called opposition, which has the same capitalist interests as the government only slightly more honestly expressed. Then he'll have lunch with our half-witted puppet king. And all the time he has to be protected so damn carefully that presumably he won't be allowed to see a single demonstrator or even hear that there is any opposition, if Säpo or the CIA don't tell him. The only thing he'll notice is that the head of the Communist Party isn't at the banquet'

'You're wrong there. All demonstrators are to be allowed within sight'

'If the government doesn't get scared and talk you out of it, yes. What can you do if the Prime Minister suddenly calls you up and says all the demonstrators are to be transported to Råsunda stadium and kept there?'

'Then I'll resign.'

Cop Killer by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö (Harper Perennial 1974)

He drank down his vodka in a sort of rage.

'The welfare state,' he said. 'I heard about it all over the world. And then when you see this shit country, you wonder how in hell they've managed to spread all those lies and propaganda.'

He refilled his glass.

Martin Beck didn't know exactly what he ought to do. He wanted Mård reasonably sober, but he also wanted him in a fairly good mood.

'

Don't drink so damn much,' he said experimentally. ‘What?'

Mård looked perplexed.

‘What the fuck did you say? Here in my own house?'

'I said you shouldn't drink so damn much. It's a hell of a good piece of advice. Besides, I want to talk to you, and I want some sensible answers.'

'Sensible answers? How's a person supposed to be sensible in the midst of all this shit? Anyway, do you think I'm the only one sitting around drinking himself to death in this wonderful welfare state?'

Martin Beck knew only too well that Mård was not alone in his dilemma. For a large part of the population, alcohol and drugs seemed to be the only way out. This applied to the young as well as the old.

'You ought to see the old men at my so-called pub. The hell of it is, not one of them has any fun drinking. No, it's about as much fun as turning on the gas for a while, and then turning it off again when you're groggy enough. And then open it up again when you start to come around.'

Mård stared heavily at his dirty glass. . 'I've had some damn good times drinking. In the old days. That's the difference. That was in the old days. We used to have a hell of a time. But not here. Other places.'

'In Trinidad-Tobago, for example?'

Mård seemed utterly unaffected.

'Well,' he said. 'So you managed to dig that up. Well done. I'll be damned. I didn't think you were up to it'

'Oh, we usually find out a lot of things,' said Martin Beck. 'Most things, as a matter of fact.'

'Well you wouldn't fucking believe it to see the cops around town. I often wonder why you use human beings at all. Over at Tivoli in Copenhagen they've got a mechanical man who pulls a gun and fires when you put in a coin. They ought to be able to fix him up so he'd lift the other arm too and hit you with a truncheon. And they could put in a tape recorder that says, "All right, what's going on here?'"

Martin Beck laughed.

'It's an idea,' he said.

What he was really laughing at was the thought of how the National Commissioner would react to Bertil Mård's proposed reorganization of the force.

But he kept that to himself.

The Locked Room by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö (Harper Perennial 1972)

Anyone who had been in a position to compare the bank robbery squad to the robbers themselves would have found that in many ways they were evenly matched. The squad had enormous technical resources at its disposal, but its opponents possessed a large amount of working capital and also held the initiative.

Very likely Malmström and Mohrén would have made good policemen if anyone could have induced them to devote themselves to so dubious a career. Their physical qualities were formidable, nor was there much wrong with their intelligence.

Neither had ever occupied himself with anything except crime, and now, aged thirty-three and thirty-five respectively, they could rightly be described as able professional criminals. But since only a narrow group of citizens regarded the robbery business as respectable, they had adopted other professions on the side. On passports, driving licences, and other means of identification they described themselves as 'engineer' or 'executive', well-chosen labels in a country that literally swarms with engineers and executives. All their documents were made up in totally different names. The documents were forgeries, but with a particularly convincing appearance, both at first and second sight. Their passports, for example, had already passed a series of tests, both at Swedish and foreign border crossings.

Personally, both Malmström and Mohrén seemed if possible even more trustworthy. They made a pleasant, straightforward impression and seemed healthy and vigorous. Four months of freedom had to some extent modified their appearance; both were now deeply tanned. Malmström had grown a beard, and Mohrén wore not only a moustache but also side-whiskers.

The Abominable Man by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö (Harper Perennial 1971)

Martin Beck stood on Regeringsgatan enjoying the chilly freshness of the early morning.

He wasn't armed, but in the inside right-hand pocket of his coat he was carrying a stencilled circular from National Police Headquarters. It was a copy of a recent sociological study, and he'd found it on his desk the day before. .

The police force took a very dim view of sociologists - particularly in recent years since they'd started focusing more and more on the activities and attitudes of policemen - and all their pronouncements were read with great suspicion by the men at the top. Perhaps the brass realized that in the long run it would prove untenable simply to insist that everyone involved in sociology was actually a communist or some other subversive.

Sociologists were capable of anything, as Superintendent Malm had recently pointed out in one of his many moments of indignation. Martin Beck, among others, was supposed to look on Malm as his superior.

Maybe Malm was right Sociologists got all kinds of ideas. For example, they came up with the fact that you no longer needed better than a D average to get into the PoliceAcademy, and that the average IQ of uniformed officers in Stockholm had dropped to 93.

'It's a lie!' Malm had shouted. 'And what's more it isn't true! And on top of that it isn't any lower than in New York!'

He'd just returned from a study tour in the States.

The report in Martin Beck's pocket revealed a number of interesting new facts. It proved that police work wasn't a bit more dangerous than any other profession. On the contrary, most other jobs involved much greater risks. Construction workers and lumberjacks lived considerably more hazardous lives, not to mention dockers or taxi drivers or housewives.

But hadn't it always been generally accepted that a policeman's lot was riskier and tougher and less well paid than any other? The answer was painfully simple. Yes, but only because no other professional group suffered from such role fixation or dramatized its daily life to the same degree as did the police.

It was all supported by figures. The number of injured policemen was negligible when compared with the number of people annually mistreated by the police. And so forth.

And it didn't apply only to Stockholm. In New York, for example, an average of seven policemen were killed every year, whereas taxi drivers perished at the rate of two a month, housewives one a week, and among the unemployed the rate was one a day.

To these odious sociologists nothing was sacred. There was a Swedish team that had even managed to torpedo the myth of the English bobby and reduce it to its proper proportions, namely, to the fact that the English police are not armed and therefore don't provoke violence to the same degree as certain others. Even in Denmark responsible authorities had managed to grasp this fact, and only in exceptional situations were policemen permitted to sign out weapons.

But such was riot the case in Stockholm.

Martin Beck had suddenly started thinking about this study as he stood looking at Nyman's body.

Murder at the Savoy by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö (Harper Perennial 1970)

Lennart Kollberg didn't know which way to turn.

The job he'd been assigned seemed both repugnant and pointless. It never occurred to him, however, that it would turn out to be complicated.

He would call on a couple of people, talk to them, and that's all there would be to it

A little before ten o'clock he left the South police station in Västberga, where all was quiet and peaceful, largely because of the shortage of personnel There was no shortage of work, however, for all varieties of crime flourished better than ever in the fertile topsoil provided by the welfare state.

The reasons for this were cloaked in mystery - at least for those who had the responsibility of governing and for the experts who had the delicate task of trying to make the society function smoothly.

Behind its spectacular topographical facade and under its polished, semi-fashionable surface, Stockholm had become an asphalt jungle, where drug addiction and sexual perversion ran more rampant than ever. Unscrupulous profiteers could make enormous profits quite legally on pornography of the sleaziest kind. Professional criminals became not only more numerous but also better organized. An impoverished proletariat was also being created, especially among the elderly. Inflation had given rise to one of the highest costs of living in the world, and the latest surveys showed that many pensioners had to live on dog and cat food in order to make ends meet.

The fact that juvenile delinquency and alcoholism (which had always been a problem) continued to increase surprised no one but those with responsible positions in the Civil Service and at Cabinet level.

Wahlööped #2

Reason #191 why I love Sjöwall and Wahlöö:

"Walpurgis Eve is an important day in Sweden, a day when people put on their spring clothes and get drunk and dance and are happy and eat food and look forward to the summer. In Skĺne, the roadsides are in bloom, and the leaves are coming out. And out on the plain, the cattle are grazing the spring grass, and the other crops are already sown. Students put on their white caps and trade union leaders get their red flags out from the moth-balls and try to remember the text of Sons of Labour. It will soon be May Day and time to pretend to be socialist for a short while again, and during the symbolic demonstration march even the police stand to attention when the brass bands play the Internationale. For the only tasks the police have are the redirection of traffic and ensuring that no one spits on the American flag, or that no one who really wants to say anything has got in amongst the demonstrators.

The last day of April is a day of preparation; preparations for spring, for love and for political cults. It is a happy day, especially if it happens to be fine".

From 'The Fire Engine That Disappeared' (Published 1969).

Mannen På Balkongen (1993)

The Fire Engine That Disappeared by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö (Pantheon Books 1969)

Doris Mĺrtensson arrived back home on the evening of Saturday the twentieth of April.

It was now eight o'clock on Monday morning and she was standing in front of a large mirror in her bedroom, admiring her suntan and thinking how envious her friends at work would be. She had an ugly love-bite on her right thigh and two on her left breast. As she fastened her bra, she thought that perhaps it would be necessary to keep things on for the coming week to avoid awkward questions and involved explanations.

The doorbell rang. She pulled her dress over her head, thrust her feet into her slippers and went to open the door. The doorway was filled by a gigantic blond man in a tweed suit and a short open sports coat

He stared at her with his china-blue eyes and said:

'What was Greece like?'

'Wonderful.'

'Don't you know that the military junta there allows tens of thousands of people to rot away in political prisons and that people are tortured to death every day? That they hang women from the ceiling on iron hooks and burn off their nipples with electric steel cutters?'

'You don't think about things like that when the sun's out and everyone's dancing and happy' 'Happy?'

She looked appraisingly at him and thought that her suntan must look fine against her white dress. This was a real man, she could see that at once. Big and strong and blunt Perhaps a little brutal too; nice.

'Who are you?' she said, with interest.

Roseanna (1993)

The Man Who Went Up in Smoke by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö (Vintage Crime/ Black Lizard 1966)

Martin Beck inspected his fellow passengers gloomily. His expedition had been a failure. There was nothing to indicate that Ari Boeck had not been telling the truth.

Inwardly he cursed the strange impulse that had made him take on this pointless assignment. The possibilities of his solving the case became more and more remote. He was alone and without an idea in his head. And if, on the other hand, he had had any ideas, he would have lacked resources to implement them.

The worst of it was that, deep down within himself, he knew that he had not been guided by any kind of impulse at all. It was just his policeman's soul—or whatever it might be called—that had started to function. It was the same instinct that made Kollberg sacrifice his time off—a kind of occupational disease that forced him to take on all assignments and do his best to solve them.

The Laughing Policeman (1973)

The Laughing Policeman by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö (Vintage Books 1968)

"How I loathe that bastard," Gunvald Larsson muttered suddenly.

"What?"

"I'll tell you something I've never said to anyone else," Gunvald Larsson confided. "I feel sorry for nearly everyone we meet in this job. They're just a lot of scum who wish they'd never been born. It's not their fault that everything goes to hell and they don't understand why. It's types like this one who wreck their lives. Smug swine who think only of their money and their houses and their families and their so-called status. Who think they can order others about merely because they happen to be better off. There are thousands of such people and most of them are not so stupid that they strangle Portuguese whores. And that's why we never get at them. We only see their victims. This guy's an exception."

"Hm, maybe you're right," Rönn said.

The Man On The Balcony by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö (Vintage Crime 1967)

He thought too of the swift gangsterisation of this society, which in the last resort must be a product of himself and of the other people who lived in it and had a share in its creation. He thought of the rapid technical expansion that the police force had undergone merely during the last year; despite this, crime always seemed to be one step ahead. He thought of the new investigation methods and the computers, which could mean that this particular criminal might be caught within a few hours, and also what little consolation these excellent technical inventions had to offer the women he had just left, for example. Or himself. Or the set-faced men who had now gathered around the little body in the bushes between the rocks and the red paling.

Roseanna by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö (Vintage Crime 1965)

They were finished a half hour later. Kollberg drove quickly and carelessly through the rain but Martin Beck didn't seem nervous, in spite of the fact that driving usually put him in a bad mood. They didn't speak at all during the trip. When they pulled up in front of the house where Martin Beck lived, Kollberg finally said: "Now you can go to bed and think about all this. So long."