Maj Sjowall and Per Whaloo, 1965
This is a departure from the conventional crime novel, a
very narrowly focussed police procedural. There are no clues to figure out, no
elaborate settings or plots, no insight into the criminal mind. It simply
traces the slow and painstaking steps of analyzing a murder, building up
information and gradually identifying the suspects and then trying to find
evidence to confirm a case. Except for the somewhat overdrawn final chapter, we
have no idea what motivates the murderer. All this is, I suspect, much more
like a real police case than the psychological profilers and intuitive
detectives that we see so much today (at least in my television experience, and
I don’t watch or read much criminal fiction because it just seems so overdone).
For my temperament, this approach is interesting and
satisfying, although I can imagine that for many readers it would be too dry.
For the first three months of the plot, the police don’t even know who the
victim is, until someone matches a missing person report from the USA to the
Swedish murder. The story reproduces investigation reports and interrogations
without extraneous description or comments on the reaction of those questioned.
The reader has to piece together the details from the words reported. Even the
interior monologue of the lead detective doesn’t advance the plot or contribute
to understanding the crime. The pace is even more constrained by the time
period, the early sixties when the only instant communication was the
telephone, and investigators had to wait while documents were couriered from
one place to another. Forensics are limited and high-tech doesn’t exist.
In spite of this style, the novel is intriguing for the
realistic portrayal of what an actual police investigation might be like in
reality. This, to me, seems like the investigations that I read about in news
media, when even with the benefit of instantaneous communications it takes
weeks to get lab reports and months or more to build a case. Investigators’
hunches, both right and wrong, come from what the witnesses actually say or
what’s in the evidence, not from brilliant intuition. And they have to be
proven on the basis of evidence that will stand up in court. I expect that this
is because the authors were journalists, and presumably has some knowledge of
the realities of criminal investigation. Also, as Marxists, they want to see
conclusions drawn from material fact.
The characters are thinly drawn and the action is slow –
although there is one sequence at the end when an intensity builds, the police
lose track of the suspect and suspense is real. But the stories do give an
interesting picture of a police investigation in a realistic Swedish setting at
a particular time. I’m interested enough to want to read more in the Martin
Beck series.
