by Maj Sjowall
Just as Macdonald's books have been described as intense family dramas doubling as crime novels, so the work of Sjöwall and Wahlöö could be described as political indictments doubling as crime novels. The Laughing Policeman opens with a scene that immediately places it in the late 1960s, specifically 1968, the year of the student riots in Paris, demonstrations in London's Grosvenor Square and anti-war protests, marches and demos all across America and various parts of the Western world.
On a rain-swept, wintry night in Stockholm, the police are busy clashing with peaceful and-Vietnam demonstrators outside the American embassy. Outnumbered by roughly two to one, the police are obliged to bring to their assistance a highly impressive arsenal of 'tear gas bombs, pistols, whips, batons, cars, motorcycles, shortwave radios, battery megaphones, riot dogs and hysterical horses', wielding them against demonstrators armed to the teeth with'a letter and cardboard signs'. In case we don't get the joke, Sjöwall and Wahlöö helpfully inform us that the latter 'grew more and more sodden in the pelting rain'. Although this incident helps to date-stamp the novel and is an amusing aside, it also allows the authors to set their pro-Marxist stall out as early as possible and imbues the comical proceedings with a darker hue as they note that one demonstrator, a thirteen-year-old girl, is grabbed by a trio of hefty cops who dragged her into a squad car, where they twisted her arms and pawed her breasts'. Well, that'll give her something to protest about.
More importantly the scene acts as a prelude to another confrontation that is the crux of the novel, for while the scene at the embassy is being played out, and while Beck and Kollberg are engaged in a game of chess in the latter's apartment, a few miles away in yet another part of Stockholm, a double-decker bus, along with the driver and passengers, is shot to smithereens by a man with a machine gun, who leaves behind nine victims, eight of them dead and one seriously wounded. One of those killed happens to be Åke Stenström, a young colleague of Beck and Kollberg's whose now lifeless hand is still holding his service pistol. Why was he on the bus? Just to get from A to B? Then why have his gun with him? These questions lead Beck into one of the most difficult cases of his career since, like the fateful bus, it too is a double-decker, leaving him with not one but two crimes to solve.
While the slaughter on the bus initially seems a random act of appalling violence, Beck and his team, after weeks of frustration and effort, are rewarded with a glimmer of hope. Having methodically examined Stenström's work load, they come across the legendary Teresa Camarão case and it gradually dawns on them that the two incidents might be connected. The carnage, they deduce, might have been carried out by a rational and shrewd individual, a person with something to hide.
In procedural scenes masterfully staged by Sjöwall and Wahlöö, the police begin to peel back the years to reveal their secrets. What has always been opaque now grows more distinct, more visible, and as the truth slowly emerges, the past joins up with the present and the two cases become one.
Outside the office, it's life as usual for Beck (in other words, he doesn't have one).
The marital void depicted in the earlier novels continues to expand in The Laughing Policeman: Beck has actually distanced himself from his long-suffering and often insufferable wife, Inga, by moving out of their room and sleeping by himself on a sofa bed. A terse description of their courtship and conjugation - 'He had met her seventeen years ago, made her pregnant on the spot and married in haste' – speaks volumes. Apart from a brief moment where Beck pleasantly bids good night to his daughter, Ingrid, the only member of his family to whom he seems close, domestic bliss seems utterly conspicuous by its absence. Even the usually highly vocal Inga is mosdy silent and remote and, except for momentarily reminding him that he's 'not the only policeman', an admonition that's more like a mantra, she's no longer moved to scold or argue with her husband.
It seems that for Beck there can be little hope for the survival of a marriage - that roundelay of shared intimacies, of mutual displays of trust and kindness, the pleasing routine of mundanities and creature comforts - when one partner has his head full of murder, assault, robbery and deceit, or ) when circumstances, perhaps choice, have compelled him to take on the seemingly impossible task of protecting and serving a society that spurns his help, however much it needs it, and constantly derides and abuses him. In Beck's case, the ties of matrimony and fatherhood have been realigned to form a noose that is tightening around his neck, and the cloying confines, the saccharine strictures of a family Christmas - the one time of year when it's impossible to avoid such proximity - are threatening to choke him.
Conversely, Beck's friend and colleague, Lennart Kollberg, seems to be remarkably content once he is away from his desk and at home. Any potential marital trouble hinted at in the third novel, The Man on the Balcony, where he was tempted by the allures and overtures of a sexy witness, is entirely absent here and he is full of love and longing for his wife, 'a long-legged girl of normal build and sensual nature' who enticingly tells him that she'll see him in bed. 'Or on the floor or in the bathtub or wherever you goddam like.' Gazing at her as she stands naked at the kitchen sink, making the feed for their baby's bottle, a seemingly perfect combination of maternal care and desirability, he reflects that she 'was exactly what he wanted, but it had taken him over twenty years to find her and another year to think it over'.
Never ones to over-egg the pudding, Sjöwall and Wahlöö discreetly demonstrate the enormous contrast between the two men's marriages by showing Beck at night, waiting until he hears his wife start snoring before he telephones Kollberg, who, we realize, is making love with his wife and still entwined when he answers the call from his fellow officer. Apart from its other attributes, Kollberg sees sex with his wife as a handy way of clearing from his mind 'the thought of Stenström and the red doubledecker bus', a diversion of which Beck, alone in his sofa bed, smoking and poring over old cases, is unable, or unwilling, to take advantage. Presumably angry at having been transported away from his wife's charms and dragged back onto the bus, as it were, Kollberg concludes the conversation by telling his colleague to 'Go to hell' and promptly hanging up. Standing there'with the phone to his ear for a few seconds', Beck retreats to the sofa bed and lies down in the dark, 'feeling he had made a fool of himself.
Despite the difference in each man's home life, Beck and Kollberg are professionally as united as ever as they investigate first the bus murders and, eventually, the cold case from the past. There are instances, as in the preceding novel, when they literally think as one, although on one significant occasion when they don't, when Beck has finally grasped that Stenström had been working on the Teresa Camarão case and his friend hasn't, the two men both have 'the same thought', voiced by Kollberg:'One can't communicate merely by telepathy.' Naturally, though, they do get on each other's nerves, as when Kollberg's irritation at Beck's persistent cough causes the latter to rudely tell him he gets 'more and more like Inga every day. Still, they function brilliantly together and they are 'a good complement to one another' When Beck first learns of the incident on the bus and that one of his colleagues has been shot, he immediately fears that it's Kollberg, whom he left after their walk together earlier and whom he discovers has still not returned home. But at the scene of the crime, as Beck silently scans the feces of the victims, Kollberg suddenly appears as if nothing had happened. Too relieved to trust himself to speak, Beck says nothing, as Kollberg gives him 'a searching look’. In such brief and telling instances as these, the reader comes to understand just how the two men 'had learned to understand each other's thoughts and feelings without wasting words'.
Sjöwall and Wahlöö took the novel's title from the famous 1920s music hall song of the same name. Sung by the aptiy named Charles Jolly, but under the pseudonym of Charles Penrose, it's a song about a fat policeman who laughs all the time and has been unaccountably popular over the years. A record of it is given to Beck for a Christmas present by his daughter, Ingrid, who clearly thinks it's hilarious and tells him i
t's 'Pretty appropriate, eh?' As his family sat around him and 'howled with mirth', Beck himself, this driven, dyspeptic detective, 'was left utterly cold. He couldn't even manage a smile.' It is only at the very end of the novel when the two cases have been solved, when Stenström's death has been avenged and when the final twist is delivered by the authors, that Beck starts laughing. The joke is on him and the rest of the police force, but still he laughs.
Beck at the Box Office
The American success of The Laughing Policeman was boosted by its adaptation for the big screen, filmed in the USA in 1973, after its triumph at the Edgar Allan Poe Awards. Directed by Stuart Rosenberg and starring Walter Matthau as 'Sergeant Jake Martin', the American version of Martin Beck, it also featured Bruce Dern and Lou Gossett as Beck's colleagues, and the setting was changed from Stockholm to San Francisco. Perhaps because of a possibly inappropriate association with that humorous Charles Penrose record, the title was changed in the UK to the rather dreary An Investigation of Murder. The film received solidly good reviews from US critics and Rosenberg's next project, in 1975, was to direct The Drowning Pool This was adapted from Ross Macdonald's crime novel of the same name which, as it neatly closes the circle on the cinematic side of things, leaves us with a happy ending.
Further Interrogation of Maj Sjöwall
Q and A by Richard Shephard
Unlike the hot, sultry summer of the previous book, this is set in the winter, near Christmas, with lots of rain and cold winds. How important was the weather as a backdrop to the events in the novels? In Scandinavia we have shifting seasons and to make a book's setting the cold winter or grey autumn or slushy pre-spring or hot summer can spice up the story a little. Sometimes we simply used the weather as it was at the time of writing.
You seemed particularly interested in what you call the ‘poison' of status in this book. Did you think Sweden especially succumbed to this?
I'm not sure I understand the question, but I suppose that the development we described in Sweden was similar to that in the rest of the world.
There is a very powerful use of the past in this novel, more so than in the preceding books. Was that deliberate and, if so, why did you wait until now?
I think it turned out to be the right time to look back in history and give both the reader and us some background. We hadn't really planned it or postponed it, though.
This novel won the Edgar Award in 1971 and remains the only European novel to have done so. Why do you think this book was so popular with American readers? I honesdy don't know. Perhaps it took time for American readers to find their way to our books and that particular tide might have created an interest for Sweden and the so-called 'Swedish Model' which Prime Minister Palme spread abroad.
Maj Sjöwall was born in 1935 in Stockholm, Sweden. She studied journalism and graphics and worked as a translator, as well as an art director and journalist for some of the most eminent magazines and newspapers in Sweden. She met her husband Per Wahloo in 1961 through her work, and the two almost instantly became a couple. They had two sons together and, after the death of Per Wahlöö, Sjöwall continued to translate. She also wrote several short stories and the acclaimed crime novel The Woman Who Resembled Greta Garbo, with the Dutch crime writer Tomas Ross. She is arguably Sweden's finest translator and is still at work today.
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Maj Sjowall
Per Wahloo
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