Nordic Noir. Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö - The Locked Room

Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö – The renowned crime-writing duo

The Locked Room

A Martin Beck Police Mystery

Translated from the Swedish by Paul Britten Austin

Praise for the Martin Beck Series

“Lively, stylistically taut…Sjöwall and Wahlöö changed the genre.” – Henning Mankell

“One of the most authentic, gripping and profound collections of police procedurals ever accomplished.”–Michael Connelly

First English-language edition jacket cover. Via Wikipedia

The Locked Room

This is the eighth book in the ten-book crime fiction series that authors Sjöwall and Wahlöö entitled The Story of a Crime. A straight police procedural , The Locked  Room is a classic in the mystery genre—a man is found, shot dead, in an apartment whose door is locked from the inside; there is no gun on the premises; the window is closed; and the curtains are drawn.

The detective who solves the mystery is Martin Beck, who is returning to work at the Central Bureau of Investigation in Stockholm in 1972, after recovering from a bullet wound.

Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö

Swedish writers Sjöwall and Wahlöö were both left-wing journalists who met in 1961 while working in the magazine industry. In 1962, they married, started a family, and wrote the Martin Beck series, taking alternate chapters and working late into the night while their children slept. As political radicals, Sjöwall and Wahlöö revealed the incompetence of the Swedish police force in the series, in addition to commenting on the societal issues in the Swedish welfare state. This tradition has been upheld by such note-worthy crime fiction writers as Henning Mankell and Stieg Larsson.

In addition to working for several Swedish newspapers, Wahlöö wrote radio and TV plays, film scripts, short stories and novels.  Sjöwall was also a poet.  In 1975, Wahlöö died at the age of 49.

This year, Sjöwall will celebrate her 80^th birthday and mark the 50^th anniversary of the publication of the first book in the Martin Beck series, Roseanna. She lives in Sweden and continues to work as a writer, a poet and a translator.

Maj Sjöwall

The Telegraph ran a profile of Maj Sjöwall in 2015, on the occasion of the 50^th anniversary of the publication of Roseanna:

The Telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/authorinterviews--The-couple-who-invented-Nordic-Noir
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/authorinterviews/11741385/The-couple-who-invented-Nordic-Noir.html

The Martin Beck Series

The Scandinavian Books website has an overview of the ten books in the Martin Beck series:

http://scandinavianbooks.com/crime-fiction/swedish-author/sjowall-wahloo.html
http://scandinavianbooks.com/crime-fiction/swedish-author/sjowall-wahloo.html

Read an excerpt

The Locked Room, published by Penguin Random House, comes with an Introduction by Michael Connelly.  Read an excerpt from the book at:

Penguin Random House.com/books/the-locked-room-by-maj-sjowall-and-per-wahloo-with-a-new-introduction-by-michael-connelly
http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/168102/the-locked-room-by-maj-sjowall-and-per-wahloo-with-a-new-introduction-by-michael-connelly/

Cinema

All of the books in the Martin Beck series have been adapted into film. Six of these films featured Swedish actor Gösta Ekman as Martin Beck. In North America, Walter Matthau played a detective based on the character of Martin Beck in The Laughing Policeman (which was set in San Francisco, and based on the original Martin Beck mystery). Martin Beck has also been played by Belgian actor Jan Decleir and British actor Derek Jakobi. In 1995, the Mystery Writers of America named The Laughing Policeman the second best police procedural after Tony Hillerman’s Dance Hall of the Dead.

You can check out the movie trailer for The Laughing Policeman here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0y_ZLXMbv4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0y_ZLXMbv4

ABOUT THE LOCKED ROOM

The stunning eighth installment in the Martin Beck mystery series by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö is a masterful take on a classic locked room mystery.

A young blonde in sunglasses robs a bank and kills a hapless citizen. Across town, a corpse with a bullet shot through its heart is found in a locked room–with no gun at the scene. The crimes seem disparate, but to Martin Beck they are two pieces of the same puzzle, and solving it becomes the one way he can escape the pains of his failed marriage and the lingering effects of a near-fatal bullet wound. Exploring the ramifications of egotism and intellect, luck and accident, this tour de force of detection bears the unmistakable substance and gravity of real life.

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