“The Locked Room” Per Wahlöö and Maj Sjöwall

I was going to put the books for 2010 in the blog in order, but I had a backlog by the time I started the blog, so was then going to add the books as I went along. However, I checked today and although this entry was written and waiting to be posted, the blog skipped from 2010-11 to 2010-13. Resurrected and revised, here it is.

This is the seventh Martin Beck book I have read and the eighth book in the series. When I was buying books last year, “The Abominable Man” was either not available or I got confused on the order, and I am missing the fifth, ninth and tenth books. I would love to get it to fill in the gaps, but alas, that would probably require buying a book. Right now all I can do is put it on my wish list and wish.

“The Locked Room” has two story lines. Martin Beck is investigating a locked-room murder that everyone else has declared a suicide even though the man was shot to death and no gun or cartridge were found in the room. Beck does not read detective novels, he is more interested in books about history and the sea, so he doesn’t appreciate the idea of a locked-room mystery. Kollberg, Larsson and Rönn have been assigned to Bulldozer, the director of a task force on bank robberies which seem to be rampant in Sweden in the early 70s. The Bulldozer is an inept administrator and showboat (yes, inept at that, too). There has just been a bank robbery that ended in the death of an overly brave civilian, and the job seems to have been done by a woman. Not willing to think outside of the box, the investigative team wants to believe the perpetrator is a man dressed as a woman and must be one of the usual suspects.

I have read that Wahlöö and Sjöwall decided to write ten police novels starting in 1965 and finishing one a year, doing the work in the evenings while their children were in bed. They also wanted to make political commentary on the welfare state and who gets left behind in a society that is supposed to take care of everyone from cradle to grave. I found the commentary rather light early in the series, and Colin Dexter bears this out in the introduction of my copy of “The Fire Engine that Disappeared.” He writes that until he was asked to write that introduction he had never read any of the Martin Beck books, in part because he was afraid of how one-sided it would be politically, but also partly because he thought the formula for the writing would come directly from the Ed McBain 87th precinct books, a series that started in 1956, nine years before the Beck books. His preconceptions were unfounded, and he was pleased to find humor in the book. Here is what Dexter had to say about the 1970 book: “I found little or nothing in the novel that could be called tub-thumping propaganda.” However, the few muted and humane comments about the failures of the “nanny” state that Dexter refers to, often written humorously, became chapter long tirades in the 1973 book “The Locked Room.”

When my husband read “The Locked Room,” his first comment was that the writing was not as fluid as in the previous books, and it was clearly written by two authors. I agree. The parts of the book that describe Beck’s solving of the locked-room murder have the same tone as the previous books, or at least the ones I have read thus far, but in this book there are many parts that are just about crime or the government instead of putting forward the story of Beck and his team. About a third of the book tells the story from the viewpoint of the criminals, which is change from many of the previous books. The social commentary is less than subtle: “Big-time criminals profit from everything—from poisoning nature and whole populations and then pretending to repair their ravages by inappropriate medicines; from purposefully turning whole districts of cities into slums in order to pull them down and then rebuild others in their place. The new slums, of course, turn out to be far more deleterious to people’s health than the old ones had been. But above all they don’t get caught.” On at least three occasions, there are references to the Swedish government’s relationship (worship?) of the United States government: “The only crime that could be considered more serious [than a bank robbery] was throwing eggs at the United States ambassador.” At that time, the police force is understaffed and has a reputation for abusing protestors, especially those protesting the Viet Nam war. None of this makes the job for Beck and his associates any easier.

A rather interesting, but macabre, part of the story has Martin Beck interviewing the drivers of a gray Volkswagen van with a peculiar smell. These men are responsible for removing victims of suicide from where they died, sometimes having not been found for months. The van is well known to the police and journalists, but most people would think it is just another vehicle. This is purposeful: “There is no reason to make people more dispirited and scared than they were already.” This is yet another comment by the authors about the high suicide rate in Sweden.

Wahlöö and Sjöwall love their characters Beck, Kollberg, Larsson, Rönn and the other regulars, and except for their specific quirks, they do their jobs admirably. The other police in the story are depicted a Keystone Kops with miserable results. In fact, only one person in the story solves any of the crimes, our friend Martin Beck, but his solution is laughed away by the district attorney. I would say that of the seven Martin Beck books I have read so far, this was the least satisfying in terms of writing. Only about 50% of it has the same feel as the previous books I have read, but there is more about Beck in the second half of the book, and it was worth it to wade through the bungling of Bulldozer and his gang to get to the end.