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Maj Sjöwall (1935-) |
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Swedish writer and journalist, who created with her husband Per Wahlöö the detective character Martin Beck and published widely translated novels of Beck and his colleagues at the Central Bureau of Investigation in Stockholm. According to the authors' claim, the series was more popular in the United States and France than in Sweden. The critic and awarded mystery writer H.R.F. Keating selected Roseanna (1965) in 1987 for his list of the one hundred best crime novels. Several of the books have been adapted into screen. "Elofsson was in great pain, and the front of his uniform was already soaked and smeared with blood. He could neither talk nor move, only observe. And still he was more dumfounded than afraid. How could this have happened? For twenty years he'd been driving around shouting and swearing, pushing, kicking, hitting people with his billy club, or slapping them with the flat side of his saber. He had always been the stronger, had always had the advantage of arms and might and justice against people who were weaponless and powerless and had no rights." (from Cop Killer, 1974) Maj Sjöwall was born in Stockholm, the daughter of Will Sjöwall and the former Margit Trobäck. She studied journalism and graphics before finding employment as a reporter and art director at a series of newspapers and magazines. From 1959 to 1961 she was an editor with the publishing house Wahlström and Widstrad. Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö met in 1961 while working for magazines published by the same company; Maj Sjöwall for Idun and Per Wahlöö for Folket i bild. At that time Wahlöö was married, Sjöwall was was a single parent of a daughter. They became lovers and married. The carefully planned crime series was created in the evenings, after their two sons, Tetz and Jens, had been put to bed. Starting in 1965 from Roseanna the work ended ten years and ten books later with Terroristerna (1975). Sjöwall and Wahlöö's collaborations was seamless, based on the journalistic experience and style that demanded brevity, concision, and attention to detail. Both writers were Marxists and admired the work of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. According to Wahlöö, their intention was to "use the crime novel as a scalpel cutting open the belly of the ideological pauperized and morally debatable so-called welfare state of the bourgeois type." Of course, even in the 1960s, this kind of radicalism was not meant to make the books more acceptable. "Fortunately none of this has any bearing on the quality of the Martin Beck series itself, which is not only unique in presenting a detailed and evolving vision of police work from a definable political perspective but consistently transcends the level of the average police procedural thanks to a prevailing sense of unease which in the end seems as much existential as ideological." (Micheal Dibdin in The Picador Book of Cime Writing, 1993) With careful research and attention to authentic detail, the series would function as a mirror of the Swedish society by following ten years in the career of the Martin Beck, chief of the National Homicide Squad. Beck would thus serve as the barometer of a changing atmosphere, reflecting shifts in the political, economic, social climate. The first three novels, Roseanna, The Man Who Went Up in Smoke (1966), and The Man on the Balcony (1967) were straightfoward police procedural novels. They introduced the central characters – solid, methodical detective Martin Beck with failing marriage, ex-paratrooper Lennart Kollberg, a gourmet, who hates violence and refuses to carry a gun, Gunvald Larsson, wildman and a drop-out from high society, Einar Rönn from the rural north of Sweden – he was Wahlöö's favorite figure – and patrolmen Kristiansson and Kvant, whose activities usually lead to some kind of fiasco. Beck suffers from insomnia, and he has troubles with his stomach. He joined the police force in the mid-1940s. Beck met Inga, his future wife on a canoe tour in 1951. After marriage they moved to Kungsholmen. They have two children, but during the story their marriage dissolves. In Roseanna the body of a girl is discovered, but nothing is know of her. Eventually she is linked to Roseanna McGraw, an American, who never returned from her tour of Europe. Martin Beck and colleagues find a photograph in which Roseanna is accompanied by a man. Beck is convinced he is the killer. "Chance, too, is allowed to play a bigger role than most storytellers, those shapers of events to their own ends, would allow. This, once more, introduces an element of outside reality. So, as one puts the book down, one is apt to think: a good story, and interesting, but also, in the words of the newspaper advertisement, 'all human life is there'." (H.R.F. Keating in Crime & Mystery: the 100 Best Books, 1987) The Laughing Policeman (1968), filmed by Stuart Rosenberg in 1973, and The Fire Engine That Disappeared (1969), brought in the development of the series social themes and weak points of the Western society. Rosenberg's film was set in San Francisco instead of Stockholm and Malmö. In the story Walter Matthau played a detective, who is solving a case in which all passengers in a bus are massacred by an unseen killer. The later novels, and especially the last, The Terrorist, is a bitter analysis of the welfare state, and openly sides with criminals-as-revolutionaries. Bo Widerberg's screen adaptation of Den vedervärdige mannen från Säffle (1971, The Abominable Man) from 1976, entitled Mannen på taket, was a great success. One of its highlights was a helicopter crash on the Odenplan metro station. Carl-Gustaf Lindstedt, who was best known as a comedian, was cast in the role of Martin Beck. Sjöwall herself had imagined him to be lean, looking like Gunnar Björnstrand or the young Henry Fonda, but Lindstedt was stockily built. In this film, Lindstedt realized his potential as a serious actor. Widerberg, who was not a Raymond Chandler fan, planned to continue with the third book in the series, The Man on the Balcony, but this production never went ahead. Widerberg accused Jörn Donner, the director of the Swedish Film Institute who had actually supported the idea, of putting him on a blacklist. In Cop Killer (1974) Lennart Kollberg writes his resignation, because of his socialist world view. At the end of the series, Beck is deeply ambivalent about remaining a policeman, because he fears that he is contributing to the violent nature of Swedish society rather than preventing it. The novel was published after Wahlöö's death in 1975, at the age of 48. Though a joint venture, the book was mostly written by Wahlöö, who was already very ill. After Wahlöö's death, Sjöwall found it difficult to write novels. With Åke Sjöwall she translated Robert B. Parker's Spenser novels into Swedish. Many of Sjöwall and Wahlöö's successors have adopted their critical approach of the abuses of state power, including Olov Svedelind, Kenneth Ahl (pseudonym of Lasse Strömstedt och Christer Dahl), Leif G.W. Persson, K. Arne Blom, Henning Mankell, and Stieg Larsson. Also the Chinese mystery writer Qiu Xiaolong, who has lived in the United States since the 1980s, has acknowledged his admiration of Martin Beck police mysteries.
Selected works with Per Wahlöö:
Other works:
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