History and Mystery Reads

Rating: 9/10 · Translated from Swedish

• Plot: Nine people are shot dead on a Stockholm bus one November night, and one of them is a young detective who wasn’t supposed to be there.
• Clues: Superbly buried: the dead detective’s private investigations, an old unsolved case, and the question of why he sat where he did.
• Reveal: Logical, satisfying and grimly human.
• Science bonus: Ballistics and a forensic reconstruction of the bus, down to who sat where, are central to cracking the case.

On a rainy November night in 1967, while police are busy with an anti-Vietnam War demonstration outside the American embassy, a gunman opens fire on a red double-decker bus. Nine people die. Among them is Åke Stenström, a young detective from Martin Beck’s own squad. Nobody knows why he was on the bus.

The Laughing Policeman is the fourth Martin Beck novel and the best of the series. The investigation is methodical, slow and deeply collaborative. Beck, Lennart Kollberg and the abrasive Gunvald Larsson each contribute different skills. Their frustrations, jokes and rivalries are as vivid as the case.

The breakthrough comes when the team realises Stenström had been secretly reinvestigating a cold case, the unsolved murder of a woman many years before. From there the novel becomes two investigations at once, and the way they fit together is superbly worked out.

Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s social critique is sharper here. The police force is under-resourced, the political climate is tense, and Stockholm is portrayed as prosperous, anonymous and cold. The authors’ Marxism shapes the analysis, but it is expressed through details and characters rather than lectures.

The book won the Edgar Award for Best Novel after its English publication, a rare honour for a translated work. It was later filmed in San Francisco with Walter Matthau.

The 9 reflects a near-perfect procedural. It misses a 10 only because a few passages of routine inquiry drag. For anyone who wants to understand why Scandinavian crime fiction became a global phenomenon, this is the place to start.