True Detectives

While it’s never been a favorite genre of mine, Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö have permanently spoiled me on the police procedural. It simply cannot be done better than this series.

In the hands of lesser writers, The Laughing Policeman is an uninspired, formulaic mystery-thriller that would likely come with a heavy dose of toxic masculinity if it were written stateside. A person shoots up a bus full of people and then disappears. Cops work hours on ends, scouring the city’s underbelly. Discussions about women’s sexuality, mental health, and gun control permeate the novel. I can already hear my stomach churning at how bad such a book would be.

But these are not lesser writers. These two practically invented Scandinavian crime fiction. And they’re brilliant. This is a nuanced, layered mystery-within-a-mystery where the detectives are common, ordinary folk trying to figure things out, solving a hyper-violent crime in a society where hyper-violent crime is rare. Those discussions add layers of complexity to the tale. Our detectives aren’t heroes; they’re not your woke uncle. They’re men of varying life experiences trying to understand things through the prism of Swedish society. More often than not, they come off as confused or buffoonish. But their behavior is not to be emulated or written off; it’s to be critiqued.

What initially drew me to the Martin Beck series was the social commentary of the books. Sjöwall and Wahlöö are using the classic detective tale as a means of deconstructing Swedish society. This is book four and it’s the first one of the series where this truly comes off. Corners of Swedish society such as foreign relations, gender dynamics, criminal justice are put under the microscope for the reader to examine. The criticisms are stinting but not preachy.

Also, while there’s been humor in the other books, this is the first one that truly made me laugh out loud. The comedy here is dry and it made me think of how The Wire would use comedic moments to help make social tragedy palatable.

The book falls just short of greatness due to the ending, which I cannot criticize without spoiling. Let’s just say the resolution was a tad too tidy for me, though if you’ve read the other books, it follows the same motif of how police in these novels eventually catch criminals.

This is widely considered the best of the series and while I’m only four books in, I think the writers would be hard pressed to top it.