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 […]
Police, Adjective
My word, this feels like the police procedural to end all. For reasons I can and cannot spoil. I’m not a big fan of police procedurals. I prefer private eyes or unlikely detectives in the mold of Hitchcock. In real life, detective work doesn’t get solved by a Sherlock Holmes-type using inductive reasoning until the killer is revealed by sheer cleverness. Instead, it takes hard, grinding work, and if a case is solved, it’s usually due to a combination of labor and luck. If a […]
We’ll Always Have Budapest
Dang it! I really did not need another mystery series to get into. A few years ago, I read Roseanna, which is book one in Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö’s famed Martin Beck detective series. I liked it fine as a procedural but I’m not much of a fan of procedurals in general. Many complimented the series for the social justice aspect; it was an outsized influence for Henning Mankell in his popular Wallander series. But it just didn’t grab me. The case was interesting enough but it […]