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 […]
So dry
It’s interesting to read proto-Scandinavian murder mysteries. It’s also interesting to read the novels that inspired famous BBC representations of those novels. This is an early crime novel in the sense of crime novels being about the violence, and the world around that violence, and the world that created that violence. There’s an introduction to this novel written by Henning Mankell, who is as famous as could be in the world of Nordic crimes novels, and he talks about this being a novel about details, […]