Maj Sjowall - The Locked Room

maj sjowall (1935-) and per wahloo (1926-1975) were husband and wife. They were both committed Marxists and, between 1965 and 1975, they collaborated on ten mysteries featuring Martin Beck, including The Terrorists, The Fire Engine that Disappeared and The Locked Room. Four of the books have been made into films, most famously The Laughing Policeman, which starred Walter Matthau.

From the reviews of the Martin Beck series:

'First class' Daily Telegraph

'One of the most authentic, gripping and profound collections of police procedural ever accomplished'

michael connelly

'Hauntingly effective storytelling' New York Times

'There's just no question about it: the reigning King and
Queen of mystery fiction are Maj Sjowall and her husband
PerWaloo The National Observer

'Sjowall/Wahloo are the best writers of police procedural in
the world' Birmingham Post

Also by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo

Roseanna

The Man Who Went Up in Smoke

The Man on the Balcony

The Laughing Policeman

Murder at the Savoy

The Fire Engine that Disappeared

The Abominable Man

Cop Killer

The Terrorists

MAJ SJOWALL AND PER WAHLOO

The Locked Room

Translated from the Swedish by Paul Britten Austin

HARPER PERENNIAL

London, New York, Toronto and Sydney

Harper Perennial An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 77-85 Fulham Palace Road Hammersmith London W6 8J6

This edition published by Harper Perennial 2007

This translation first published by Random House Inc, New York, in 1973 Originally published in Sweden by P. A. Norstedt Sonders Forlag

Copyright Maj Sjdwall and Per Wahloo 1972 PS Section Richard Shephard 2007

PS is a trademark of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo assert the moral right to be identified as the authors of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

ISBN 978-0-00-724298-6

Set in Minion by Palimpsest Book Production Limited, Grangemouth, Stirlingshire

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Gays Ltd, St Ives plc

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publishers.

This book is sold subject to the condition mat it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

INTRODUCTION

What I don't like about writing an introduction is that you can't give anything away. You can only tease. You can say to the reader that you are in for a great ride, a great set of characters and a great story but you can't really make your case. You don't want to ruin it for the reader, so you can't exactly say why. So an introduction is sort of a 'trust me' proposition. I am here to tell you that if you are about to hop aboard and ride this story, then you are in for a great ride. Trust me.

I first took this ride about thirty years ago. A child of the movies and television, I have come to most of the masters of crime fiction through the visual medium. I read Raymond Chandler, Ross MacDonald and Joseph Wambaugh after seeing their work on the screen first In each case I found the written stories that spawned the screen stories to be much deeper, more detailed and more gripping as they took the reader to the place no movie or television show can go; inside a character's thoughts.

So too was the case with the work of Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo. The movie came first. My father and I both loved cop flicks. We went together often. One night in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, we went to see The Laughing Policeman with Walter Matthau and Bruce Dern. I didn't know it was based on a book until I saw the credits. I liked the movie, with the deeply brooding Detective Martin played by Matthau and the more reactive, loose cannon Detective Larsen played by Dern.

Not long after, I bought the book and quickly learned that the original story was not set in San Francisco, California, but in Stockholm, Sweden, and that the film's Detective Jake Martin was actually Detective Martin Beck in the book. No matter, I had invested. I read the book and there begun one of the best lessons a writer in waiting could ever have. In the next several years I moved from book to book in the Martin Beck series. I found it to be one of the most authentic, gripping and profound collection of police procedurals ever accomplished.

Sjowall and Wahloo set out to write a ten book, ten year glimpse of Swedish society, using the detective novel as the magnifying glass through which they would conduct their examination. They achieved their goal with great mastery. As a young reader with the intention - hope of writing crime novels someday, there were no better teachers when it came to showing how the detective story could rise above mere entertainment to the point of holding a mirror up to ourselves and the societies we build. Their work constantly reminds me of something the great writer Richard Price once said when questioned about his repeated forays into the realms of crime and detection. He said that he liked writing about detectives because when you circle around a murder long enough, you get to know a city. Long before he said that, Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo knew it and practised it. The Martin Beck books tell us so much more than just how a crime is solved. Beautifully structured, textured and rendered, they tell us how a crime happens and how a city, country and society can often be complicit. They take us beneath the surface. They tell it like it is. Though the series now ages past thirty years, there is both a timeliness and timelessness to the books that make them just as important now as the days they first came out of the bindery.

The Locked Room is flat out one of my favourites in the series.

I am blown away by the authors' wonderful and original take on a standard mystery contraption - a locked room murder. I am in awe of the novel as a showcase of Martin Beck at his brooding best The authors avoid the norms by weaving two seemingly separate investigations through the book; the story of a bank robbery gone bad and the story of Beck's investigation into, what appears to be an unsolvable case, a man found shot to death in a room with the door and window locked. The case has been all but given up on until the detective returns to the job after recovering from wounds received in an earlier story. As he deals with his physical and mental recovery he works the locked room case over like a child works on a loose tooth with his tongue.

From the standpoint of a writer who has some experience attempting such things, there is no finer example of how to do it. Sjowall and Wahloo do it with completely convincing detail, humour and that most important ingredient; momentum. The book never lags. It never fails to keep the reader in his seat

All the while the book carries the vivid imagery of Stockholm and its underbelly of crime that Beck traverses. I read this book long before I ever visited Stockholm but the sense of the city, its smells, its sounds, its hidden dangers and beauties are vibrantly alive. The city is as much a character in the book as any person who appears in its pages.

What's more, the book carries a dark irony: the idea of justice in which we are all guilty of something, and if we are not punished for the crimes we have committed then we are punished for those we have not. It is a daring proposition and one I have seen in a number of other books. But I have not seen it played out so well as in these pages.