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The Laughing Policeman by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo, translated from the Swedish by Alan Blair
Orion Crime Masterworks No.9
0752847724
£6.99
Wife and husband Maj Sjowall (1935-) and Per Wahloo (1926-1975) decided that together they would write ten crime novels, and together – over the next ten years – they wrote ten crime novels.
These were constructed with the openly Marxist intention of using the crime novel as 'a scalpel cutting open the belly of an ideologically pauperized and morally debatable so-called welfare state of the bourgeois type'.
I don't know about you, but this has me cheering from the sidelines straight away. It's not that I require crime fiction to have ulterior motives. I'm quite happy with action for action's sake. And, in effect, Sjowall and Wahloo's aims have been just as efficiently achieved by Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain. (Marxists, these two may not have been; scalpels, they were.) But ulterior motives do often warp the form of novels in fascinating ways.
The Laughing Policeman is not the first but the forth of the ten book series. If you are obsessive about this sort of thing, then you should begin with Roseanna (1965). However, The Laughing Policeman is by far the best-known of Sjowall and Wahloo's novels. This is mainly due to the 1973 film of the same title, starring Walter Matthau. Tagline: 'Eight people know who the killer is – and they're all dead!'
The novel is named after a 1923 music hall song recorded by Charles Jolly. Presumably Sjowall and Wahloo chose this title for reasons of irony. There is very little laughter in their world, and when it does come, it is belated and bitter. Policemen are very much their subject, though.
On the evening of the thirteenth of November it was pouring in Stockholm. Martin Beck and Kollberg sat over a game of chess in the latter's apartment not far from the subway station of Skarmarbrink in the southern suburbs. Both were off duty insomuch as nothing special had happened during the last few days.
Martin Beck is the main character of the ten book series. If I asked you, you could probably describe him to me – even if you've never read one of these novels. He is unhappily married, world-weary, dogged and – beneath it all – deeply committed to justice. Within the genre of downbeat detectives, his main idiosyncrasy is probably that he doesn't have a drink problem.
It wouldn't be unfair to describe The Laughing Policeman as a conventional police procedural. The pace at which the mystery is unravelled, and the story unfolds, is very gradual indeed. There is much bad weather. There are many interviews which seem to yield little information that wasn't known before. There is a powerfully Swedish despondancy among the detectives. But the wonderful thing about crime fiction is that it allows the writer, or writers, to depict the most mundane people, places, objects and events – and all with the promise that, by the end of the book, something will be achieved. The slog will have been worth it. (The same thing follows, perhaps to an even greater extent, with the spy thriller. George Smiley is transfixingly dull.)
Jim Thompson, whose name you should know, once said, 'There are thirty-two ways to write a story, and I've used every one, but there is only one plot – things are not as they seem.'
The crime around which The Laughing Policeman centres itself is not as it seems.
The book includes a transcript of a police press conference:
QUESTION: When was the bus found?
ANSWER: About ten minutes past eleven last night.
Q: By whom?
A: A man in the street who then stopped a radio patrol car.
Q: How many persons were in the bus?
A: Eight.
Q: Were they all dead?
A: Yes.
As it turns out, they have all been shot. And one of them, Ake Stenstrom, was 'detective sub-inspector on the homicide squad and one of Martin Beck's youngest colleagues'. At the time he was shot, Ake Stenstrom was carrying a service pistol.
Perhaps the Marxist programme of Sjowall and Wahloo comes out in the number of victims. Marxism is the politics of the mass; this is a mass murder. The investigation, going from one victim to another, becomes a kind of syncopated journey through different levels of Swedish society.
Much is achieved by a prose style which is resolutely, almost comically, underachieving.
The red doubledecker bus seemed to stop for a moment in the middle of the turn. Then it drove straight across the street, climbed the sidewalk and burrowed halfway through the wire fence separating Norra Stationsgatan from the desolate freight yard on the other side.
Then it pulled up.
The engine died but the headlights were still on, and so was the lighting inside.
The misty windows went on gleaming cozily in the dark and cold.
And the rain lashed against the metal roof.
The time was three minutes past eleven on the evening of the thirteenth of November, 1967.
In Stockholm.
I am fascinated by the idea of people writing novels either in pairs or small groups. How is the labour divided? Do you just edit one another's work down to some kind of uniformity? Or is Writer A responsible for plotting whilst Writer B does the actual word-spinning?
Sjowall and Wahloo leave very few clues of their own behind. The Laughing Policeman speaks with a clear and familiar voice. Yet there is a kind of anonymity about it, which, in Marxist terms, makes it a wonderfully orthodox achievement.
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