The First Three Titles: Martin Beck

Martin Beck is a fictional Swedish police detective who is the main character in a series of ten novels by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö collectively titled The Story of a Crime. The stories are frequently referred to as the Martin Beck stories. All of the novels have been adapted to films between 1967 and 1994, six of which featured Gösta Ekman as Martin Beck. Between 1997 and 2018 there have also been 38 films (some only broadcast on television) based on the characters, with Peter Haber as Martin Beck.

I've read the first three volumes as follows:

Roseanna Book 1

Roseanna is the first book in the hugely acclaimed Martin Beck series: the novels that shaped the future of Scandinavian crime fiction and influenced writers from Stieg Larrson to Jo Nesbo, Henning Mankell to Lars Kepplar.

On a July afternoon, the body of a young woman is dredged from a lake in southern Sweden. Raped and murdered, she is naked, unmarked and carries no sign of her identity. As Detective Inspector Martin Beck slowly begins to make the connections that will bring her identity to light, he uncovers a series of crimes further reaching than he ever would have imagined and a killer far more dangerous. How much will Beck be prepared to risk to catch him?

The Man Who Went Up In Smoke Book 2
The second book in the classic Martin Beck detective series from the 1960s - the novels that shaped the future of Scandinavian crime writing.

Hugely acclaimed, the Martin Beck series were the original Scandinavian crime novels and have inspired the writings of Stieg Larsson, Henning Mankell and Jo Nesbo. Written in the 1960s, 10 books completed in 10 years, they are the work of Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo - a husband and wife team from Sweden. They follow the fortunes of the detective Martin Beck, whose enigmatic, taciturn character has inspired countless other policemen in crime fiction; without his creation Ian Rankin's John Rebus or Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander may never have been conceived. The novels can be read separately, but are best read in chronological order, so the reader can follow the characters' development and get drawn into the series as a whole. 'The Man Who Went Up in Smoke' starts as Martin Beck has just begun his holiday: an August spent with his family on a small island off the coast of Sweden. But when a neighbour gets a phone call, Beck finds himself packed off to Budapest, where a boorish journalist has vanished without a trace. Instead of passing leisurely sun-filled days with his children, Beck must troll about in the Eastern Europe underworld for a man nobody knows, with the aid of the coolly efficient local police, who do business while soaking at the public baths - and at the risk of vanishing along with his quarry.

The Man on the Balcony

Published in 1967 this third instalment sees a newly promoted Detective Superintendent Martin Beck setting a much darker tone than previous books.

The opening description of a nondescript, forty-year old man sitting on his apartment balcony and watching Stockholm waking up brings shivers to the spine as the traffic builds and children make their way to school feeling fairly ambivalent about the whole scene playing out under his watchful eye.

Tempers amongst the police force are frayed as a serious of vicious mugging on pensioners at the city parks is running riot, with the eighth occurrence in the last two weeks and no closer to finding the perpetrator. This man who is charged with tackling this one man crime wave is Detective Inspector Gunvald Larsson who comments that "if someone doesn't grab him soon" the perpetrator could end up taking a life. That "someone" being either the police or a civil patrol, and Larsson seems largely indifferent to just whom it is, one of many times that society seems to sympathise with vigilante action in this novel. On the night of the eighth mugging an altogether more sinister horror awaits, as the body of a young girl who has been the victim of sexual interference and assault is found dead. Jaded before even beginning the investigation, Kollberg is faced with breaking the news to the mother of the child, just as his own wife is due to give birth. When a second girl is discovered under similar circumstances it takes a tip off to bring the mugger into the police fold and establish that he has seen the murderer. Along with a three-year-old boy who is also believed to have witnessed the murderer, the details they provide bring a flash of inspiration from Martin Beck.

My thoughts:

These were 3 easy reads, not long or overly convoluted but straightforward crime detective narratives.  Written in the 60s the accessories of detection and sources available to the police which we take for granted today: the internet, databases of personal information, previous criminal history, mobiles phones and DNA techniques inevitably lead to plots which are less convoluted and the methods employed by the police are less sophisticated and immediate - for example mobile phone communication between detecting personnel which accelerates the action.  In some ways this lack of sophistication and technology adds to the tension and the reader is drawn to keep turning the pages, and delaying the moment when the book must be put aside in favour of a more pressing  task.  These are books to take on a 'plane, or on a beach.