For a long time now I've avoided reading challenges, mainly because I was finding I never completed them. But I've always made an exception in the case of Simon and Kaggsy's year Clubs and have managed to contribute to them all so far. This time round it's 1965, a year within my own living memory, though the less we say about that the better. I checked out the lists on Wikipedia and almost went for Agatha Christie, but then this caught my eye, and though I'd read it before I really felt like it was time for a revisit to the gloomy Sweden of Detective Martin Beck. Roseanna is the first in a series of ten novels, written over a ten year period.
Unhappily married and in poor health - he smokes too much and has digestive problems, worsened by his coffee drinking - Martin Beck presides over the police station in a suburb of Stockholm. As the novel starts he and his team are called upon to investigate a murder. The body of a young woman has been found in the Gota Canal, but there is no means of establishing her identity or of tracking down the murderer. The only option for the police is to look into reports of missing persons. Starting in the immediate area, which produces no results, they gradually spread the net wider and wider and end up appealing to the police in the United States. Despite the difficulties in communicating - language barriers, difference in time zones, crackly telephone lines - they finally establish that the dead woman is Roseanna McGraw, a librarian from Lincoln Nebraska, who had been visiting Europe on holiday. They also work out that she had been a passenger on a cruise ship, and must have been killed and thrown overboard when the ship was docked. But with eighty-five passengers on board and another thirty or more crew, a lot of time and work is spent eliminating suspects. And after all this, the police draw a blank. Months go by in which nothing happens, but Martin never forgets Roseanna and his wish to solve the case. Finally almost by chance a suspect is identified, but though the police are pretty certain that he is to blame, proving it is well nigh impossible. Finally, though, he is trapped by some very unorthodox activity involving a female police officer. Six months after the murder the case is finally solved.
Sjowall and Walloo are frequently cited as the grandparents if Scandinavian noir, and certainly many authors there and elsewhere acknowledge their indebtedness to them. These are of course police procedurals, and much of their interest lies in the painstaking details of the day to day running of the police station - the tiredness, the tedium, sometimes relieved by train journeys to police stations in other parts of the country. In addition, as Henning Mankell points out in his introduction to the edition I read, Sjovall and Wahloo
wanted to use crime and criminal investigations as a mirror of Swedish society - and later on include the rest of the world. Their intent was never to write crime stories as a form of entertainment.....They realised that there was a huge, unexplored territory in which crime novels could form the framework for stories containing social criticism.
Certainly Sweden is portrayed here as a dark and depressing country: '7 January arrived and looked like 7 January. The streets were full of grey, frozen people without any money'. Although 1965 doesn't really sound all that long ago, the background detail makes one realise what a lot has changed, especially in the matter of communication -- those tedious, frequently incomprehensible transatlantic phone calls, and photos arriving slowly through the post! As for the character of Martin Beck himself, he is certainly the progenitor of countless flawed police officers who have put in an appearance since 1965, Mankell's Wallander being only one of them. He's been married for years but realised very early on that he actively disliked his wife, so his long hours at the police station are quite welcome, however exhausted they make him, though he regrets the fact that he never spends any time with his children. He is much troubled by digestive problems and frequently feels sick, especially after drinking coffee or on train rides, and eats a lot of unsuitable food when his appetite allows. But his patience and diligence make him a good policeman, and at one point he feels the need to remind himself of his virtues in the job:
'Remember that you have three of the most important virtues a policeman can have', he thought. 'You are stubborn and logical, and completely calm. You don't allow yourself to lose your composure and you act only professionally on a case, whatever it is. Work like repulsive, horrible, and bestial belong in the newspapers, not in your thinking. A murderer is a regular human being, only more unfortunate and maladjusted'.
I enjoyed this enormously even though I remembered more or less what was going to happen. I've read quite a few others in the series but feel ike returning again soon the the world of Martin and his associates. Thanks to Simon and Kaggsy for taking me back there.
