The Locked Room: A Martin Beck Police Mystery (8) (Martin Beck Police Mystery Series)

I came across this series of books on Radio 4 and knew it would be a great audio book to listen to on a long car journey, it didn't disappoint me.

Michael Connolly writes in his introduction to the Kindle edition of this novel that “The Martin Beck books tell us so much more than just how a crime is solved. . . [T]hey 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.” And that is certainly true of The Locked Room. In fact, of all the eight novels I’ve read so far in the series, this book most boldly lays bare the authors’ leftist perspective on Swedish society. The Locked Room advances the continuing story of Martin Beck and his colleagues in the National Homicide Squad. But throughout the book is a running commentary on the incompetence and unpopularity of the Swedish police, the deficiencies of Sweden’s welfare state, and the sad consequences of capitalism.A Marxist view of Swedish societyFor example, here are Sjöwall and Wahlöö describing the motivation of two career criminals. “Big-time criminals profit from everything—from poisoning nature and whole populations and then pretending to repair their ravages by inappropriate medicines; from purposely turning whole districts of cities into slums in order to pull them down and then rebuild others in their place. The new slums, of course, turn out to be far more deleterious to people’s health than the old ones had been. But above all they don’t get caught.” There’s truth at the core of this diatribe. But it’s far over the top.Later, Martin Beck muses “that the law has been designed to protect certain social classes and their dubious interests, and otherwise seems mostly to consist of loopholes.” The Marxist influence could hardly be clearer.The police come off badlyThe National Police Commissioner is, apparently, a politician without prior policing experience. He’s concerned, above all, with secrecy. “Don’t let anything get out,” he admonishes at every turn. And he has good reason to fear exposure. Like New York during the same era, Stockholm is in the grips of a crime wave—and the police have proven unable to do anything about it.Although the force is severely underfunded, the National Homicide Squad does better than most. But its budget is far outstripped by the security police, a rabidly anti-Communist outfit that follows leads from fascist organizations to pursue suspected leftists and ignores violent action on the Right. (This is historically consistent with the pro-Nazi stance of the Swedish police and security services in World War II.)The district attorney is obsessed with bank robberies, of which there have been many in recent years. Two of Martin Beck’s closest colleagues are detailed to his special squad to pursue a gang of bank robbers who have eluded the DA for years. They end up stumbling into a bungled operation that’s reminiscent of a Keystone Cops episode.The police are so unpopular that the force has great difficulty recruiting new officers. Now anyone, including the “retarded,” can gain access to a badge. And the proof of this comment by an embittered officer is in one of the members of the DA’s special squad who appears to have an IQ of about 60.Now about that “locked room” mysteryIn this novel, as in all the previous entries in the series, the men of the National Homicide Squad are involved in two different investigations. Two of them pursue the bank robbers on assignment to the DA’s office. Martin Beck goes solo on the other.Martin Beck has been on leave for months, recuperating from a gunshot wound to his chest. To ease his way back into the force, his superiors assign him a seemingly unsolvable case that has gone cold. (It’s a way to keep him busy without getting back into the action.) A retired dockworker, essentially barricaded in his rented room, has died of a gunshot wound. The investigating officer, who is notoriously incompetent, has concluded the man killed himself—even though there is neither a gun nor a spent cartridge in sight. Spending weeks of patient investigation into the case, Martin Beck does solve it at length. But prepare yourself for an ironic surprise. In the end, it’s all very, very funny.An awkward translation?Unlike the previous novels in the Martin Beck series, The Locked Room reads as though one of the two coauthors did most of the writing—the more doctrinaire of the couple. That seems apparent not only from the numerous passages lamenting the sorry condition of Swedish society and the incompetence of the Swedish police but from the dialog as well. Many of the conversations come across as awkward, something I hadn’t noticed in the pair’s earlier work. Now, perhaps the translator was at fault. A number of different translators worked on this series, and the man who translated The Locked Room was not responsible for any of the other books.

This is the eighth novel in the ten-book Swedish police procedural and mystery series written in the 1960's and '70's. ( I first became acquainted with them as a college student in 1974.) The main protagonist, senior homicide investigator Martin Beck, has just returned to duty after being shot in the chest the year before when he attempted to arrest a mentally unbalanced former policeman who was on a shooting rampage in 1971. Beck has been pronounced "fully" recovered by the medicos, but he has recurring nightmares about the event and can't believe he's still alive.Homicide Inspector Beck is given a case to review in which a man was found dead a month or two after being shot in the heart in a locked room with no firearm being found. The initial investigation was atrociously sloppy. Meanwhile, a Stockholm bank was robbed by a young woman who shot and killed a bank customer during the holdup, and the police force is scrambling to find the bank robber. Most of the city (and police force) is on summer vacation and things are chaotic to say the least. Another fine installment in this series.

Each of these reissues of the 1960s-70s Swedish crime series by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo has an introduction by a current-day crime fiction writer. This eighth in the ten-part series is introduced by Michael Connelly. In his opening paragraph, he assures readers that, if they are about to "hop aboard" and read this book, they are in for a great ride. He did not lie. This is my favorite Martin Beck book so far.It has all the elements that I find so interesting about the series. Sjowall and Wahloo use the vehicle of the detective novel to examine Swedish society, and, in a larger context, Western society, of the late twentieth century. They do it with the clear-eyed irony that such an endeavor demands and they achieve their goal with a wry humor. These mysteries are always meticulously plotted and, while they examine how crime happens, they also manage to explore how a city, a country, or a society can be complicit in those crimes.The writers show the police at their incompetent worst and yet they manage to also convey the doggedness with which these ordinary men - and they are almost all men - pursue the solving of crimes. Even when they quite literally don't have a clue, they keep pushing, probing, poking through the detritus left by criminals until they come up with some sort of a solution. Even if, as in this case, it may not be the correct solution.The start of this tale is all about a bank robbery. Stockholm is experiencing a rash of bank robberies in 1972, and so, in late June, when this one takes place, it seems a part of this epidemic, possibly planned and committed by the same "gang." One thing is different. In this case, one of the bank's customers tried to be a hero and accosted the robber - who promptly shot and killed him.Meanwhile, we learn that Martin Beck, who was shot and seriously wounded at the end of the last book, is just about to return to work after many months of recovery. When he gets back on the job, he is assigned a locked room mystery.A corpse was found in an apartment in a room that had all windows and doors locked from the inside. The corpse had lain there for a couple of months before being discovered. When it finally was examined, it was discovered that it had been shot, but there was no weapon in the room. It is a mystery that will require all of Martin Beck's famous intuition, as well as his dogged persistence, to solve.The main priority of the Stockholm police, however, is solving the rash of bank robberies. In pursuit of that goal, the special team assigned mounts an operation which turns into a scene straight out of one of Peter Sellers' old Inspector Clouseau movies. It is laugh-out-loud, rolling-on-the-floor funny and still gives me chuckles every time I think of it.In the beginning, it seems that the "locked room" corpse and the bank robberies have no links, but, as Martin Beck, in his solo investigation, runs down every lead, it finally becomes apparent that there is a point where the two cases overlap. Finding the evidence to prove it may be a different matter.This story has great momentum. There is never a dull moment or a false step by the writers. The action never lags, and it makes the reader look forward with keen anticipation to the next entry in the series, while at the same time regretting that there are only two left. It really is that good.Yes, definitely my favorite so far.

This book is a delight on so many levels, I hardly know where to start.There are two investigations afoot. A special squad is looking into a rash of bank robberies. And Martin Beck is working by himself on a classic locked room mystery.The bank robbery inquiry is headed by a madly exuberant district attorney and staffed by detectives we know and love from previous books: most notably Beck's able associates Kollberg and Larsson, but also a trigger-happy junior. With this promising crew, Sjöwall and Wahlöö deliver their most hilarious scenes ever.Meanwhile Martin Beck is just back from fifteen months of recuperation from a bullet to the chest. The locked room mystery is a kind of therapeutic welcome-back gift from the homicide squad. It's a puzzle. A pensioner who locked and bolted himself into his room, and locked or taped both windows, has been shot to death. But no weapon, bullet or casing can be found.At this point in his life, Beck is also living in a locked room. Sleeping alone, eating alone, listening to music alone. Happily his new case is engrossing, requiring both brainwork and fieldwork. And it may give Beck the key to his own locked room.The Locked Room is a real showcase for the comic genius of Sjöwall & Per Wahlöö. It's all here - from subtle ironies to downright slapstick. Even the plot is a kind of joke with ludicrous twists and turns and quite a number of amusing characters. The technical fiascos rival the human errors.You could read this book on its own with great enjoyment. But reading it in the context of the whole series is even better.