The Laughing Policeman

The Laughing Policeman is the only Swedish novel ever to have been made into a Hollywood movie. The film appeared in 1973, five years after the book's Swedish publication, and starred Walter Matthau, transposing the story to San Francisco. It's not hard to see what attracted Hollywood's attention. In an austerely realistic setting, Sjöwall and Wahloo begin their story with a tour de force. A bus crashes in a quiet Stockholm street On board are the driver and eight passengers. All of them are dead, except for one critically injured passenger. They have all been shot. One of the dead is Åke Stenström, a young police detective. He was off-duty but carrying a pistol. What was he doing on the bus? Was his presence there a coincidence? He was sitting next to a young nurse: did he know her? Was he having an affair with her? (Absurdly, the filmmakers dispel much of the mystery in advance by beginning not with the bus crash but with the events leading up to it, answering questions in the opening sequence that, in the book, are only answered late in the story.)

The first clues are equally tantalizing. When Sjöwall and Wahloo's regular detective, Martin Beck, searches Stenström's desk, he finds an envelope containing nude photographs of the dead man's girlfriend. Why did Stenström take them? 'To look at,'

Martin Beck comments. But why did he keep them on his desk and not at home? The injured passenger regains consciousness for a few seconds and gives the following interview, recorded by one of the detectives:

'Who did the shooting?’

'Dnrk'

'What did he look like?' 'Koleson:

Then he dies. The police listen to the tape over and over again. Are they meaningless syllables?

These are all, in their very different way, the sort of enigmas that Agatha Christie might have conceived, and there is no doubt that Sjöwall and Wahloo took pleasure in the conventions of classic crime fiction. They even based a later book on that most artificial of forms, the 'locked room mystery' (in The Locked Room, 1973). But the Golden Age detective stories of Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr had a semi-mythical setting in which the mystery is everything. Christie's Murder on the Orient Express is plainly based on the Lindbergh baby kidnapping, but the author has no interest in motivation or social context beyond what is necessary for the plot. For Hercule Poirot, a murder scene has the abstract interest of a crossword puzzle or a chess problem.

For the Swedish couple, however, the contrivances of detective fiction must always be grounded in reality. The discovery of the bus occurs only in chapter two of The Laughing Policeman - for this book was published in 1968 and chapter one describes, brilliantly and amusingly, an anti-Vietnam War demonstration outside the American embassy in central Stockholm. It is often pointed out that Sjöwall and Wahloo were Marxists, and, while the Martin Beck novels are far from being works of agitprop, they are embedded in history. A relevant quotation might be from the famous opening of Marx's essay, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte: 'Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances of their own choosing...'

It is these circumstances - unpredictable, messy, confusing -that define the fiction of Sjöwall and Wahloo. When Beck arrives at the bus, the incompetent police officers have already tramped all over the scene, obscuring evidence. Even the more competent policemen are for from being detached investigators. They bring their own problems and experiences into the investigation. Some are simply biased or politically reactionary. Others are from the provinces, in the north and the south, uncomfortable in the rough cosmopolitanism of Stockholm. Stenström's sexual explorations, as expressed in his photographs, infect Kollberg and his own relationship. One thinks of Ingmar Bergman's priests, distracted from their pastoral duties by their own spiritual problems. Sjöwall and Wahldoo's policemen are plagued by doubts about what it is to be policemen and what they are for: 'There's a latent hatred of police in all classes of society,' says one of them. 'And it needs only an impulse to trigger it off.'

Above all there is Martin Beck, the prototype of the brilliant tormented detective: Thomas Harris's Will Graham, Ian Rankin's John Rebus, Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander, and many others, owe their existence to him. Beck's malaise is all the more effective for being only partially articulated. There is almost a surfeit of causes: his weariness after years as a detective, his failures as a family man and, suffusing everything in all the books, a sense that something has gone profoundly wrong in social democratic Sweden, as if the crimes he faces are superficial symptoms of a much deeper historical crisis.

As a simple feat of storytelling, the arranging of events and the marshalling of clues, this is a marvellously accomplished piece, but it all occurs in a vividly evoked setting. This narrative doesn't exist in a capsule. There are always tendrils extending in other directions, suggesting a world elsewhere. Nor is this mere decoration. It is a part of the meaning of the book. The victims on the bus - the driver (a man from northern Sweden), a nurse, a widow, an Algerian immigrant worker, a philandering businessman with a pocketful of cash - form a snapshot of a society in transition, a society of secrets and hypocrisies and punctured myths. The investigation is an exercise in disenchantment, of poking beneath the surfaces of Swedish complacency and discovering what's beneath, and it's invariably something corrupt or depraved, whether racism, commercial exploitation or sexual perversion.

If there is any aspect of the book that has dated, it may be aspects of its sour portrayal of Swedish sexuality. Apart from Bergman films and Volvos, Sweden in the late sixties was most notorious or famous for its supposed sexual freedom. This was always more complicated and compromised than the legend suggested, and Sjöwall and Wahloo were certainly having none of it In a corrupt society, they suggest, sex cannot remain uncorrupted, and this novel features not just one but two "nymphomaniacs' - a term and a diagnosis that most of us probably now feel is itself a part of the sexual confusion and oppression that Sjöwall and Wahloo were attempting to expose.

But this is just a cavil. It's hard to think of any other thriller writers (apart from Simenon, perhaps) who can capture so much of a society in a couple of hundred pages and yet still hold true to the excitements of the thriller form. Because despite it all, despite politics that are as far from the reactionary Christie as it is possible to get, Sjöwall and Wahloo never lost their pleasure in the machinery of the whodunnit The book even, delightfully, has a superb twist on the very final page and unlike many twists it doesn't undercut what you've read before but deepens it, adds poignancy and darkness.

And, speaking as another married couple who write thrillers, we don't know which of them wrote what we can't see the joins, and we don't care.

Sean and Nicci French

On the evening of 13 November it was pouring in Stockholm. Martin Beck and Kollberg sat over a game of chess in the latter's flat not far from the underground station of Skärmarbrink in the southern suburbs. Both were off duty insomuch as nothing special had happened during the last few days.

Martin Beck was bad at chess but played all the same. Kollberg had a daughter who was just over two months old. On this particular evening he was forced to baby-sit, and Martin Beck on the other hand had no wish to go home before it was absolutely necessary. The weather was abominable. Driving curtains of rain swept over the rooftops, pattering against the windows, and the streets lay almost deserted; the few people to be seen evidently had urgent reasons to be out on such a night

Outside the American embassy on Strandvägen and along the streets leading to it, 412 policemen were struggling with about twice as many demonstrators. The police were equipped with tear-gas bombs, pistols, whips, truncheons, cars, motorcycles, shortwave radios, battery megaphones, riot dogs and hysterical horses. The demonstrators were armed with a letter and cardboard signs, which grew more and more sodden in the pelting rain. It was difficult to regard them as a homogeneous group, for the crowd comprised every possible kind of person, from thirteen-year-old schoolgirls in jeans and duffel coats and dead-serious political students to agitators and professional trouble-makers, and at least one eighty-five-year-old woman artist with a beret and a blue silk umbrella. Some strong common motive had induced them to defy both the rain and whatever else was in store. The police, on the other hand, by no means comprised the force's elite. They had been mustered from every available precinct in town, but every policeman who knew a doctor or was good at dodging had managed to escape this unpleasant assignment There remained those who knew what they were doing and liked it, and those who were considered cocky and who were far too young and inexperienced to try and get out of it; besides, they hadn't a clue as to what they were doing or why they were doing it. The horses reared up, chewing their bits, and the police fingered their holsters and made charge after charge with their truncheons. A small girl was bearing a sign with the memorable text: DO YOUR DUTY! KEEP FUCKING AND MAKE MORE POLICE! Three thirteen-stone patrolmen flung themselves at her, tore the sign to pieces and dragged her into a squad car, where they twisted her arms and pawed her breasts. She had turned thirteen on this very day and had not yet developed any.

Altogether more than fifty persons were seized. Many were bleeding. Some were celebrities, who were not above writing to the papers or complaining on the radio and television. At the sight of them, the sergeants on duty at the local police station had a fit of the shivers and showed them the door with apologetic smiles and stiff bows. Others were less well treated during the inevitable questioning. A mounted policeman had been hit on the head by an empty bottle and someone must have thrown it

The operation was in the charge of a high-ranking police officer trained at a military school He was considered an expert on keeping order and he regarded with satisfaction the utter chaos he had managed to achieve.

In the apartment at Skärmarbrink, Kollberg gathered up the chessmen, jumbled them into the wooden box and shut the sliding lid with a smack. His wife had come home from her evening course and gone straight to bed.

'You'll never learn this,' Kollberg said plaintively.

'They say you need a special gift for it,' Martin Beck replied gloomily. 'Chess sense I think it's called.'

Kollberg changed the subject

'I bet there's a right to-do at Strandvägen this evening,' he said. 'I expect so. What's it all about?'

'They were going to hand a letter over to the ambassador,' Kollberg said. 'A letter. Why don't they post it?' 'It wouldn't cause so much fuss.'

'No, but all the same, it's so stupid it makes you ashamed.' Yes,' Martin Beck agreed.

He had put on his hat and coat and was about to go. Kollberg got up quickly.

'I'll come with you,' he said. 'Whatever for?' 'Oh, to stroll around a little.' 'In this weather?'

'I like rain,' Kollberg said, climbing into his dark-blue poplin coat

'Isn't it enough for me to have a cold?' Martin Beck said.

Martin Beck and Kollberg were policemen. They belonged to the homicide squad. For the moment they had nothing special to do and could, with relatively clear consciences, consider themselves free.

Downtown no policemen were to be seen in the streets. The old lady outside the central station waited in vain for a beat officer to come up to her, salute, and smilingly help her across the street A person who had just smashed the glass of a showcase with a brick had no need to worry that the rising and falling wail from a patrol car would suddenly interrupt his doings.

The police were busy.

A week earlier the police commissioner had said in a public statement that many of the regular duties of the police would have to be neglected because they were obliged to protect the American ambassador against letters and other things from people who disliked Lyndon Johnson and the war in Vietnam.

Detective Inspector Lennart Kollberg didn't like Lyndon Johnson and the war in Vietnam either, but he did like strolling about the city when it was raining.

At eleven o'clock in the evening it was still raining and the demonstration could be regarded as broken up.

At the same time eight murders and one attempted murder were committed in Stockholm.

Rain, he thought, looking out of the window dejectedly. November darkness and rain, cold and pelting. A forerunner of the approaching winter. Soon it would start to snow.

Nothing in town was very attractive just now, especially not this street with its bare trees and large, shabby blocks of flats. A bleak esplanade, misdirected and wrongly planned from the outset It led nowhere in particular and never had, it was just there, a dreary reminder of some grandiose city plan, begun long ago but never finished. There were no well-lit shop windows and no people on the pavements. Only big, leafless trees and street lamps, whose cold white light was reflected by puddles and wet car roofs.