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Per Wahlöö (1926-1975) | |
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Swedish writer and journalist, who published with his wife Maj Sjöwall the
widely translated books of
Martin Beck and his colleagues at the Central Bureau of
Investigation in Stockholm. The series was an attempt to take a
critical, Marxian look at the Swedish society within the framework of a
detective novel.
The critic and awarded mystery writer H.R.F. Keating selected the first
volume, Roseanna
(1965), in 1987 for his list of the one hundred best crime and mystery
novels. All of the Martin Beck books have been filmed. In addtion, a
number TV films have been based on the characters the couple created. "Elofsson was following the normal procedure. He had grabbed the boy's jacket with both hands. The next step was to pull the victim closer and drive his right knee into the man's groin. And that would take care of that. The same way he had done it so many times before. Without firearms." (from Cop Killer, translated from the Swedish by Thomas Teal, 1975) Per Wahlöö was born in Göteborg, the son of Waldemar and Karin (Svensson) Wahlöö. After graduating from the University of Lund in 1946, he worked as a journalist, covering criminal and social issues for a number of newspapers and magazines. In the 1950s Wahlöö was engaged in radical political causes, activities that resulted in his deportation from Franco's Spain in 1957. Before becoming a full-time writer, he wrote a number of television and radio plays, and was managing editor of several magazines. As a novelist Wahlöö made his debut with Himmelsgeten
(1959), which was followed by others dealing with abuses of power and
the dark side of the society. Wahlöö's science fiction thrillers
include Mord på 31 (1965, The Thirty-first Floor), which was
filmed as Kamikaze 1989, starring the director Rainer Werner Fassbinder in his final screen
role. The story was set in a futuristic Germany. Stälspranget
(1968, Steep Spring) depicted a deadly plague in an unnamed European
country. The
protagonist in these both novels was Chief Inspector Jensen. Generalerna
(1965), a trial novel set in a military state, reflected Wahlöö's views
on dictatorship. Lastbilen (1962) was published in the United
States as A Necessary Action and in Britain as The Lorry.
Uppdraget (1963), set in a Latin American country, gained an
international success. It was translated into English under the title The
Assignment. Wahlöö's first work as a scriptwriter was Flygplan saknas
(1965, Aircraft Missing), co-written with Arvid Rundberg, directed by
Per Gunvall, and starring Olle
Johansson, Birgit Nordin and Runar Martholm. With the veteran film
director Arne Mattsson he made three films between 1965 and 1967,
beginning from an adaptation of Jan Ekström's crime novel Morianerna.
British censors cut two minutes from the original release, which
contains nudity, voyerism, a psychopath, and a rape of maid. In
1961 Wahlöö met Maj Sjöwall when they were working for
magazines published by the same company. At that time Wahlöö was
married, Sjöwall was a single parent of a daughter and already twice
divorced. Both were members of the Communist Party. Although Wahlöö
didn't want to cheat his wife, they began to meet after work, and
eventually became lovers, but never officially married. Until 1969, the
couple lived in Stockholm, but they kept contact with
the KRW (Kronkvist-Rooke-Wahlöö) group from Malmö, where they lived and
worked from 1969. Their carefully planned crime novel series, with the undertitle "roman om ett brott" (the story of a crime), was created in the evenings, after the children had been put to bed. Starting from Roseanna (1965), the project ended ten years and ten books later with Terroristerna (1975). According to Wahlöö, their intention was to "use the crime novel as a scalpel cutting open the belly of the ideological pauperized and morally debatable so-called welfare state of the bourgeois type." ('Wahlöö, Per (1926-75 and Maj Sjövall (1935-)' by Bo Lundin, in Twentieth-Century Crime and Mystery Writers, second edition, edited by John M. Reilly, 1985, p. 947) The narrative focused on realistic police routine and teamwork. The first three novels, Roseanna,
The Man Who Went Up in Smoke (1966), and The Man on the Balcony (1967),
were straightforward police procedural novels, written in reportal, spare style, similar to that of Georges Simenon. They introduced
the central characters – the solid, methodical detective Martin Beck
with failing marriage, ex-paratrooper Lennart Kollberg, who hates
violence and refuses to carry a gun, Gunvald Larsson, a Mike
Hammer-type in police forces and a
drop-out from high society – Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848) by
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: "Just as, therefore, at an earlier
period, a section of the nobility went over to the bourgeoisie, so now
a portion of the bourgeoisie goes over to the proletariat"– Einar Rönn from the rural north of Sweden,
and patrolmen Kristiansson and Kvant, the necessary comic pair. Beck
considers himself "stubborn and logical, and completely calm". He lives
in a small apartment in Stockholm with his wife, Inga, and two
children. In the following books Beck's relationship with his wife
deteriorates, and he begins an affair with the liberal Rhea Nilsen.
Larsson's character, played by Mikael Persbrandt in TV films, made a
gradual change from a misogynist into a sensitive man with a heart
of gold deep down. Roseanna, a story of
rape-murder of an American girl, Roseanna Mc Graw, whose body in found
in a Swedish canal, was
not an immediate success. Some reviewers felt that the novel was too
dark and
brutal, but its publication in English translation in 1967 sparked the
interest of a worldwide audience. "A fine example of the police
procedural," said H.R.F. Keating. "So, as one puts the book down, one
is apt to think a good story, and interesting, but also, in the words
of the newspaper advertisement, 'all human life is there'." ('Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö: Roseanna,' in Crime & Mystery: The 100 Best Books by
H.R.F. Keating, 1987, p. 138) Until The Story of a Crimeseries
Swedish detective novels had
been apolitical, conservative or occasionally liberal, but Sjöwall and
Wahlöö
managed to revive interest in a genre generally overlooked by leftist
intellectuals. Readers were ready to accept their new
approach, the introduction of political ideas as part of crime fiction.
The theme of class conflict was not defined right from the beginning,
but its weight grew step-by-step, in the context of social problems the
novel exposed.In the final volume the foundations of the welfare state start to shake. The murder of the
prime minister signals the
end of the Social-Democratic project of Folkhemmet (the people's home).
The Laughing Policeman (1968), about the investigation
of the murder of eight occupants of a Stockholm bus, was adapted
to screen in 1973, directed by Stuart Rosenberg, starring
Walter Matthau, Bruce Dern, and Lou Gossett. "Police movies so often
depend on sheer escapist action that it's fun to find a good one," said
Roger Ebert in his review. ('The Laughing Policeman'
by Roger Ebert, December 24, 1973, RogerEbert.com) Swedish
critics were unanimous in that the
film had very little to do with the novel, and there was little left of
Sjöwall and Wahlöö's original point of view. The story, set in San
Francisco, shared its Bay area locale with Dirty Harry
(1971), but was otherwise more downbeat. By coincidence, Bo Widerberg,
who made a film adaptation of the novel The Abominable Man,
entitled Mannen på taket
(1976), had lived in Malmö in the
same building than Wahlöö's first wife Inger Wahlöö. The large-scale
action scenes were shot in everyday settings, to illuminate what it
means when violence takes place in the midst of a supposedly safe
community
"A little boy riding a creaking bicycle approaches two gunned-down
police officers and asks why they are lying in the steet. A girl
screams in terror when she catches sight of a couple of wounded
policemen. Were it not for one of their blood-soaked hands gleaming
scarlet red in the sunshine, one could think they were resting." ('The Criminal and Society in Mannen på taket' by Daniel Brodén,
in Swedish Film: An Introduction and
a Reader, edited by Mariah Larsson & Anders Marklund, 2005,
p. 203)
The killer is a former police officer, himself a victim of the
conditions of the society. Politically, Widerberg was a social democrat, and his
view of the society was not as acid as it was in the book. At the end of The Locked Room (1972), Sjöwall and
Wahlöö show their sympathy towards a bank robber; however, they abhor
sexual violence. The novel nods to the puzzles of John Dickson Carr. In
Cop Killer (1974)
Lennart Kollberg writes
his resignation: a socialist, he don't want to work for the system anymore. The suspected cop
killer of the title, a teenager in a stolen car, is chased across Sweden. Especially in the
last novel, The Terrorists,
police officers, and criminals doing their own thing, at the mercy of forces they cannot control. – Manifesto of the Communist Party
(1848) by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: "Constant revolutionising of
production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions,
everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch
from all earlier ones. . . . All that is solid melts into air, all that
is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober
senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind."– The authors openly side with Rebecka Lind, "the novel's holy fool and
sacrifical lamb, cast adrift by a society that proclaims to care for
her then preys upon her as soon as her isolation leads to financial
need." ('Introduction' by Denis Lehane, The Terrorists, translated from the
Swedish by Joan Tate, 2010, p. vii)
Rebecka kills the book's Swedish prime minister – this is passed
shortly, perhaps a statement in itself. "No one in the novel is greatly
affected by the death of
the prime minister. There is no suggestion of the convulsion of grief
and self-reproach that affected the country when Palme was
assassinated." (Fishing
In Utopia: Sweden And The Future That Disappeared by Andrew
Brown, 2009, p. 128) Beck feels alienated from his work and doubts about staying
in the police force. His unhappy marriage is over. On the other hand,
Beck don't have any more stomach aches. – Manifesto of the Communist Party
(1848) by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: "Does it require deep
intuition to comprehend that man's ideas, views, and conception, in one
word, man's consciousness, changes with every change in the conditions
of his material existence, in his social relations and in his social
life?"– A telling sign of times:
Chairman Mao poster get mentioned in the text. The novel ends with the
lines: "The trouble with you, Martin, is just that you've got the wrong job, At the wrong time. In the wrong part of the world. In the wrong system." The novel was published after Wahlöö's death in
Stockholm on June 23, 1975. Though a joint venture, this volume was
mostly
written by Wahlöö, who was already very ill and knew he was going to
die. Doctors had said that his lungs were full of water, before
realizing that his pancreas had burst. After returning from Màlaga,
Wahlöö took very strong morphin tablets, fell into coma, and never woke
up again. Wahlöö's other works include translations into Swedish of some
Ed McBain's 87th Precinct procedural novels and Noel Behn's political
thriller The Kremlin Letter, filmed by John Huston in 1970.
With Sjöwall he also edited the literature magazine Peripeo,
and wrote a comparative study of police methods in Sweden, the United
States, Russia, and England. The English mystery writer Julian Symons recalled Wahlöö as an
extrme Left-winger whose interest in British foorball was passionate.
"He wrote two novels which combine the moral symbolism of Dürrenmatt
with a flavour of Orwellian fantasy. Murder
on the Thirty-first Floor (1966) and The Steel Spring (1970) make their
points about dictatorship and paternalism through the medium of crime.
. . . The books that Wahlöö, as
Per and not Peter, wrote in collabaration with Maj Sjöwall (1935-) were
less ambitious and more successful." (Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to
the Crime Novel: A History by Julian Symons, 1985, p. 182)
Selected works:
With Maj Sjöwall:
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