Martin Beck: The Locked Room Part 29

12 Life at a Glance.

14 True Crime - Just the Facts?

A Policeman's Lot is Not a Happy One.

in 1879, British composers Gilbert & Sullivan produced their comic opera, Pirates of Penzance. Its rhyming couplet, 'When constabulary duty's to be done, to be done, A policeman's lot is not a happy one, happy one', has a lot to answer for, since this seems to have created the notion of solemn sleuths, glum gumshoes and discontented, dispirited detectives, a theme taken up only eight years later by Arthur Conan Doyle when his creation Sherlock Holmes made his entrance in A Study in Scarlet. Aided by his chum, the dependable, resolutely cheerful but rather less than rapier-witted Dr Watson, Holmes is the most celebrated fictional detective, a brilliandy rational sleuth, but p.r.o.ne to boredom, depression and the use of cocaine to alleviate his frequent longueurs.

Since then, it seems that the majority of fictional detectives, private or public, have had the blues, and Martin Beck is no exception, admitting as much in the majority of the novels, ranging from his acknowledgement of the 'policeman's occupational disease' to the gloomy fact that no other professional group suffered from such role fixation or dramatized its daily life as did the police'. Towards the conclusion of the Beck series, there are several rumours, as well as an official decision, that he will be made commissioner. Yet due to a combination of chance and another error of judgement from his superiors, he's not promoted. Ironically, he seems much better off as he is and promotion to a safer, desk-bound job would only add to his malaise, reaffirming his awareness that he wasn't, as he puts it, a 'Cheerful Charlie'. An enthusiastic fan of Raymond - Chandler's cla.s.sic 'Philip Marlowe' novels, the poet W. H. Auden noted that they were 'powerful but extremely depressing', largely because Marlowe is a lone wolf, professionally, legally and romantically, and much given to sitting on his own in his dingy office or flat with only a bottle of booze for company and bemoaning the meagre rewards accorded to his life and life in general. Though Beck is married with a family and has a secure job that's reinforced by the support of capable colleagues and the judicial might of the authorities, he too is disillusioned by the emptiness of his life. While they're not in the same league of lowness as the Marlowe novels, the Beck books do share a similar sense of gloom and futility. This is partiy due to the nature of the police officer's job but also perhaps because of the actual work itself - taking notes at a crime scene, shoving the grisly images to the back of one's mind while focusing on an interminable spiral of myriad details, before wading through a paper mire, the stultifying welter of facts and figures that make up a person's life. Long, weary hours spent immersing oneself in the grind of canva.s.sing, phoning, burrowing through the detritus of the victim's past, straining bloodshot eyes and struggling to uncover a name, a number, some indistinct piece of information that might, if examined more closely, actually have some significance.

These streets down which the detectives go may be mean, as Chandler put it, but they are also dreary and endless, and behind their doors are sullen types, stubbornly unhelpful, their grim faces radiating mistrust and a desire to be left alone. This is not exciting, rewarding work, andthere is no thrill of the chase. Bored by the long periods of inaction and inertia, frustrated by the apparent lack of success, stymied by the rigidity and dogmatic loopholes of the law, much of their life is unadulterated tedium, very occasionally punctuated by moments of peril or even triumph, and its c.u.mulative effect is such that, in all likelihood, happiness may not actually be important to these men any more. But that may well actually be the point; that perhaps the most miserable investigators are also the best.

But if the work is difficult and not entirely rewarding, can the disconsolate detective, a.s.suming he's not a lone wolf but part of a unit, take refuge in team spirit and the companions.h.i.+p of his peers? Well, not really. Although Beck and Kollberg are good friends and have known each other for decades, they remain very different individuals, with the latter being much more of the sensualist than his diffident and rather dyspeptic ally. Apart from this, while there is a certain amount of respect, there's little or no camaraderie among the men. Indeed, Sjowall and Wahloo delight in dis.h.i.+ng up a double whammy by not just making the policemen a'miserable bunch but also pretty unpopular. Totally dissimilar, Ronn and Larsson nevertheless have something approaching a mutual affection, but the latter is disliked by almost everybody else. Beck finds Ronn annoying and petty, and doesn't greatly care for . Larsson, who is, in turn, intensely disliked by Kollberg, although a begrudging respect between them creeps in slowly during the later books.

Larsson's unpopularity, which doesn't remotely bother him, may stem from the fact that, unlike most of his colleagues, he is a man of action, not given to ruminating over endless paperwork and more inclined to pound a confession out of a suspect than pounding the pavement trying to prise information from members of the public, especially since these usually prove to be indifferent, reluctant to be involved or just plain hostile. At times he seems to have wandered in from another crime novel, one of a more dramatic, if commonplace, variety. His strength, dynamism, spontaneity and willingness to break the law to apprehend a lawbreaker are so radically different from the methodical cud-chewing and line-toeing favoured by the majority of his peers that they make him unique and also help to explain why he remains so heartily disliked. Ironically, this bold and fearless approach to his job doesn't appreciably elevate Larsson's mood, since he grumbles incessantly about the hours he has to work, his colleagues, the criminals he's pursuing, and reserves his most stinging and insolent complaints for his superiors. Unlike the majority of his peers, he's a bachelor and is perhaps in agreement with another careworn cop, Inspector Kurt Wallander, the creation of Swedish crime novelist Henning Mankell, whose att.i.tude towards matrimony was decidedly gloomy: 'Policemen were divorced. That's all there was to it'

Society is to Blame.

Sjowall and Wahloo wanted to construct a series of crime novels that mirrored the society shaped by the Swedish welfare state, an aim in which they succeed admirably. So, it's not just the police, the politicians or the criminals that are under scrutiny in the ten Martin Beck books, but the whole of Swedish society, including the bureaucrats, urban planners, legal pract.i.tioners, the wealthy, the poor, the dissolute and the disenfranchised. The one genus conspicuous by their absence in the authors' world is the one that might be considered 'normal', leaving the reader to draw the somewhat uncomfortable conclusion that perhaps such people don't actually exist any more.

Despite the apparendy popular perception of the welfare experiment as being so successful that it earned itself the sobriquet 'the Third Way (between Communism and Capitalism) and the more enticing-sounding,'the Swedish Method', Sjowall and WahldS clearly looked on it as a kind of social poison, infecting the country from top to (mainly) bottom. In all of the ten books, the downside of the welfare venture is markedly apparent - with the majority, though not all, of the victims being the young. As the series unfolds, the energetically promoted notion of Sweden as a kind of paradise, home of the sauna and the smorgasbord, basking in its international reputation for s.e.xiness and pleasure, is revealed to be nothing more than a desperately enforced myth. In Beck's eyes, it's a kind of demi-monde, an inferno riven by poverty, rampant drug abuse, corruption at all levels, steeped in murder and crimes of violence.

There is also the d.a.m.ning statistic, which is difficult to ignore, that Stockholm has one of the highest suicide rates in the world, a fascinating subject for Beck and one 'that had begun to interest him more and more'. As the omniscient narrator notes in The Locked Room, 'the so-called Welfare State abounds with sick, poor and lonely people, living at best on dog food, who are left uncared for until they waste away and die in their rat-hole tenements', whilst in the penultimate novel, Cop Killer, Beck himself informs us,' concerning the popularity of suicide, that 'Sweden led the world by a margin that seemed to grow larger from one report to the next'. Certainly, his world is crowded with hordes of teenage runaways, single mothers and drug users; adolescent nihilists drifting into a sordid, seemingly inescapable spiral of addiction, prost.i.tution, petty crime and, at the furthest extreme, murder. From his perspective, Sweden's cities are full of them; abandoned, repressed or misunderstood by parents with different values and neglected by a society caught at a crossroads, from which it's impossible to escape.

Police and Policies.

the story of a crime is the subt.i.tle for the entire sequence of Beck novels and the crime in question would appear to be a political one - the nationalization of Sweden's police force in 1965, a development that led to it becoming a more paramilitary organization, with greater use of firearms and military equipment, bigger and more centrally orchestrated operations and a greater prominence of the National Police Commissioner, whose fictional counterpart in the books is a generally vilified figure. As if to confirm this, in the eighth novel, The Locked Room, there is the telling remark that what various high-ranking members of the police force 'actually wanted, was power'. Despite the fact that their central character, Beck, has no interest in politics, and virtually none of the other characters, unlike their creators, are particularly politically informed, the novels all possess a political undertone, set as they are against the ever-s.h.i.+fting backdrop of the sixties and seventies, a period of tumultuous social change when young people began to involve themselves in world affairs.

As the story of Beck and his world gradually picks up pace, political references, initially veiled, begin to take centre stage, especially since, being public servants, Beck and his colleagues have to deal with the invariably calamitous results of political misjudgements and chicanery. Alongside this, and the frequent mentions of anti-Vietnam demonstrations usually dealt with in an amusing, if cynical, manner, more and more political commentary begins to emerge.

As a young man Per Wahloo was engaged in various radical causes (at least one of which saw him deported from Franco's Spain in 1957), wrote several political novels detailing different aspects of dictators.h.i.+p, and along with his wife was a committed Marxist and member of the Leftist Communist Party, called VPK in Sweden. But in the early Beck novels, Sjowall and Wahloo proceeded cautiously, restricting themselves to tangential observations of the chaotic political machinations taking place in Sweden, and it's not until around the fourth or fifth book, towards the middle of the series, that they start to grow rather more energetic in their banner-waving.

From there on, more pointed criticism of the Swedish government begins to appear though always contributed by the omniscient third-person narrator, a discreet if voluble presence who hovers over each book. Used by the authors to affirm their message, he is nonetheless, as they admitted in an interview, 'a little afraid of making our characters too politically aware. They might start to seem unreal.' From the second half of the series, politics start to shade almost every aspect of the story, including plot, background, and most of the characters, even the criminals. For while they too are rendered early on as fairly tenebrous, indistinct characters, clearly villains but little more than that, in the later books, as the socio-political waters are muddied and grow more opaque, the bad guys become more rounded individuals - and perhaps are not so bad after all. Some of them even start to seem sympathetic. In The Locked Room, for instance, Monita, setting a fine example of multi-tasking, is a single mother, waitress and bank robber, who (literally) gets away with murder but she is also responsible for the arrest of her former lover, an incorrigible professional criminal who might otherwise have gone free.

It's not just the reader who feels sympathy towards the felons, either. In the sixth novel, Murder at the Savoy, Beck is moved to feel more sorry for the killer than he is for the victim, a wealthy, corrupt businessman who, we are gently coaxed into thinking, pretty much deserved to die. Unlike the majority of crime novelists writing at this time, certainly Swedish ones, Sjowall and Wahloo deliberately present the characters, their settings and their histories in such a way as to ensure that one's sympathies drift irresistibly towards those who might be regarded as bad. The only one of their contemporaries employing similar subtleties was Patricia Highsmith and there is more than a touch of her legerdemain in the way the two slyly subvert our precious preconceptions about good and evil. As with many of Highsmith's novels, and especially the brilliant Mr Ripley series, Sjowall and Wahldo tear down the black-and-white, papier-mache gimcrack of conventional morality and reveal in its place a much more complex and substantial structure, multi-layered, many-hued and infinitely more intriguing.

Also by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo.

Roseanna.

The Man Who Went Up in Smoke.

The Man on the Balcony.

The Laughing Policeman.

Murder at the Savoy.

The Fire Engine that Disappeared.

The Abominable Man.

Cop Killer.

The Terrorists.

MAJ SJOWALL AND PER WAHLOO.

The Locked Room.