If you have not encountered Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo’s mysteries, you’re in for a treat. I found them when they were repackaged several years ago in an eye-catching new trade paperback format. (The used copies that I have, published when the books were originally published in the 60s and 70s have much gloomier covers.)

Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo were Swedish journalists who wrote about a police detective, Martin Beck, and his homicide team: his good friend, Leonard Kollberg; the phlegmatic Ronn who has perfect recall; the boorish but snappy dresser, Gunvald Larssen; and a rotating cast of other detectives. Despite their disagreements (Beck and Kollberg are good friends – as are Ronn and Larssen – but most of them don’t get along) the team solves the crimes that are tossed their way, for the most part. The question, in these mysteries often isn’t so much whodunnit but how will Beck and co. solve the crime, especially with everything working against them. Everything being Sweden itself – the inept uniformed policemen who are more interested in beating up the public than preventing crime or apprehending criminals, and the publicity-mad District Attorney, “Bulldozer” Olsson – works against their success.

The book starts with Martin Beck returning to work after a long absence following an on-the-job injury that almost killed him in the previous book. Beck’s character, up until this book, is often depressed: he joined the police force and has watched it become an enemy of the people; he married young when his girlfriend got pregnant and he and his wife live in their own cold war; his relationship with his teen kids is discouraging; and his country is going to hell in a handbasket.

Beck returns to work to find that his team has been coopted by Bulldozer Olsson’s latest scheme for self-aggrandizement: catching a band of bank robbers who have been stunningly successful in their work and are making Swedish law enforcement look bad. Knowing Beck’s opinion of Bulldozer, Koller has volunteered for the task force and hands Beck a cold case to get him re-engaged with his job: a body was discovered in a locked room; the responding police officers lazily assumed it was suicide, although they could not find the gun that shot the victim; they told the coroner’s office it was suicide, so the coroner found only what they expected to find in a suicide. Now Beck has to figure out what happened and by whom, with almost no clues whatsoever.

Meanwhile, another bank is robbed and, this time, a security guard bumbles and gets killed. The witnesses are crystal clear in their recollections, and each one saw something different. (The testimony of the one witness who describes the suspect and the suspect’s actions clearly, ironically is dismissed out of hand because his demeanor is not as self-assured as the others.) The team rounds up the usual suspects without results. The reader knows who committed the crime and why, and can see that the special task force is headed the wrong direction, which is part of the pleasure of the story. Every small victory that the task force earns – despite Olsson’s actions – provides another clue that takes the team further away from solving the actual crime.

When Beck solves his crime, his suspect is already under arrest for the security guard’s murder, tying everything together – only to fall apart again, leaving both cases, ultimately, unsolved. Despite this, Beck, engaged once again in an activity he loves – unravelling mysteries – and having met a woman who is waking up his love life in a new way, drags himself out of his depression.

Gosh, I love these books. They are hilarious. The descriptions of what’s happening in Sweden around them is biting and insightful, from Beck’s everyday frustrations with life (the cost of cigarettes, the rudeness of the rank-and-file police) all the way up to the ineptitude of civil and police leaders. And then there is the police raid – Olsson’s latest grand and perfect plan – that blows up spectacularly in his face in a scene full of slapstick. Oh my god, I die laughing every time I read this scene, and I’ve read this book at least a dozen times. My husband asks what I am laughing about – and I can’t read it to him because I am laughing so darn hard.

You can read this book and enjoy the story; and you can read it as a grand social commentary, an analogy for what is happening in Sweden at the time which, since Wahloo and Sjowall started as reporters, is what I suspect they meant it as. No one is safe from their pen, including a certain right-wing, cowboy-hatted American governor with presidential asperations who shows up in one of their books (I’m pretty sure it’s this one, though I could be wrong) and is greeted by riots that complicates the investigation by tying up police resources at a critical moment.

Wahloo and Sjowall’s writing is so unique – I tried to think of something to compare them to, and the only thing I could come up with was the old TV Show, Barney Miller, which also features a team of oddball detectives with disparate personalities, solving crimes despite the ineptitude of the system they are a part of, with some social commentary. But, while I love Barney Miller, it is a pale comparison to Wahloo and Sjowall’s world. If you were going to do a movie of their work, you’d have to hire Spike Lee to direct it; it’s that biting and violent.

Warning: there are a lot of books in this series and, once you read one, you will want to read them all.

Have you read any Per Wahloo and Maj Showall? If so, what other authors would you recommend to people who like their work?