2023/009: Roseanna — Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö (translated by Lois Roth)

‘The Central Telephone Office has advised us that there is a phone call coming from the United States. It is coming in about thirty minutes. Can you take it?’ [loc. 991]

Sweden in the mid-Sixties: the body of an unknown young woman is discovered in a canal. She has been murdered, but there are no clues to the murderer's, or the victim's, identity.

Published in 1965, Roseanna is the first in the Martin Beck series, featuring a very ordinary detective with none of the flair or eccentricities of popular detectives such as Holmes, Wimsey, Poirot. Martin Beck isn't a genius, he isn't prone to flashes of insight, he doesn't single-handedly unravel the case: instead, he does the dull but necessary procedural tasks, as do his colleagues in the Stockholm police, and other investigators further afield. Martin Beck (always referred to in the text by his full name) is dedicated and stubborn, unhappily married and resigned to it, middle-aged and prone to indigestion: he describes himself, to himself, as 'stubborn and logical, and completely calm'. While the newspaper headlines describe the crime as 'barbaric' and 'repulsive', he thinks of the unknown murderer as 'maladjusted'.

Quite aside from the murder mystery, this was a reminder of just how far criminology has come in the last sixty years. The murder victim turns out to have been American: even establishing that fact takes months. Martin Beck suggests that the investigators look at photographs taken by passengers on a tour boat, but collecting the physical photos takes quite a while. Each potential witness must be interviewed in person, and the passengers and crew of the boat are scattered all over the world. There is no DNA testing; there is no central repository of missing-person reports; international phone calls tend to be of poor quality, and are scheduled in advance. There is a great deal of waiting around (everybody smokes) and the case takes months rather than days to solve. Sixties Sweden doesn't have the distant glamour of pre-war Europe. Indeed, it feels rather bland. But Martin Beck is also bland -- or seems so to those who encounter him -- and he's a marvellously understated protagonist. I look forward to reading more novels by Sjöwall and Wahlöö: there are ten in the series.

Fulfils the ‘Nordic Noir’ rubric of the 52 books in 2023 challenge.