Marxist husband and wife team Sjöwall ad Wahlöö wrote ten detective novels together, of which this is the first, each writing alternative chapters. The books are remarkable for their deadpan tone and realistic plotting. What this means is that very often, nothing at all seems to be happening.
This is a daring way to write a crime novel, never mind ten of them. It’s a genre that normally demands a constantly evolving narrative that starts off at a frantic pace and then gets faster. One of the features of Roseanna is how frustrating it is for police to communicate when they are separated by long distances in the absence of today’s technology. As a result, the suspense lies in our wondering whether the police are going to be able to collaborate effectively and avoid getting their wires hopelessly crossed, never mind actually catch the culprit.
The book concerns the hunt for the killer of a nameless corpse that is discovered during the dredging of a river, and at least half of the mystery lies in identifying the victim.
Sjöwall and Wahlöö also set out to expose what they saw as the decadence of Swedish society, and their protagonist, Martin Beck, and his colleagues have a distinctly ambivalent attitude towards the society they strive to protect.
Martin Beck, who is always referred to by his full name, is dedicated to the job (as is mandatory for all hard-boiled cops) to the expense of everything else, not least his marriage. He frequently has a small revelation that breaks the case. What would otherwise be seen as cliché is actually pioneering work on the part of Sjöwall and Wahlöö; they can’t be blamed for helping to establish these conventions at the core of the modern detective story.
The authors use interesting linguistic features – such as their habit of referring to one character as “the man called Folke Bengtsson”, as if his identity was beyond us, or only a façade over something we can never know.
All of this adds up to make Roseanna a distinctly superior genre novel.
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One Comment so far. Leave a comment below.Now everyone is talking about the American economy and eclections, nice to read something different. Eugene