The Man on the Balcony (1967)

As police procedurals go, I tend to be more attracted to the routine and mundane—I still think Adam-12 is one of the best. But for obvious commercial reasons, and perhaps because police famously "see everything," they're often at least as lurid as true-crime. Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, the Swedish writing partners behind the Martin Beck series, were hardly immune. The first novel featured a sexualized serial killer. This third is essentially the same, except the victims are young girls around 10 years old. So even more lurid. At the same time, the cast of characters around Beck and the context of his job are starting to deepen and grow larger. And the one thing you can say about Sjöwall and Wahlöö is that their language is never sensational. It is flat nearly to a fault—flatter than Hemingway, though perhaps not Jack Webb. I suppose it could be partly the translation. But they respect rules of the genre scrupulously—it feels like the way police who are serious go about investigating and solving crimes. The Man on the Balcony was written before the Zodiac killer started up in California, though quite soon after the Boston Strangler, and it is good at painting a portrait of a large city, Stockholm in this case, seized by panic as an invisible monster roams among them. There are nods and winks to Ed McBain, such as an alliterated pair of patrolmen partners, Kristiansson and Kvant (different police roles but same narrative purpose as McBain's Monoghan and Monroe). But there's much more gravity to these Martin Beck stories. It's partly the loss of McBain's sunny optimistic American voice as opposed to the more sophisticated and dour European judgments of Sjöwall and Wahlöö. Remember, pretty much all McBain did—as McBain, Evan Hunter, and under other aliases (none of them his actual name, Salvatore Lombino)—was write popular fiction and screenplays. Per Wahlöö was a journalist and wrote other novels of his own. Maj Sjöwall was a translator and poet. They were also life partners for 13 years and self-declared Marxists. Not surprisingly, they represent an interesting wrinkle on the form. As usual, the police are presented as at least well-meaning and generally competent, but here they are also specifically functionaries of the state—the beneficent but not always competent state. The ambivalent attitude toward the police even as the work of some of them is valorized is a pretty neat trick. The Man on the Balcony is very sharply done, quick and to the point, yet thorough. It's just I could just do with a little less child rapist. They get better.

In case it's not at the library.