The Locked Room (1972)

I was impressed with this entry in the Martin Beck series—I'm tempted to call it the best. The locked-room mystery—in which victims are found dead of violence in rooms locked from the inside and no weapon or signs of exit or entrance are in evidence—is of course one of the oldest and most enduring of mystery story types. There is only so much you can do with them, and authors Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö were rarely innovative in the whodunit realm anyway. So the explanation here is somewhat busy but fair enough. Ed McBain liked locked-room mysteries and used them often, which might make it another wry homage. What I like better about The Locked Room is how they blend the genre requirements with their social preoccupations and put it together into a nearly perfectly waterproof vessel. This is much longer than any previous novel in the series, and indeed the longest of all. There is another case the police detectives are working on as well, a series of brazen bank robberies. For his part, police detective Beck has been assigned the locked-room case to work through by himself. The ironies and paradoxes of a blended capitalist / socialist system still evolving are explored in rich detail, as usual. Social programs may be a net positive, but they have unintended and sometimes grotesque results. Meanwhile, harshly authoritarian conservatives cling to power with all their might. (They have less might in these Beck novels than they have now, and I must say some of these scenarios make me nostalgic for past times.) Beck is recovering from an injury suffered in the previous action-packed novel. We see via Beck's investigation how one woman's life has gone since being abandoned by her husband. It is an acutely painful study of the lack of support and perceived value for single mothers then. It's still bad now, but it was worse then, and the trap she falls into—once her husband has stopped providing child support—is all too plausible. The Locked Room takes an extraordinary number of complex threads and weaves them into a remarkable picture. It's not often you get to see one tied up so neatly. Start here if you're only going to read one of these Martin Beck novels.

In case it's not at the library.