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The Abominable Man
Maj Sjowall
Per Wahloo
The seventh classic instalment in this genre-changing series of novels featuring Detective Inspector Martin Beck.On a quiet night a high-ranking police officer, Nyland, is slaughtered in his hospital bed, brutally massacred with a bayonet. It's not hard to find people with a motive to kill him; in fact the problem for Detective Inspector Martin Beck is how to narrow the list down to one suspect. But as he investigates Nyland's murder he must confront whether he is willing to risk his life for his job.Written in the 1960s, these masterpieces are the work of Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo – a husband and wife team from Sweden. The ten novels follow the fortunes of the detective Martin Beck, whose enigmatic, taciturn character has inspired countless other policemen in crime fiction. The novels can be read separately, but do follow a chronological order, so the reader can become familiar with the characters and develop a loyalty to the series. Each book will have a new introduction in order to help bring these books to a new audience.
MAJ SJÖWALL AND
PER WAHLÖÖ
The Abominable Man
Translated from the Swedish by Joan Tate
Copyright (#u5e30c45d-08ae-50fd-af46-5ecc8877180e)
4th Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
www.4thEstate.co.uk (http://www.4thEstate.co.uk)
This ebook first published by Harper Perennial in 2009
This 4th Estate edition published in 2016
This translation first published by Random House Inc,
New York, in 1972
Originally published in Sweden by P. A. Norstedt & Söners Forlag
Copyright text © Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö 1971
Copyright introduction © Arne Dahl 2009
Cover photograph © Shutterstock
PS Section © Richard Shephard 2007
PS™ is a trademark of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö assert the moral right to be identified as the authors of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the authors' imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Source ISBN: 9780007439171
Ebook Edition © DECEMBER 2013 ISBN: 9780007323449
Version: 2016-03-30
Praise (#u5e30c45d-08ae-50fd-af46-5ecc8877180e)
From the reviews of the Martin Beck series:
‘First class’
Daily Telegraph
‘One of the most authentic, gripping and profound collections of police procedural ever accomplished’
MICHAEL CONNELLY
‘Hauntingly effective storytelling’
New York Times
‘There's just no question about it: the reigning King and Queen of mystery fiction are Maj Sjöwall and her husband Per Wahlöö’
The National Observer
‘Sjöwall/Wahlöö are the best writers of police procedural in the world’
Birmingham Post
Contents
Cover (#uc6823aeb-c7a8-5a40-b8f1-8306a5733803)
Title Page (#u20fce805-5197-594a-87ae-a965ae89e146)
Copyright (#u9d4483f7-2a2e-5873-9e84-b2bafb8d963f)
Praise (#u8fed441c-e3e8-5535-a7b5-ef549cc178c8)
Introduction (#u618b4762-0d22-57a2-9db2-ce94bfd313ca)
Chapter 1 (#ulink_bea96f50-d650-52ef-97bb-6765f933eab9)
Chapter 2 (#u3c1e1b6d-cd7b-553a-b117-6742628bf788)
Chapter 3 (#u57b583fb-2dbe-5ac3-9722-403c056dab17)
Chapter 4 (#u3f1ccc01-5988-57ef-a889-61c2579b63ca)
Chapter 5 (#u1dff017b-e98f-5f3a-99b9-e05d5fd45ab0)
Chapter 6 (#ub6b16593-fc17-53c2-9ebf-fd606674c114)
Chapter 7 (#uefcf059e-b833-5943-ac21-b3b986fd45d0)
Chapter 8 (#u8f1d380c-2872-5cbb-a35a-a2f857e36b0c)
Chapter 9 (#u285f999e-b0c1-55a1-8ca0-a949dea92bd1)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 27 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 29 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 30 (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Authors (#litres_trial_promo)
Other Books by (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
INTRODUCTION (#ulink_a02fd31f-3fb3-5a10-ab91-36efa5411772)
Nations are stereotyped as easily as anything else, and in the 1960s and 70s most of us thought of Sweden as a paradise, where social democracy worked, where the welfare state was successful, where the girls were blonde and beautiful, where the scenery was lovely and the buildings half-timbered, and where sexuality was frank and innocent. Even its legendary suicide rate could be seen in a positive light, as being the result of the admirable willingness of Sweden’s coroners to be open and honest instead of hushing things up because of outdated taboos.
Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo lived there, and knew different.
They’re usually described as a wife-and-husband team, but they weren’t married. They’re usually described as Marxists,but they were, more accurately, modern European socialists, intensely sceptical of capitalist excess. What is agreed upon – and what we readers should be grateful for – is that instead of writing agitprop in obscure journals, they aired their views in a series of ten crime novels, of which this title was the seventh. Originally the series had a single subtitle – what we might now call a strapline – which was ‘The Story of a Crime’, and which, it became clear, had a dual meaning. The books were crime stories, obviously, but the series as a whole was the authors’ indictment of the way power treats the powerless.
All very worthy, all very noble and interesting, and like most things worthy and noble and interesting probably destined for the footnotes of history – except that along the way Sjowall and Wahloo also invented a brand-new type of police procedural that changed the genre for ever and still resonates to this day.
Their criticism of government was unrestrained: ‘The centre of Stockholm had been subjected to sweeping and violent changes in the course of the last ten years. Entire districts had been levelled and new ones constructed … What was behind all this activity was hardly an ambition to create a humane social environment but rather a desire to achieve the fullest possible exploitation of valuable land.’ With predictable results: ‘This is an insane city in a country that’s mentally deranged.’
The police force was both their narrative vehicle and their political focus. Again stereotypically, because Sweden had been neutral during World War Two, and because the girls were blonde and beautiful, we thought of Sweden as an essentially pacifist country, but Sjowall and Wahloo were at pains to point out its central militaristic culture, and the way in which the police recruited from the military ranks. They saw the nationalisation of Sweden’s regional police forces in the mid-1960s as a final nail in the coffin, as a transition to a paramilitary force answerable to, and interested in, no one but itself: ‘If you really want to be sure of getting caught, the thing to do is kill a policeman … There are plenty of unsolved murders in Swedish criminal history, but not one of them involves the murder of a policeman.’ And: ‘… everyone knows it’s pointless to report a policeman. The general public has no legal rights vis-à-vis the police.’
Interesting, eye-opening and worthy, but forgettable, regrettably, except that their narrative vehicle was so perversely compelling. Cop stories until then had tended to be exaggerated and glamorous, but Sjowall and Wahloo went the other way. Their manifesto is recapitulated in this book as succinctly as anywhere: ‘Police work is built on realism, routine, stubbornness and system.’
And in the middle of it was Martin Beck.
By this seventh title Beck was fully mature and fully realized as a character. Dour, determined, dissatisfied, dogged, even a little depressed, he was revolutionary at the time, and lives on as the grandfather of practically all current Scandinavian detectives, as well as foreigners as far-flung as Ian Rankin’s John Rebus and Martin Cruz Smith’s Arkady Renko. He is a marvellous invention, well served by a supporting cast of colleagues as superbly drawn as, say, Ed McBain’s ‘87th Precinct’ repertory. (And very well served, here and elsewhere, it must be said, by Thomas Teal’s English translation, which captures Beck’s weary, sardonic tone to perfection.) Even minor passing characters are delightfully written: in this text, one Captain Hult is found wearing his uniform on his day off. ‘I wear my uniform most of the time,’ he says. ‘I prefer it.’ Thus Sjowall and Wahloo create an impression in eleven words, where some writers would use eleven paragraphs.
And surprisingly, given the rubric of routine, the plotting is equally able. Subtle reversals come thick and fast. I don’t think it’s giving too much away to say this book opens with the gruesome murder of a senior policeman. But ‘The Abominable Man’ is not the perpetrator – it’s the victim. The moral ground shifts under our feet just as new clues alter the direction of the investigation. These books work superbly well as thrillers – no question about that – but they’re remembered for making the crime novel socially realistic. Or is it the other way around?
Lee Child
New York, 2011
1 (#u5e30c45d-08ae-50fd-af46-5ecc8877180e)
Just after midnight he stopped thinking.
He'd been writing something earlier, but now the blue ballpoint pen lay in front of him on the newspaper, exactly in the right-hand column of the crossword puzzle. He was sitting erect and utterly motionless on a worn wooden chair in front of a low table in the cramped little attic room. A round yellowish lampshade with a long fringe hung above his head. The fabric was pale with age, and the light from the feeble bulb was hazy and uncertain.
It was quiet in the house. But the quiet was relative – inside there were three people breathing, and from outside came an indistinct, pulsating, barely discernible murmur. As if from traffic on far-off roads, or from a distant boiling sea. The sound of a million human beings. Of a large city in its anxious sleep.
The man in the attic room was dressed in a beige lumber jacket, grey ski pants, a machine-knit black turtleneck jumper and brown ski boots. He had a large but well-tended moustache, just a shade lighter than the hair combed smoothly back at an angle across his head. His face was narrow, with a clean profile and finely chiselled features, and behind the rigid mask of resentful accusation and obstinate purpose there was an almost childlike expression, weak and perplexed and appealing, and nevertheless a little bit calculating.
His clear blue eyes were steady but vacant.
He looked like a little boy grown suddenly very old.
The man sat stock still for almost an hour, the palms of his hands resting on his thighs, his eyes staring blankly at the same spot on the faded flowered wallpaper.
