- What matters to me is how persuasively these mystery writers manage to create a world that one can imaginatively inhabit—for the duration of a first reading, initially, but also long after. The various features of Martin Beck’s world, including his Stockholm streets, his police department colleagues, his lovers, his friends, the crimes he solves, the murderers he pities, the politicians and bureaucrats he deplores, even the apartments he inhabits, all seemed terribly real to me when I first encountered them, and all continue to seem so today, even after one or more rereadings. This is the mystery novel not as a puzzle that can be forgotten as soon as it is solved but as an experience one is living through along with the characters. If they are sometimes “flat” characters in the manner of Dickens’s grotesques or Shakespeare’s clowns, that is not an absence of realism, but rather a realistic acknowledgment that in our own lives most other people remain opaque to us, often memorable mainly through their caricature-able qualities. We do not have the capacity, as George Eliot famously noted, to be fully empathetic at all times. Much of our observant life, and even much of our own experience, is conducted in a kind of shorthand.
Yet part of what makes the Sjöwall/Wahlöö books great, in comparison to most other mystery series, is precisely the opposite of this shorthand. They are oddly inclusive, with an eye for extraneous detail and a concern with the kinds of trivialities (subways ridden, meals eaten, suspicions vaguely aroused, meandering conversations, useless trains of thought, sudden bursts of intuition, random acts or events that cause everything to change suddenly) that make up not only every life, but every prolonged police investigation. This means that the timing of the books is, for some readers, excessively slow: we often have to wait for the necessary facts to surface, so we tend to find ourselves floating along rather than racing toward an increasingly visible conclusion. I always tell people that they have to wade through at least the first two volumes, Roseanna and The Man Who Went Up in Smoke, before things really get going in the Martin Beck series. Only when they reach The Man on the Balcony or, even better, The Laughing Policeman will they be able to judge how much they like the series. Patience is required of the reader, just as it is of the detective.