The Man Who Went Up in Smoke Read online

  Praise

  From the reviews of the Martin Beck series:

  ‘First class’

  Daily Telegraph

  ‘One of the most authentic, gripping and profound collections of police procedurals 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

  Praise

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  About the Author

  Other Books By

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Introduction

  I first went to America in 1979. I had to buy another holdall to bring home the books. Discovering dedicated mystery booksellers was a bit like going to heaven without having to die first. There were so many crime writers whose books were available in the US only – ironically, some of them British – and in those pre-Internet days, the only apparent way to acquire them was physically to go there and buy them. Which I did. In industrial quantities.

  Among the books in the holdall were ten paperbacks in the black livery of Vintage Press. They comprised a decalogue of crime novels written by the Swedish husband-and-wife team of Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö. They'd been on my must-read list since I'd read about them in Julian Symonds' definitive overview of the genre, Bloody Murder. He said, ‘they might come under the heading of “Police Novels” except that the authors are more interested in the philosophical implications of crime than in straightforward police routine … [They] are markedly individual and very good’. I suppose it was a bit of a gamble to buy all ten on that recommendation alone. But it's a gamble I've never regretted.

  Reading the Martin Beck series with twenty-first-century eyes, it's almost impossible to grasp how revolutionary they felt when they first appeared almost forty years ago. So many of the elements that have become integral to the point of cliché in the police procedural sub-genre started life in these ten novels. So many of the features we take for granted and sigh over in a world-weary way have their roots in the work of a couple of journalists turned crime writers.

  In the mid-sixties, when Sjöwall and Wahlöö started writing, there were plenty of examples of the police procedural novel around. Going back to the golden age of the 1930s, Ngaio Marsh's Inspector Alleyn and Freeman Wills Crofts' Inspector French were among those who led the way, but they were followed in a steady stream by the likes of J. J. Marric's Gideon and, on the other side of the Atlantic, Ed McBain.

  What these examples of the roman policier have in common is that they are wedded to the status quo. Their world is divided into black and white, good and evil, right and wrong, with no uncomfortable intervening grey area. Bad men – and very occasionally bad women – do bad things and thus are bound to come to a bad end. Their police officers are honourable, upstanding family men who believe in the rule of law and the delivery of justice by their own hands. A bent cop is almost unthinkable; an incompetent one only a little less so.

  And while the star of the series may have a sidekick, invariably less gifted and often more brawny, little more than lip service is paid to the rest of the squad, whose legwork goes mostly unrecognized. (McBain later became an exception to this, but in the earlier 87th Precinct novels Steve Carella is invariably centre-stage.) The police procedural was home to a singular hero. There was no room to share the limelight.

  The books of Sjöwall and Wahlöö are different. Although they are generally referred to as the Martin Beck novels, they're not really about an individual. They're ensemble pieces.

  Beck is not some solo maverick who operates with flagrant disregard for the rules and thinly disguised contempt for the lesser mortals who surround him. Nor is he a phenomenal genius blessed with so extraordinary a talent that mere mortals can only stand back in amazement as he leads them unerringly to the solution to the baffling mystery. He's not glamorous either. Not the scion of some high-society family, not the husband of an acclaimed portrait painter, nor the flamboyant solver of baffling mysteries with an upward flick of a single eyebrow.

  No, Martin Beck is none of these things. He's a driven, middle-aged dyspeptic whose marriage slowly disintegrates during the series. Not because of some cataclysmic infidelity or clash of belief systems, but rather because of the quiet desperation that builds between two people who once loved each other but now have nothing in common but their children and their address.

  He's also something of an idealist whose job forces him to confront the gulf between what should exist in an ideal world and what exists in actuality. His awareness of that gap colours his life, making him depressed and sometimes fatalistic about whether what he does can ever make any difference.

  But more than this, he is part of a team, each member of which is a fully realized character. His strengths and weaknesses are balanced by those of his colleagues. He relies on them as they rely on him. This is a world where ideas are kicked around, where no individual has the monopoly on shafts of brilliant insight. Nor are the repetitive tedious tasks carried out offstage by minor minions. Both action and routine are shared between Beck and his underlings. Friendships and enmities are equally tested in the course of the ten books, and everyone is portrayed as an individual who has virtues and vices in distinct measure.

  Of itself, that would be enough to mark these books out as different from the run of the mill. But Sjöwall and Wahlöö add other elements to the mix which demonstrate the uniqueness of their vision.

  Their plots, for example, are second to none, both in terms of structure and subject. Sometimes it's the starting point which is surprising, a seemingly eccentric moment that leads cunningly to the heart of something much darker. Sometimes it's the choice of the underlying issue which confounds us; lulled into thinking we're getting one kind of story, we suddenly find ourselves in a very different place. Wherever their stories take us, Sjöwall and Wahlöö find ways to catch the reader on the back foot, making us reassess our take on the world.

  Then there is that aspect that Julian Symonds picked on so astutely – their interest in the philosophical aspects of crime. These days, it is a given that the crime novel is capable of shining a light on society, of illuminating us to ourselves. At its best, the contemporary crime novel tells us how our society works, revealing its social strata and its patterns. It can strip away the surfaces, leaving the malign and the benign exposed, and it can use both characters and storylines to excoriate us for our sins.

  But back when Sjöwall and Wahlöö started writing, those jobs were left to literary novelists. Crime writers were supposed only to entertain. The Swedish duo demon
strated that there was a different way to write about murder. Through the eyes of Martin Beck and his colleagues, they held a mirror up to Swedish society at a time when the ideals of the welfare state were beginning to buckle under the realities of everyday life. They write unsparingly and unswervingly about social ills and problems, but they never forget that they are writing novels, not polemics. They dress up their social concerns in fast-moving storytelling, never losing sight of the need to keep their readers engaged.

  The end product, though serious in its intent, is far from gloomy. Sjöwall and Wahlöö are blessed with the gift of humour. It manifests itself in the sly, dark wit of Beck, but also in the knockabout farce that erupts from time to time, generally through the characters of Kristiansson and Kvant, a pair of patrol cops who are as stupid as they are unlucky. Their slapstick interludes are as funny to the reader as they are frustrating to the detectives. Before Sjöwall and Wahlöö, such a pair of Keystone Kops would have been unthinkable, undermining as they do the seriousness of police investigation and bringing it squarely into the realm of normal human behaviour.

  In many respects, however, The Man Who Went Up in Smoke is an exception to the rest of the novels. It takes place mostly outside Sweden, in Budapest, at a time when the cold war was still an unnerving backdrop to everyday life. For much of the book, Beck is on his own in a strange land, without back-up and without any visceral understanding of the society he's trying to operate in. His investigation into the disappearance of a Swedish journalist seems to run into brick walls at every turn, growing more and more baffling with each successive revelation.

  Soon we come to understand that Beck can't crack the case on his own. He has to draw on help both from his colleagues at home and from unexpected sources in Budapest before the pieces can finally fall into place, revealing a truth that manages to be both banal and original.

  Sjöwall and Wahlöö won the Mystery Writers of America's Edgar award for Best Novel in 1971 with The Laughing Policeman. It remains the only novel in translation ever to have won the award. To me, that's not particularly surprising. I guarantee if you read their books, you'll end up agreeing with me. And with all the other crime writers who know only too well how much we owe to that pair of Swedish journalists turned novelists.

  Val McDermid

  1

  The room was small and shabby. There were no curtains and the view outside consisted of a grey fire wall, a few rusty armatures and a faded advertisement for margarine. The centre pane of glass in the left half of the window was gone and had been replaced by a roughly cut piece of cardboard. The wallpaper was floral, but so discoloured by soot and seeping moisture that the pattern was scarcely visible. Here and there it had come away from the crumbling plaster, and in several places there had been attempts to repair it with adhesive strips and wrapping paper.

  There were a heating stove, six pieces of furniture and a picture in the room. In front of the stove stood a cardboard box of ashes and a dented aluminium coffee pot. The end of the bed faced the stove and the bedclothes consisted of a thick layer of old newspapers, a ragged quilt and a striped pillow. The picture was of a naked blonde standing beside a marble balustrade, and it was hanging to the right of the stove so that the person lying in the bed could see it before he fell asleep and immediately when he woke up. Someone appeared to have enlarged the woman's nipples and genitals with a pencil.

  In the other part of the room, nearest to the window, stood a round table and two wooden chairs, of which one had lost its back. On the table were three empty vermouth bottles, a soft-drink bottle and two coffee cups, among other things. The ash tray had been turned upside down and among the cigarette butts, bottle tops and dead matches lay a few dirty sugar lumps, a small penknife with its blades open, and a piece of sausage. A third coffee cup had fallen to the floor and had broken. Face down on the worn linoleum, between the table and the bed, lay a dead body.

  In all probability this was the same person who had improved upon the picture and tried to mend the wallpaper with strips of adhesive and wrapping paper. It was a man and he was lying with his legs close together, his elbows pressed against his ribs and his hands drawn up towards his head, as if in an effort to protect himself. The man was wearing a woollen vest and frayed trousers. On his feet were ragged woollen socks. A large sideboard had been tipped over him, obscuring his head and half the top part of his body. The third wooden chair had been thrown down beside the corpse. Its seat was bloodstained and on the top of the back handprints were clearly visible. The floor was covered with pieces of glass. Some of them had come from the glass doors of the sideboard, others from a half-shattered wine bottle which had been thrown onto a heap of dirty underclothes by the wall. What was left of the bottle was covered with a thin skin of dried blood. Someone had drawn a white circle around it.

  Of its kind, the picture was almost perfect, taken by the best wide-angle lens the police possessed and in an artificial light that gave an etched sharpness to every detail.

  Martin Beck put down the photograph and magnifying glass, got up and went across to the window. Outside it was full Swedish summer. And more than that. It was hot. On the grass of Kristineberg Park a couple of girls were sunbathing in bikinis. They were lying flat on their backs with their legs apart and their arms stretched outward away from their bodies. They were young and thin, or slim as they say, and they could do this with a certain grace. When he focused sharply, he even recognized them as two office girls from his own department. So it was already past twelve. In the morning they put on their bathing suits, cotton dresses and sandals and went to work. In the lunch hour they took off their dresses and went out and lay in the park. Practical.

  Dejectedly, he recalled that soon he would have to leave all this and move over to the south police headquarters in the rowdy neighbourhood around Västberga Allé.

  Behind him he heard someone fling open the door and come into the room. He did not need to turn around to know who it was. Stenström. Stenström was still the youngest in the department and after him there would presumably be a whole generation of detectives who did not knock on doors.

  ‘How's it going?’ he said.

  ‘Not so well,’ said Stenström. ‘When I was there fifteen minutes ago he was still flatly denying everything.’

  Martin Beck turned around, went back to his desk and once again looked at the photo of the scene of the crime. On the ceiling above the newspaper mattress, the ragged quilt and the striped pillow, there was an old patch of dampness. It looked like a sea horse. With a little good will it could have been a mermaid. He wondered if the man on the floor had had that much imagination.

  ‘It doesn't matter,’ said Stenström officiously. ‘We'll get him on the technical evidence.’

  Martin Beck made no reply. Instead he pointed at the thick report Stenström had put down on his desk and said, ‘What's that?’

  ‘The record of the interrogation from Sundbyberg.’

  ‘Take the miserable thing away. Starting tomorrow I'm on my holiday. Give it to Kollberg. Or to anybody you damn please.’

  Martin Beck took the photograph and went up one flight of stairs, opened a door and found himself with Kollberg and Melander.

  It was much warmer in there than in his room, presumably because the windows were closed and the curtains drawn. Kollberg and the suspect were sitting opposite each other at the table, quite still. Melander, a tall man, was standing by the window, his pipe in his mouth and his arms folded. He was looking steadily at the suspect. On a chair by the door sat a police guard in uniform trousers and a light-blue shirt. He was balancing his cap on his right knee. No one said anything and the only moving thing was the reel of the tape recorder. Martin Beck situated himself to one side and just behind Kollberg and joined in the general silence. A wasp could be heard bouncing against the window behind the curtains. Kollberg had taken off his jacket and unbuttoned his shirt, but even so, his shirt was soaked with sweat between his plump shoulder blades. The wet patch s
lowly changed shape and spread downward in a line along his spine.

  The man on the other side of the table was small, with thinning hair. He was slovenly dressed and the fingers gripping the arms of his chair were uncared-for, with bitten, dirty nails. His face was thin and sickly, with weak evasive lines around his mouth. His chin was trembling slightly and his eyes seemed cloudy and watery. The man hunched up and two tears fell down his cheeks.

  ‘Uh-huh,’ said Kollberg gloomily. ‘You hit him on the head with the bottle, then, until it broke?’

  The man nodded.

  ‘Then you went on hitting him with the chair as he lay on the floor. How many times?’

  ‘Don't know. Not many. Quite a lot though.’

  ‘I can imagine. And then you tipped the sideboard over him and left the room. What did the third one of you do in the meantime? This Ragnar Larsson? Didn't he try to interfere; I mean, stop you?’

  ‘No, he didn't do anything. He just let it go on.’

  ‘Don't start lying again now.’

  ‘He was asleep. He'd passed out.’

  ‘Try to speak a little louder, all right?’

  ‘He was lying on the bed, asleep. He didn't notice anything.’

  ‘No, not until he came to and then he went to the police. Well, so far it's clear. But there's one thing I still don't really understand. Why did it turn out this way? You'd never even seen each other before you met in that beer hall.’

  ‘He called me a damned Nazi.’

  ‘Every policeman gets called a damned Nazi several times a week. Hundreds of people have called me a Nazi and Gestapo man and even worse things, but I've never killed anyone for it.’

  ‘He sat there and said it over and over again, damned Nazi, damned Nazi, damned Nazi… It was the only thing he said. And he sang.’

  ‘Sang?’

  ‘Yes, to get my goat. Annoy me. About Hitler.’