Murder at the Savoy Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  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 Authors

  Other Books By

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  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

  INTRODUCTION

  Revisiting Murder at the Savoy more than three decades after first reading it was an unexpected pleasure in two very different ways. Although I remembered little about the story, in an instant the opening chapter came back vividly to me, with its surreal image of a man who had been shot at a hotel dining table continuing to speak with a bullet lodged in his brain. As I read on, I found more scenes embedded in my memory, particularly one involving the hapless pair of Keystone Kops from Skåne, Kristiansson and Kvant, and a three-year-old on the back of his father's bicycle playing ‘this little piggy’. Yet despite the resonance and familiarity of those scenes, the story read as if it were brand new, and I followed it with the same sort of absorption I must have on my original reading.

  The most interesting crime writers stretch the boundaries of the genre. Dashiell Hammett brought a new, hard-boiled voice to detective stories, and a different sort of detective. Raymond Chandler rendered that detective in a baroque prose style that made him heroic. Richard Stark, in the sixties, created an anti-hero whose criminal sociopathology was reflected in his spare, taut prose. And Sjöwall and Wahlöö took the police procedural and turned it both inwards, with its probing deep into the individual characters of its cops, and outwards, to create a sometimes tragi-comic and always forensic examination of an entire society.

  They may have inspired James McClure's excellent series of novels set in South Africa, where the relationship of Afrikaner detective Tromp Kramer and his black sergeant Mickey Zondi comments on the world of apartheid. But even McClure couldn't match the scope and depth of the Beck books.

  Since then, new ground has been broken by the story-telling dialogues of George V. Higgins, the manic riffing of James Ellroy, and by Michael Connelly's ultimate loner, Harry Bosch. Yet one could argue convincingly that Sjöwall and Wahlöö made more impact than all three of those greats together; providing the template for a whole new generation of realistic, socially conscious (if not depressive) police novels, including Connelly's. Their influence has been particularly strong in Britain, where the new wave of police novels typified by John Harvey's Charlie Resnick, Graham Hurley's Joe Faraday (whose sidekick Paul Winter is an English Gunvald Larsson, bizarre as that sounds!), Ian Rankin's John Rebus, and Mark Billingham's Tom Thorne all owe something to Martin Beck.

  My second pleasure was the wider sense of memory that the book evoked. It may read as fresh now as it did in the early seventies, but it also is very much of its time. Then, it was not only a very different sort of police procedural from, say, the 87th Precinct novels of Ed McBain, which Sjöwall and Wahlöö often cited as an influence. For me, and many other readers, the Beck books were a primer of sorts into the exotic mysteries of Sweden. This may require some explanation.

  In the sixties, it was unusual for crime fiction to be accepted as mainstream literature. Hammett and Chandler had managed to elevate themselves to the point where mainstream critics felt compelled to aim darts of denigration at the still pulpy flavour of their work. But I recall the commotion that followed Ross MacDonald's work being reviewed on the front page of the New York Times Book Review, the ultimate arbiter of American middlebrow respectability. Though MacDonald's Lew Archer novels are anchored firmly in what one might call ‘deep psychology’, they were written with a keen eye toward the increasingly bizarre social mores of Southern California, and thus admired by many critics as a sort of field guide to LaLa Land, presented with more accuracy and flair than the mainstream could imagine.

  To some extent, the Beck novels were viewed in the same way. This was particularly important because Sweden was regarded with suspicion by the mainstream in sixties America, as a land consumed by socialism and sex, not necessarily in that order. I remember the right-wing shill William F. Buckley, soon to become a thriller writer himself, opining that Swedes were communistic and hedonistic and committed suicide at a prodigious rate as a result. It seemed to me, as an American teenager whose attachment to his Swedish heritage grew stronger with every movie Ingmar Bergman released, that Buckley was being disingenuous at best. The world portrayed by Sjöwall and Wahlöö served as a realistic counterpoint to such outlandish claims. If anything, knowing that Sweden's murder rate was infinitesimal compared with America's made the context of Swedish crime books particularly relevant.

  My memory tells me I first read Murder at the Savoy (in translation) in Sweden, in 1973, soon after it had been published in paperback. I must have bought the book in Stockholm, where I was meeting relatives, imposing on their hospitality as only a 21-year-old on his first trip away from home can, and reading as much Swedish literature as I could afford to buy in imported English-language editions. I read the book on the way to visit my grandmother's family on Öland, an island in the Baltic. Few of them spoke English, but I remember somehow getting them to explain to me how the book's Swedish title, Polis, polis, potatismos, got translated into Murder at the Savoy.

  When rebellious Swedes in the sixties called policemen ‘pigs’, they chanted ‘polis, polis, potatisgris’ (literally: ‘police, police, potatopig’). ‘Potatismos’ means ‘mashed potato’ in Swedish, and the play on words in the book's title is typical of Sjöwall and Wahlöö. The mashed potato relates to the story, but it's not really a ‘clue’; in fact the relationship of police and pigs is more integral to the plot. It's very much like the preceding Beck novel, The Fire Engine that Disappeared. Although that one is a story about, amongst other things, arson, the engine of the title is actually a children's toy that has been lost, and whose rediscovery provides another indirect connection to the story. The titles themselves are often fanciful, perhaps with a nod to the cosy tradition of parlour mysteries, which had previously dominated Swedish crime fiction, and perhaps indicating the playful nature of the narrative voice, reminding readers that the title, like the book itself, is much more than a mere puzzle. Only Sjöwall and Wahlöö would begin a chapter, ‘Everything happened on that Monday’, as if their players were following a script, events beyond their control. Which, in a sense, they were
. Nothing typifies better the strange relationship between the realistic nature of police procedural and the fantastic nature of fiction itself than that simple line.

  Rereading Murder at the Savoy brought back a frisson with each of the many moments that reveal an insider's Sweden. Most readers will not recall the legions of repressed Britons and Americans who flocked to the film I Am Curious, Yellow, expecting to be shocked by Swedish sexuality. Far from licentiousness, a very Swedish practicality pervaded matters sexual, as it does in the novel, in everything from Martin Beck's difficult relationship with his wife to his female colleague Åsa Torell. It was a relief to discover that, in their own ways, Swedes were as repressed as Americans! If anything the scene where the Malmö cop Per Månsson, who had been introduced in the previous Beck novel, visits the victim's wife, who is sunbathing naked, reveals the restraints that tradition put on Swedish ‘liberation’. Sjöwall and Wahlöö make it clear that, in reality, Swedish society was struggling as much as any other to cope with the changes brought about by the sixties. They are far more concerned with the old-fashioned structure of Swedish society, and its peculiar class-consciousness, an anachronism of sorts in an egalitarian country, but one whose economic base they make plain in Gunvald Larsson's relationship with his status-seeking sister. Much is made of Sjöwall's and Wahlöö's status as Marxists, but the strength of their ‘analysis’ is always in the way personal situations reflect flaws in the wider structure.

  Swedish status was tied to one's occupation. The man who winds up face down in his mashed potatoes is Viktor Palmgren, an industrialist with his fingers in a number of shady multinational deals. Thus his murder takes on a special sort of importance, the wheels of justice turning in a well-greased fashion. That this is not uncommon may be indicated by the appearance of the secret police in the story, to Beck's evident discomfort, amusement, and disgust. Sjöwall and Wahlöö drop in a mention of the Robert Kennedy assassination in a timely reminder of the way the police are always stretched beyond their limits trying to keep up with the machinations of the various shell and holding companies, and the appearance of one executive's call-girl/mistress further illustrates the gap between the everyday cops and society's elite.

  I raced along to the book's conclusion, its power intensified by the matter-of-fact way it is reported. The killer's interrogation is reprinted as if verbatim, which gives it a haunting quality. It reflects the procedural reality, but even more, it puts the reader into the middle of that reality. It also reminds us, as noted earlier, that the abstractions of capitalism and socialism involve the lives of real people.

  Getting back to that first sense of pleasure I mentioned, the sense that the story was still fresh, still new, it also reminded me of Henning Mankell's The Man Who Smiled. The connection between the Beck novels and Mankell's Wallander series is obvious; see Mankell's introduction to the first Beck novel in this series, Roseanna, if you doubt it. But beyond the obvious similarities, Mankell's Wallander books are set in Skåne, the southern part of Sweden from which Kristiansson and Kvant have inflicted themselves on Stockholm. Perhaps Mankell is getting one back for the Skånians. The Man Who Smiled pits Wallander against a tycoon who is very much a Viktor Palmgren for the 1990s, and whose privileged place in society reminds us that certain things remained unchanged decades later in Sweden. Even looked at as series, there are parallels: Murder at the Savoy is one of the few books that takes Beck out of Stockholm, but The Man Who Went Up in Smoke was set in Budapest, just as Mankell sent Wallander to Latvia in The Dogs of Riga.

  In The Fire Engine that Disappeared there is a description of Beck's colleague Fredrik Melander.

  He was generally known for his logical mind, his excellent memory and immovable calm. Within a smaller circle, he was most famous for his remarkable capacity for always being in the toilet when anyone wanted to get a hold of him. His sense of humour was not nonexistent, but very modest; he was parsimonious and dull and never had brilliant ideas or sudden inspiration. Briefly, he was a first-class policeman.

  Apart from the comic relief of Melander's propensity for the toilets, which has an Ed McBain feel about it, the description of a ‘first-class policeman’ fits Wallander every bit as closely as Melander.

  I seem to recall the success of the Beck novels bringing us English editions of the Danish crime writer Anders Bodelsen. In Henning Mankell's wake have followed translations of a number of talented Nordic crime writers, most notably Iceland's Arnaldur Indridason. They all owe something to Sjöwall and Wahlöö, and it's wonderful that this series will now make the originals available to a new generation of readers. It's also worth mentioning how well-served Sjöwall and Wahlöö were by their translators, of whom I especially recommend Joan Tate and Alan Blair.

  Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö originally mapped out a series conceived to run ten novels, and Wahlöö lived just long enough to finish them. This allowed the authors the scope they needed to draw the kind of picture they wanted of all levels of Swedish society, and even to have fun with various aspects of the detective fiction genre, including the classic ‘locked room’ mystery. There is not a dud in the bunch, as you will discover. But reader, beware: these books are compulsive, and there are only ten of them! If you started with the first, you're more than halfway done!

  Michael Carlson

  Michael Carlson has reviewed crime fiction for The Spectator, Daily Telegraph, and Financial Times. He is the film editor of Crime Time magazine, and writes the ‘American Eye’ column for the e-zine Shots. He has also published books about the film directors Sergio Leone, Clint Eastwood, and Oliver Stone.

  1

  The day was hot and stifling, without a breath of air. There had been a haze quivering in the atmosphere, but now the sky was high and clear, its colours shifting from rose to dusky blue. The sun's red disc would soon disappear beyond the island of Ven. The evening breeze, which was already rippling the smooth mirror of the Sound, brought weak puffs of agreeable freshness to the streets of Malmö. With the gentle wind came fumes of the rotting refuse and seaweed that had been washed up on Ribersborg Beach and in through the mouth of the harbour into the canals.

  The city doesn't resemble the rest of Sweden to a very great degree, largely because of its location. Malmö is closer to Rome than to the midnight sun, and the lights of the Danish coast twinkle along the horizon. And even if many winters are slushy and windblown, summers are just as often long and warm, filled with the song of the nightingale and scents from the lush vegetation of the expansive parks.

  Which is exactly the way it was that fair summer evening early in July 1969. It was also quiet, calm and quite deserted. The tourists weren't noticeable to any extent – they hardly ever are. As for the roaming, unwashed hash-smokers, only the first bands had arrived, and not so many more would show up either, since most of them never get past Copenhagen.

  It was rather quiet even in the big hotel across from the railway station near the harbour. A few foreign businessmen were deliberating over their reservations at the reception desk. The cloakroom attendant was reading one of the classics undisturbed in amongst the rails of coats. The dimly lit bar contained only a couple of regular customers speaking in low voices and a barman in a snow-white jacket.

  In the large eighteenth-century dining room to the right of the lobby there wasn't much going on either, even if it was somewhat livelier. A few tables were occupied, mostly by people who were sitting alone. The pianist was taking a break. In front of the swinging doors leading to the kitchen stood a waiter, hands behind his back, looking contemplatively out of the big open windows, probably lost in thoughts of the sandy beaches not too far away.

  A dinner party of seven, a well-dressed and solemn gathering of varying sexes and ages, was sitting in the back of the dining room. Their table was cluttered with glasses and fancy dishes, surrounded by champagne buckets. The restaurant personnel had discreetly withdrawn, for the host had just risen to speak.

  He was a tall man in late middle age, with
a dark-blue shantung suit, iron-grey hair and a deep suntan. He spoke calmly and skilfully, modulating his voice in subtly humorous phrases. The other six at the table sat watching him quietly; only one of them was smoking.

  Through the open windows came the sounds of passing cars, trains switching tracks at the station across the canal, the largest junction in northern Europe, the abrupt hoarse tooting of a boat from Copenhagen, and somewhere on the bank of the canal a girl giggling.

  This was the scene that soft warm Wednesday in July, at approximately eight-thirty in the evening. It's essential to use the expression ‘approximately’, for no one ever managed to pin down the exact time when it happened. On the other hand, what did happen is quite easy to describe.

  A man came in through the main entrance, cast a glance at the reception desk with the foreign businessmen and the uniformed attendant, passed the cloakroom and the long narrow lobby outside the bar, and walked into the dining room calmly and resolutely, with steps that weren't notably rapid. There was nothing remarkable about this man so far. No one looked at him; he did not bother to look around either.

  He passed the Hammond organ, the grand piano and the buffet with its array of glistening delicacies and continued past the two large pillars supporting the ceiling. With the same resolve he walked directly towards the party in the corner, where the host stood talking with his back turned to him. When the man was about five steps away, he thrust his right hand inside his suit coat. One of the women at the table looked at him, and the speaker half turned his head to see what was distracting her. He gave the approaching man a quick, indifferent glance, and started to turn back towards his guests, without a second's interruption in the comments he was making. At the same instant the newcomer pulled out a steel-blue object with a fluted butt and a long barrel, aimed carefully and shot the speaker in the head. The report was not shattering. It sounded more like the peaceful pop of a rifle in a shooting gallery at a fair.