Martin Beck Passes

By Martha Duffy

COP KILLER

by MAJ SJOeWALL and PER WAHLOeOe

296 pages. Pantheon. $7.95.

At the beginning of The Laughing Policeman, a Stockholm bus is found with eight people sitting in their seats, all shot to death. For thriller readers, a parallel tragedy has just struck. Last month Per Wahloeoe died at 48 of pancreatic disease. Since his widow does not intend to continue their Martin Beck series, the literary toll seems higher than the one in the bus. It is as if an entire family of friends were abruptly wiped out. Few thriller writers have interwoven so many good recurring characters with their plots; only the late Margery Allingham comes to mind.

One thinks first of Beck himself, chief (since The Abominable Man) of Sweden's National Homicide Squad. A laconic fellow with bad digestion and a fear of flying, he has only two diversions: building model boats and working jigsaw puzzles. In The Man on the Balcony, Beck considers his close associates: "He disliked Gunvald Larsson and had no high opinion of Roenn. He had no high opinion of himself either, for that matter." That is one of Beck's few mistakes in judgment. The dyspeptic, broody official is that rarest creation, an ideal policeman.

Keystone Klutzes. His best friend, Lennart Kollberg, is nearly as important to the series as Beck. Kollberg is a paunchy, garrulous perfectionist. Like Holmes and Hercule Poirot, he deeply believes that "chance has no part in police work"--but his hunches tend to be inspired. These two are supported by a sturdy cast: Fredrik Melander, who has a prodigious memory and spends much of his day in the bathroom; Gunvald Larsson, an impetuous dropout from what he calls "upper-class riffraff;" Einar Roenn, who writes execrable official reports; Per Maensonn, who is chief in Malmoe, where trouble often occurs (and where the Wahloeoes lived). Finally, there are the Keystone Klutzes, Kvant and Kristiansson--patrolmen stuck with each other because neither can get along with anyone else. They impede every investigation, but when Kvant is killed in The Abominable Man, the authors award Kristiansson a virtually identical replacement called Kvastmo.

These characters do more than provide incidental entertainment. Kollberg's sexy wife Gun, Larsson's billingsgate, Beck's wretched rides on the subway are points of reference and stability in books that have become increasingly radical.

The early ones, such as Roseanna (1967) and The Man on the Balcony (1968), are about sex crimes against innocent people. In later books the victims are as villainous as the killer. In Murder at the Savoy (1971), a tycoon is shot during an after-dinner speech, his death mask etched in mashed potatoes. He turns out to have been a major white-collar crook with, among other things, a far-flung gunrunning empire. The eponymous Abominable Man is, of all things, a police superintendent. After someone slices the man in half with a bayonet, Beck compiles an appalling dossier of his brutalities. Many instances are easily available in the Ombudsman's files, all marked "No action."

Before starting the Martin Beck series, Per Wahloeoe was a prolific writer of both novels and journalism--much of it markedly leftist. His wife Maj Sjoewall, 39, is also a journalist and poet. The Wahloeoes called their work total collaboration, but for the most part, the terse prose in the Beck books is resonant of Wahloeoe's earlier fiction.

The cooperative venture is most profoundly felt in their personal, acrid critique of Sweden's bourgeois welfare state. The Wahloeoes' command of police procedure has always been formidable, but they have a deep knowledge of more elusive territory: the people for whom socialism does not work. The books are full of divorced women who cannot get jobs because there is no room for their children in day-care centers and pitiable alcoholics chased from park to park by patrolmen who cannot think of anything better to do. In The Locked Room (1973), probably the best book in the series, Beck ruminates about Sweden, which has problems surprisingly similar to those of capitalistic countries: "The so-called welfare state abounds with sick, poor and lonely people, living at best on dog food, who are left uncared for until they die in their rathole apartments." In fact, the Wahloeoes delight in pointing out that supermarkets stock row upon row of pet food for just these consumers.

Mentholated Toothpick. The mysteries also follow a growing public distrust of police. As a little girl, Beck's daughter boasts about her daddy; as a teenager, she keeps quiet about his work. The cops, all in middle age, feel their lives no longer have definition. The police force has been nationalized, structured, streamlined--and paralyzed. Recruits are fewer and worse each year. In The Locked Room, the major criminals escape conviction, and Beck loses a promotion--not that he is sure he wants it--because the results of his painstaking investigation are simply not believed by the technocrats who have become his superiors.

The new book, Cop Killer, is in some ways an exercise in nostalgia. Much of the plot concerns a man who killed an American girl, Roseanna McGraw, in the first book and who may or may not have committed another similar crime At the time of Cop Killer, Wahloeoe knew he was dying; he and Maj completed just one more book, as yet untranslated. Unhappily, few of their works are likely to make their way to the screen. The sole film adaptation (of The Laughing Policeman, starring Walter Matthau) might have been made by Kvant and Kristiansson. As time passes, the novels will probably be taken more seriously as literature because of their biting social comment and the shrewdness with which it animates the plots.

But mystery lovers, a sentimental, savoring lot, will miss less portentous things. There are, for instance, the times when the Wahloeoes kid their Swedish publisher, Norstedt, in print. Or funny throwaway scenes like Beck's feverish preparation for a dinner party that he gives to mark the end of his 18-year marriage. Or even Larsson's mentholated toothpick. There was a rumor that Beck dies in the just completed book. The only consolation that can be offered now is that he does not.

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