The Laughing Policeman Read online

  Praise for

  MAJ SJÖWALL and

  PER WAHLÖÖ

  “Hauntingly effective storytelling.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “The first great series of police thrillers.… They caught the color of the political times and are above all truly exciting.”

  —Michael Ondaatje

  “Sjöwall and Wahlöö are the best writers of police procedurals in the world.”

  —The Birmingham Post

  “No one is more convincing than [Sjöwall and Wahlöö] in transmitting the actual shock of brutal murder.”

  —The Buffalo News

  “Magically successful, a series of crime novels you shouldn’t miss.”

  —Minneapolis Tribune

  Books by MAJ SJÖWALL and PER WAHLÖÖ

  Roseanna

  The Man Who Went Up in Smoke

  The Man on the Balcony

  The Laughing Policeman

  The Fire Engine That Disappeared

  Murder at the Savoy

  The Abominable Man

  Cop Killer

  The Terrorists

  Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö

  Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, her husband and coauthor, wrote ten Martin Beck mysteries. Mr Wahlöö, who died in 1975, was a reporter for several Swedish newspapers and magazines and wrote numerous radio and television plays, film scripts, short stories, and novels. Maj Sjöwall is also a poet.

  SECOND VINTAGE CRIME/BLACK LIZARD EDITION, FEBRUARY 2009

  Translation copyright © 1970 and renewed 1998 by Random House, Inc.

  Introduction copyright © 2009 by Jonathan Franzen

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in Sweden as Den skrattande polisen by P.A. Norstedt & Söners Förlag, Stockholm, in 1968. Copyright © 1968 by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö. This translation originally published in hardcover in slightly different form in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1970, and subsequently in paperback by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1992.

  Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Crime/Black Lizard and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Acknowledgment is gratefully extended to Hillside Publications (St. Giles), Ltd., for permission to quote from “Jolly Coppers on Parade.”

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

  Sjöwall, Maj.

  [skrattande polisen. English]

  The laughing policeman / by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö; translated from the Swedish by Alan Blair.

  —1st Vintage Crime/Black Lizard ed.

  p. cm.

  I. Wahlöö, Per, 1926–1975. II. Title. III. Series.

  PT9876.29.J63S513 1992

  839.7′374—dc20

  92-50005

  eISBN: 978-0-307-74428-9

  www.vintagebooks.com

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  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 This Author

  Also by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö

  INTRODUCTION

  An actual Swedish person, my college roommate Ekström, introduced me to this book. He gave me a mass-market edition on the cover of which was a cheesy photograph of a raincoated man in mod sunglasses pointing a submachine gun into the reader’s face. This was in 1979. I was exclusively reading great literature (Shakespeare, Kafka, Goethe), and although I could forgive Ekström for not understanding what a serious person I’d become, I had zero interest in opening a book with such a lurid cover. It wasn’t until several years later, on a morning when I was sick in bed and too weak to face the likes of Faulkner or Henry James, that I happened to pick up the little paperback again. And how perfectly comforting The Laughing Policeman turned out to be! Once I’d made the acquaintance of Inspector Martin Beck, I was never again so afraid of colds (and my wife was never again so afraid of how grouchy I would be when I got one), because colds were henceforth associated with the grim, hilarious world of Swedish murder police. There were ten Martin Beck mysteries altogether, each of them readable cover-to-cover on the worst day of a sore throat. The volume I loved best and reread most often was The Laughing Policeman. Its happily married authors, Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, had wedded the satisfying simplicities of genre fiction to the tragicomic spirit of great literature. Their books combined beautiful, deft detective work with powerful pure evocations of the kind of misery that people with sore throats so crave the company of.

  “The weather was abominable,” the authors inform us on the first page of The Laughing Policeman; and abominable it remains thereafter. The floors at police headquarters are “dirtied” by men “irritable and clammy with sweat and rain.” One chapter is set on a “repulsive Wednesday.” Another begins: “Monday. Snow. Wind. Bitter cold.” As with the weather, so with society as a whole. Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s negativity toward postwar Sweden—a theme in all ten of their books—reaches its delirious apex in The Laughing Policeman. Not only does the Swedish winter weather inevitably suck, but the Swedish journalists are inevitably sensationalist and stupid, the Swedish landladies inevitably racist and rapacious, the Swedish police administrators inevitably self-serving, the Swedish upper class inevitably decadent or vicious, the Swedish antiwar demonstrators inevitably persecuted, the Swedish ashtrays inevitably overflowing, the Swedish sex inevitably sordid or unappetizingly blatant, the Swedish streets at Christmastime inevitably nightmarish. When Detective Lennart Kollberg finally gets an evening off and pours himself a nice big glass of akvavit, you can be sure that his phone is about to ring with urgent business. Stockholm in the late sixties probably really did have more than its share of ugliness and frustrations, but the perfect ugliness and perfect frustration depicted in the novel are clearly comic exaggerations.

  Needless to say, the book’s exemplary sufferer, Martin Beck, fails to see the humor. Indeed, what makes the novel so comforting to read is precisely its denial of comfort to its main character. When, on Christmas Day, his children play him a recording of “The Laughing Policeman,” in which the singer Charles Penrose gives out big belly laughs between the verses, Beck listens to it stone-faced while the children laugh and laugh. Beck blows his nose and sneezes, enduring an apparently incurable cold, smoking his nasty Floridas. He’s stoop-shouldered, gray-skinned, bad at chess. He has stomach ulcers, drinks too much coffee (“in order to make his condition a little worse”), and sleeps alone on the living-room sofa (in
order to avoid his nag of a wife). At no point does he brilliantly help solve the mass murder that’s committed in chapter 2 of the book. He does achieve one valuable insight—he guesses which cold case a deceased young colleague has been reworking—but he neglects to mention this insight to anyone else, and by failing to perform a thorough search of his dead colleague’s desk he inflicts a month and a half of avoidable misery on his department. His most memorable act in the book is to prevent a crime, by removing bullets from a gun, rather than to solve one.

  One striking thing about Sjöwall and Wahlöö, as mystery writers, is how honestly unsmitten they are with their main character. They let Martin Beck be a real policeman, which is to say that they resist the temptation to make him a romantic rebel, a heroic misfit, a brilliant problem-solver, an exciting drinker, a secret do-gooder, or any of the other self-flattering personae that crime writers are wont to project onto their protagonists. Beck is cautious, recessive, phlegmatic, and altogether unwriterly. By nonetheless rendering him with exacting sympathy, Sjöwall and Wahlöö are, in effect, swearing their allegiance to the realities of police work. They do occasionally indulge themselves with their secondary characters, notably Lennart Kollberg, the “sensualist” and gun-hater in whose leftist tirades it’s hard not to hear the authors’ own voices and opinions. But Kollberg, tellingly, is the one detective who feels ever more estranged from the police department. Later in the series, he finally quits the force altogether, while Martin Beck dutifully persists in rising through the ranks. Although much is made (and rightly so) of Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s ambition to create a ten-volume portrait of a corrupt modern society, no less impressive is their openness to discovering, book by book, via the character of Martin Beck, how stubbornly Other the world of police work is.

  As long as the mass murder remains unsolved, Beck can be nothing but miserable. He and his colleagues pursue a thousand useless leads, go door to door in freezing winds, endure abuse from fools and sadists, make punishingly long drives on wintery roads, read unimaginable reams of dull reports. To do police work is, in a word, to suffer. We readers, not being Martin Beck, can laugh at how awful the world is and with what cruel efficiency it visits pain on the detectives; we readers are having fun all along. And yet it’s the suffering cops who, in the end, produce the beautiful thing: the simultaneous solution of a very old crime and a horrific new one, a solution that turns on a delicious piece of automotive arcana, a solution foreshadowed by the words of witness after witness, “It’s funny you should ask …” The Laughing Policeman is a journey through real-world ugliness toward the self-sufficient beauties of good police work. The book is fueled by the tension between the dystopic vision of its authors and the essential optimism of its genre. When Martin Beck finally does laugh, on the final page, it’s in recognition of how unnecessary all the suffering turns out to have been. How unreal.

  —Jonathan Franzen

  1

  On the evening of the thirteenth of November it was pouring in Stockholm. Martin Beck and Kollberg sat over a game of chess in the latter’s apartment not far from the subway station of Skärmarbrink in the southern suburbs. Both were off duty insomuch as nothing special had happened during the last few days.

  Martin Beck was very bad at chess but played all the same. Kollberg had a daughter who was just over two months old. On this particular evening he was forced to baby-sit, and Martin Beck on the other hand had no wish to go home before it was absolutely necessary. The weather was abominable. Driving curtains of rain swept over the rooftops, pattering against the windows, and the streets lay almost deserted; the few people to be seen evidently had urgent reasons to be out on such a night.

  Outside the American embassy on Strandvägen and along the streets leading to it, 412 policemen were struggling with about twice as many demonstrators. The police were equipped with tear gas bombs, pistols, whips, batons, cars, motorcycles, shortwave radios, battery megaphones, riot dogs and hysterical horses. The demonstrators were armed with a letter and cardboard signs, which grew more and more sodden in the pelting rain. It was difficult to regard them as a homogeneous group, for the crowd comprised every possible kind of person, from thirteen-year-old schoolgirls in jeans and duffel coats and dead-serious political students to agitators and professional troublemakers, and at least one eighty-five-year-old woman artist with a beret and a blue silk umbrella. Some strong common motive had induced them to defy both the rain and whatever else was in store. The police, on the other hand, by no means comprised the force’s élite. They had been mustered from every available precinct in town, but every policeman who knew a doctor or was good at dodging had managed to escape this unpleasant assignment. There remained those who knew what they were doing and liked it, and those who were considered cocky and who were far too young and inexperienced to try and get out of it; besides, they hadn’t a clue as to what they were doing or why they were doing it. The horses reared up, chewing their bits, and the police fingered their holsters and made charge after charge with their batons. A small girl was bearing a sign with the memorable text: DO YOUR DUTY! KEEP FUCKING AND MAKE MORE POLICE! Three 190-pound patrolmen flung themselves at her, tore the sign to pieces and dragged her into a squad car, where they twisted her arms and pawed her breasts. She had turned thirteen on this very day and had not yet developed any.

  Altogether more than fifty persons were seized. Many were bleeding. Some were celebrities, who were not above writing to the papers or complaining on the radio and television. At the sight of them, the sergeants on duty at the local police stations had a fit of the shivers and showed them the door with apologetic smiles and stiff bows. Others were less well treated during the inevitable questioning. A mounted policeman had been hit on the head by an empty bottle and someone must have thrown it.

  The operation was in the charge of a high-ranking police officer trained at a military school. He was considered an expert on keeping order and he regarded with satisfaction the utter chaos he had managed to achieve.

  In the apartment at Skärmarbrink, Kollberg gathered up the chessmen, jumbled them into the wooden box and shut the sliding lid with a smack. His wife had come home from her evening course and gone straight to bed.

  “You’ll never learn this,” Kollberg said plaintively.

  “They say you need a special gift for it,” Martin Beck replied gloomily. “Chess sense I think it’s called.”

  Kollberg changed the subject.

  “I bet there’s a helluva to-do at Strandvägen this evening,” he said.

  “I expect so. What’s it all about?”

  “They were going to hand a letter over to the ambassador,” Kollberg said. “A letter. Why don’t they send it by mail?”

  “It wouldn’t cause so much fuss.”

  “No, but all the same, it’s so stupid it makes you ashamed.”

  “Yes,” Martin Beck agreed.

  He had put on his hat and coat and was about to go. Kollberg got up quickly.

  “I’ll come with you,” he said.

  “Whatever for?”

  “Oh, to stroll around a little.”

  “In this weather?”

  “I like rain,” Kollberg said, climbing into his dark-blue poplin coat.

  “Isn’t it enough for me to have a cold?” Martin Beck said.

  Martin Beck and Kollberg were policemen. They belonged to the homicide squad. For the moment they had nothing special to do and could, with relatively clear consciences, consider themselves free.

  Downtown no policemen were to be seen in the streets. The old lady outside the central station waited in vain for a patrolman to come up to her, salute, and smilingly help her across the street. A person who had just smashed the glass of a showcase with a brick had no need to worry that the rising and falling wail from a patrol car would suddenly interrupt his doings.

  The police were busy.

  A week earlier the police commissioner had said in a public statement that many of the regular duties of the police would h
ave to be neglected because they were obliged to protect the American ambassador against letters and other things from people who disliked Lyndon Johnson and the war in Vietnam.

  Detective Inspector Lennart Kollberg didn’t like Lyndon Johnson and the war in Vietnam either, but he did like strolling about the city when it was raining.

  At eleven o’clock in the evening it was still raining and the demonstration could be regarded as broken up.

  At the same time eight murders and one attempted murder were committed in Stockholm.

  2

  Rain, he thought, looking out of the window dejectedly. November darkness and rain, cold and pelting. A forerunner of the approaching winter. Soon it would start to snow.

  Nothing in town was very attractive just now, especially not this street with its bare trees and large, shabby apartment houses. A bleak esplanade, misdirected and wrongly planned from the outset. It led nowhere in particular and never had, it was just there, a dreary reminder of some grandiose city plan, begun long ago but never finished. There were no lighted shop windows and no people on the sidewalks. Only big, leafless trees and street lamps, whose cold white light was reflected by puddles and wet car roofs.

  He had trudged about so long in the rain that his hair and the legs of his pants were sopping wet, and now he felt the moisture along his shins and right down his neck to the shoulder blades, cold and trickling.

  He undid the two top buttons of his raincoat, stuck his right hand inside his jacket and fingered the butt of the pistol. It, too, felt cold and clammy.

  At the touch, an involuntary shudder passed through the man in the dark-blue poplin raincoat and he tried to think of something else. For instance of the hotel balcony at Andraitz, where he had spent his vacation five months earlier. Of the heavy, motionless heat and of the bright sunshine over the quayside and the fishing boats and of the limitless, deep-blue sky above the mountain ridge on the other side of the bay.