Crime is an ongoing process, it started with Cain and Abel and will continue for a long time into the future. The Story of Crime can be read out of order. I like the introduction by mystery great Michael Connelly, paying his respects to his predecessors.more What else is remarkable about this entry? It’s the most consciously leftist critique of Swedish society, with increased crime, higher suicide rate, dugs, prostitution increasing, police corruption, issues with injustice. But I like the centrality of Beck in this one, and his humanity: he connects with Rhea, a landlady, who helps him with the crimes, reaches out to connect with him. In the Beck stories, it is a team approach. I thought there were several nods in this one to Christie and Poirot, since Beck is usually not the central figure in solving the crimes. And there is a twisting set of surprises in the resolution that are engaging. The solution of the crime in this one features Beck as almost Poirot-like in revealing to a suspect that he knows more about the scene and the suspect than anyone could have imagined. He’s back at work, mostly lonely, driven. In recent books we have gotten a little back story on Beck’s team as people, and regarding Beck himself we now see he is divorced, forging a relationship with his adult daughter, and maybe strating a new relationship? Is he happier? Well, he smiles once a while! Oh, and of course Beck recovers from his traumatic rifle wound at the hands of The Abominable Man (#6). A woman robs a bank and kills a man in the process, and an old man is killed in a locked room, which everyone initially assumes is suicide, but where is the murder weapon? Beck sees that mistakes were made in the early investigation of both crimes because of early too-quick assumptions. So there’s two crimes in the book, that only Beck thinks are related, for no obvious reason. Beck himself does not read detective stories, but several people around him do, and they all recognize the death of an older man in a locked room as a familiar mystery trope. A wo The Locked Room, Martin Beck #8 in the Majo Sjowall and Per Wahloo mystery series, reveals a bit of sense of humor in its self conscious focus on a sub-genre, a “locked room” mystery, associated originally with Agatha Christie.
The Locked Room, Martin Beck #8 in the Majo Sjowall and Per Wahloo mystery series, reveals a bit of sense of humor in its self conscious focus on a sub-genre, a “locked room” mystery, associated originally with Agatha Christie.
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