The Laughing Policeman

On a cold November night in Stockholm, a gunman boards a Stockholm city bus after dark, produces a submachine gun, and shoots down eight of the people aboard, one passenger left wounded, and among the dead, to the homicide squad's disbelief, is one of their own: Åke Stenström, a young detective off duty that night, a man with no assignment that could possibly have put him on that bus.

Martin Beck's investigation therefore runs on two questions, who massacres a bus, and what was Stenström doing there, and the second unlocks the first: the dead detective, ambitious and secretive, had been privately reworking a sixteen year old unsolved case, the murder of a Portuguese prostitute, on the theory that closed is not the same as solved. The squad must reconstruct their colleague's off the books investigation from his desk drawers and his girlfriend's memory, the procedural turned inward, police work performed on a policeman, and the mass shooting resolves, with the series' characteristic cold logic, into camouflage: eight deaths purchased to hide one.

Sjöwall and Wahlöö conduct it all in the tone that made the series a world influence, flat, exact, blackly funny about bureaucracy, with the Swedish welfare state's self image quietly dismantled in the background of every interview, and Beck's dyspepsia and dying marriage doing the humanising the genre usually outsources to whisky.

Around two hundred and forty pages.

Best for readers who want the foundation stone of Scandinavian crime fiction, the procedural perfected and politicised in the same motion.