The Man Who Went Up In Smoke


With a never-ending stream of Nordic authors currently assailing UK crime fiction publishers, it probably wasn’t going to take long for someone to dust off the novels of Swedish husband and wife team Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö. Together they wrote a series of detective novels based around the character of Martin Beck. Some while back, on the back of a recommendation, I did pick up The Laughing Policeman which appeared in the Orion Crime Masterworks series. But I must admit I hadn’t read it.
Over the weekend, I saw The Man Who Went Up In Smoke in a local bookshop, and picked it up. This is the second in the series, and involves Beck searching for a journalist who’s disappeared in Budapest while he was on a story. Beyond that, I don’t really want to say much about the plot as that’s part of the fun of the novel.
You can easily see how Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s main protagonist has informed the way other Swedish and Nordic crime fiction has developed over the years. Beck seems to be something of a loner – he has a wife and kids, but they hardly feature, with cameos at the start and finish. He has a cynical world view.
I liked this book, and look forward to the republishing of the whole series. It seems that each novel will have a new introduction by a contemporary writer (Val McDermid writes here), as well as notes in the back as part of the HarperPerennial’s P.S. series.


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