{"id":1611,"date":"2006-08-14T13:36:38","date_gmt":"2006-08-14T13:36:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/2006\/08\/the_man_who_wen_1\/"},"modified":"2006-08-14T13:36:38","modified_gmt":"2006-08-14T13:36:38","slug":"the_man_who_wen_1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/2006\/08\/the_man_who_wen_1\/","title":{"rendered":"The Man Who Went Up In Smoke"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/rcm-uk.amazon.co.uk\/e\/cm?t=friday05-21&#038;o=2&#038;p=8&#038;l=as1&#038;asins=0007232845&#038;fc1=000000&#038;lc1=0000ff&#038;bc1=ffffff&#038;npa=1&#038;lt1=_blank&#038;IS1=1&#038;f=ifr&#038;bg1=ffffff\" width=\"120\" height=\"240\" scrolling=\"no\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\" frameborder=\"0\" align=\"right\"><br \/>\n<\/iframe><br \/>\nWith a never-ending stream of Nordic authors currently assailing UK crime fiction publishers, it probably wasn&#8217;t going to take long for someone to dust off the novels of Swedish husband and wife team Maj Sj&#246;wall and Per Wahl&#246;&#246;. 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&#8217;t read it.<br \/>\nOver 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&#8217;s disappeared in Budapest while he was on a story. Beyond that, I don&#8217;t really want to say much about the plot as that&#8217;s part of the fun of the novel.<br \/>\nYou can easily see how Sj&#246;wall and Wahl&#246;&#246;&#8217;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 &#8211; he has a wife and kids, but they hardly feature, with cameos at the start and finish. He has a cynical world view.<br \/>\nI 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&#8217;s P.S. series.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>With a never-ending stream of Nordic authors currently assailing UK crime fiction publishers, it probably wasn&#8217;t going to take long for someone to dust off the novels of Swedish husband and wife team Maj Sj&#246;wall and Per Wahl&#246;&#246;. Together they wrote a series of detective novels based around the character of Martin Beck. Some while [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"cybocfi_hide_featured_image":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1611","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1611","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1611"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1611\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1611"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1611"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1611"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}