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“Most crimes are a mystery in the beginning,” says the Public Prosecutor in concluding a press conference discussing a woman’s murder. In this case, it’s a real mystery: a woman’s naked body has been accidentally dredged up from a Swedish canal and, with no clues forthcoming and nobody reported missing in the area, the police can’t even put a name to the victim.  This is the gambit of Roseanna (1965), the first of ten police procedurals featuring Martin Beck, written by husband and wife team, Per Wahlöö and Maj Sjöwall.

Where much of the crime fiction that I’ve read before - few, admittedly - has focused on the methods of the lone detective, from Holmes to Poirot, it was a refreshing experience to find that Sjöwall and Wahlöö had situated their crime story away from supersleuth glamour and into the realistic drudgery of the Homicide Bureau where being First Detective Inspector is just a job like any other, albeit one that requires a certain dogged mindset.

As jobs go, Martin Beck’s is one that appears to be led by some glimmer of predestination —

Martin Beck wasn’t chief of Homicide Squad and had no such ambitions. Sometimes he doubted if he would ever make superintendent although the only things that could actually stand in his way were death or some very serious error in his duties.

— and, as seems the staple for any dour detective, once it gets its hooks into you, all else falls by the wayside, notably the marriage, which had “slipped into a fairly dull routine” and, in snippets throughout, shows little chance of reparation:

At five-thirty he called home.

‘Shall we wait for dinner?’

‘No, go ahead and eat.’

‘Will you be late?’

‘I don’t know. It’s possible.’

‘You haven’t seen the children for ages.’

Without doubt he had both seen and heard them less than nine hours ago, but she knew that just as well as he did.

‘Martin?’

‘Yes.’

‘You don’t sound well. Is it anything special?’

‘No, not at all. We have a lot to do’

‘Is that all?’

‘Yes, of course.’

Now she sounded like herself again. The moment had passed. A few of her standard phrases and the discussion was over. He held the receiver to his ear and heard the click when she put hers down. A click, and empty silence and it was as if she were a thousand miles away. Years had passed since they had really talked.

Where Beck’s head is really at is in the thrill of the case. However, when the victim surfaces in early July the investigation moves at a pace typically reserved for snails. The aforementioned press conference is bereft of details because the case itself has few leads. Even when a tip off from Interpol finally kickstarts proceedings, the pace of the case still seems lethargic for the contemporary reader, yet in no way releasing its grip.

In this age of mobile telephones, computers, email, and electronic records, it almost seems incredulous the way Martin Beck and his colleagues go about their days: waiting for files being sent through the post; hunting payphones to report back information; travelling back and forth between Stockholm and the town of Motala; scanning manifests for data that, today, would only be the click of a button away. And when things start moving, tracing the crime to a tourist-filled boat, the scope of the case becomes apparent:

Eighty-five people, one of whom was presumably guilty, and the rest whom were possible witnesses, each had their small pieces that might fit into the great jig-saw puzzle. Eighty-five people, spread over four different continents. Just to locate them was a Herculean task. He didn’t dare think about the process of getting testimony from all of them and collecting the reports and going through them.

There are no clues in Roseanna conveniently left to help solve the crime. What’s required here is old-fashioned police work, following defined procedures, to whittle that list of eighty-five down to a single murderer. The cops read over case notes countless times; they scour testimonies again and again; each time they hope to spot something between the lines that they haven’t seen before. The problem they have is that in real life people are not so much black or white as they are shades of grey and so justice comes to face the obstruction of ulterior motives and withheld confessions. This quality of people is something of which Beck is conscious, as shown in one particularly wooden moment, where he separates himself from the media sensationalists that cover such stories:

Martin Beck straightened up. ‘Remember that you have three of the most important virtues a policeman can have,’ he thought. ‘You are stubborn and logical, and completely calm. You don’t allow yourself to lose your composure and you act only professionally on a case, whatever it is. Words like repulsive, horrible, and bestial belong in the newspapers, not in your thinking. A murderer is a regular human being, only more unfortunate and maladjusted.’

When Wahlöö and Sjöwall wrote their Beck novels they took on alternate chapters. Any inconsistency of style is perhaps ironed out by translation, but the prose here, spare and taut, is little more than functional, yet it also reflects those policeman’s virtues: calm and logical and stubborn. There are times when dialogue feels stilted but it’s a minor deflection from the narrative that is almost, from start to finish, gripping in its way without, given that it was translated over forty years ago, feeling dated.

Although the first of ten novels, the expectation was that they would be taken as a single, larger arc called The Story Of A Crime. Of the crime in Roseanna, I’ve barely mentioned it as that would detract from the experience of rolling up the sleeves and following the logical progression of Martin Beck and his team as the day job becomes an obsession —

Martin Beck remained and listened to the work day die away. The telephones were the first to become silent, then the typewriters, and the sound of voices stopped until finally even the footsteps in the corridors could no longer be heard.

— and the seemingly impossible case has its story unravelled and the resulting thread leads from eighty-five suspects to one. Most crimes may be a mystery in the beginning, but they can be measured in the satisfaction of their conclusion. And, so, with this one case satisfying, it’s a pat on the back and back to the day job: there’s nine more cases to be solved.

“Life, I do not understand you”, writes Doctor Tyko Gabriel Glas in his diary as events draw to a close in Hjalmar Söderberg’s classic eponymous novel, Doctor Glas (1905), and it sums up all of his frustrations at his understanding of the world around him and at the life shattering realisation that life has passed him by. Of course, if it has passed then it has been his own doing, and how things have come to be so make the reading of his diary a rich and rewarding experience, even if it breaches (albeit in reverse) the whole doctors and confidentiality thing.

Set in Stockholm over an unusually hot summer, the likes of which he has never known, the thirty-something Doctor Glas tends to his patients by day and scribbles away in his diary at night. The entries are wide ranging, covering his day to day duties, his encounters with people in his wider circle, and his deeper reflections on the nature of the world and of himself.

One of the first questions he asks himself is one of the more unusual ones:

How can it have come about that, out of all possible trades, I should have chosen the one which suits me least?

For a doctor, he has a strange understanding of life. He shuns something as natural as sex, disgusted by how filthy it sounds (”why must the life of our species be preserved and our longing stilled by means of an organ we use several times a day to drain impurities?”) and spurns any attention shown to him, despite admitting that “I’m alone and the moon is shining, and I long for a woman”. One women, it is mentioned, has even made her interest known, but he can’t remember her mouth, and “one is only really familiar with a mouth one has kissed, or longed very much to kiss.”

One such mouth, however, belongs to Helga, (”whose heart was full of desire and misery”), the young wife of the “loathsome” Reverend Gregorius. She comes to his surgery one day, not through illness, but to ask of him a favour, saying that she is tired of her husband taking his rights in the bedroom and could he please say that she has an infection of the womb in order to deter him, even admitting that she has another lover. Whatever efforts Glas makes, however, helps only temporarily and Gregorius returns to old ways, effectively raping his wife.

All other options exhausted, Doctor Glas wrestles in his mind over the notion of murder, wondering whether removing Gregorius from the picture is the right decision. “Morality, that’s others’ views of what is right,” he tells himself:

Morality becomes consciously for me what it is in practice for each and every person, although all do not recognise it: not a fixed law, binding above all, but a modus vivendi, useful for daily life in that unremitting state of war which exists between oneself and the world.

And so he takes to wandering around with a small number of cyanide pills he had originally fashioned for himself, back in the days when he had contemplated suicide. Indeed, if his plan were not to go well he realised he must still consider that option.

While the novel’s surface expertly handles a twisted love triangle, it is the novel’s attitudes to such themes as abortion, euthanasia, and women’s right’s that make it a particular stand out. For a novel written over a hundred years ago, its ideas are incredibly prescient:

The day will come, must come, when the right to die is recognised as far more important and inalienable a human right than the right to drop a voting ticket into a ballot box. And when that time is ripe, every incurable sick person – and every ‘criminal’ also – shall have the right to the doctor’s help, if he wishes to be set free.

What makes these themes more interesting, in light of the narrative, is that the presentation is never didactic. Glas doesn’t so much believe in women’s rights as act in his own interestes towards the reverend’s wife. He refuses the women who come to him begging abortions, as his duties don’t allow it, although he does sympathise, especially on coming face to face with the product of one such opportunity.

Söderberg has done a brilliant job of making Glas a man of contrasts, his suggestive name hinting at his transparency, no matter what he himself sees. At times a seemingly generous soul, willing to help, his psyche goes deeper, darker, and into selfish realms. And no matter how much he may deceive himself, he still provides an understanding of the world and people:

We want to be loved; failing that, admired; failing that, feared; failing that, hated and despised. At all costs we want to stir up some sort of feeling in others. Our soul abhors a vacuum. At all costs it longs for contact.

Coming to the conclusion of Doctor Glas, and longing for the winter after the summer, it’s no wonder that Glas does not understand life. Indeed, he writes, “Life is action, When I see something that makes me indignant, I want to intervene.” but he can do nothing to intervene in his own circumstances.

Remarkably modern, Doctor Glas provides a fantastic slice of the gothic in a narrative that is, by turns, invigorating and horrific, and told with such succinctness that begs the question of why many modern novels contain so much fluff. It’s dark, refreshing, and completely enjoyable; as fiction goes, it’s just what the doctor ordered.