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Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö are a well-known husband-and-wife team of detective writers from Sweden. As a team they wrote ten novels about the exploits of a Stockholm detective police departement. Separately, they also wrote novels.
- Roseanna (Roseanna, 1965)
- The Man Who Went Up in Smoke (Mannen som gick upp i rök, 1966)
- The Man on the Balcony (Mannen på balkongen, 1967)
- The Laughing Policeman (Den skrattande polisen, 1968)
- The Fire Engine That Disappeared (Brandbilen som försvann, 1969)
- Murder at the Savoy (Polis, polis, potatismos!, 1970)
- The Abominable Man (Den vedervärdige mannen från Säffle, 1971)
- The Locked Room (Det slutna rummet, 1972)
- Cop Killer (Polismördaren, 1974)
- The Terrorists (Terroristerna, 1975)
Per Wahlöö about their goals with the series: "use the crime novel as a scalpel cutting open the belly of the ideological pauperized and morally debatable so-called welfare state of the bourgeois type."
From the beginning, the pair planned to write no more than ten novels together. The novels revolve around a team of police investigators, led by Martin Beck; however Wahlöö's death brought the series to an end. Other detectives who appear in the series include Lennart Kollberg, who refuses to carry a gun and will quit the police altogether later in the series; Gunvald Larsson, a former member of the merchant marine; and Larsson's friend Einar Rönn.
The series is noteworthy for how the lives of its characters change over the books. Beck gets divorced, Kollberg quits the force, a third detective gets killed. The leitmotif of the series, written from the authors' clearly defined ideological viewpoint, is to question how Sweden, as a country which champions social democracy, nevertheless has the same problems of inequality and crime as other countries. By the end of the series, several of its protagonists are considering joining the Communist Party.
lb:Maj Sjöwall / Per Wahlöö