Anthologies
| Title | Published | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|
| A Darker Shade of Sweden | 2013 | Buy |
| Ten Year Stretch | 2018 | Buy |
Martin Beck Reading Order
| Title | Published | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|
| Roseanna | 1965 | Buy |
| The Man Who Went Up in Smoke | 1966 | Buy |
| Mannen på balkongen | 1967 | N/A |
| The Man on the Balcony | 1967 | Buy |
| The Laughing Policeman / Investigation of Murder | 1968 | Buy |
| The Fire Engine that Disappeared | 1969 | Buy |
| Murder at the Savoy | 1970 | Buy |
| The Abominable Man | 1971 | Buy |
| The Locked Room | 1972 | Buy |
| Cop Killer | 1974 | Buy |
| The Terrorists | 1975 | Buy |
Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo wrote the Martin Beck series as a ten-novel project with a specific political purpose: to use the conventions of the crime novel to expose what they saw as the failures of the Swedish welfare state. Each book follows homicide detective Martin Beck and his colleagues through a case, and each one also builds a picture of a society where bureaucracy, inequality, and institutional indifference produce crime as naturally as anything else. The project was completed between 1965 and 1975, and it reshaped the possibilities of crime fiction across Europe.
The influence of the series on later Scandinavian crime writing is hard to overstate. Writers like Henning Mankell and Stieg Larsson openly acknowledged it as a model, and the procedural realism, the social criticism, and the particular melancholy tone of what became known as Nordic Noir can all be traced back to what Sjowall and Wahloo built. Sjowall later contributed to crime anthologies and remained a respected figure in the genre long after Wahloo’s death in 1975.