Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Roseanna | 1965 | Maj Sjöwall | Buy |
| 2 | The Man Who Went Up in Smoke | 1966 | Maj Sjöwall | Buy |
| 3 | Mannen på balkongen | 1967 | Maj Sjöwall | N/A |
| 4 | The Man on the Balcony | 1967 | Maj Sjöwall | Buy |
| 5 | The Laughing Policeman / Investigation of Murder | 1968 | Maj Sjöwall | Buy |
| 6 | The Fire Engine that Disappeared | 1969 | Maj Sjöwall | Buy |
| 7 | Murder at the Savoy | 1970 | Maj Sjöwall | Buy |
| 8 | The Abominable Man | 1971 | Maj Sjöwall | Buy |
| 9 | The Locked Room | 1972 | Maj Sjöwall | Buy |
| 10 | Cop Killer | 1974 | Maj Sjöwall | Buy |
| 11 | The Terrorists | 1975 | Maj Sjöwall | Buy |
Martin Beck is a Stockholm homicide detective who is not a hero in any traditional sense. He is a quiet, often melancholy man in a difficult marriage, working methodically through cases with a team that includes the sharper-tongued Gunvald Larsson and the thoughtful Kollberg. Roseanna, the first book, begins with the discovery of a woman’s body in a canal and proceeds with the slow, painstaking discipline of real police work. The tone is established from the first pages: this is procedural crime fiction with a social conscience, not a puzzle designed to be solved.
Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo co-wrote the series by alternating chapters, and the books function both as individual stories and as a sustained critique of Swedish society. The corruption, the class tensions, and the limitations of state institutions appear in every case. The Laughing Policeman won the Edgar Award in 1971 and brought international attention to the series. The Terrorists, the tenth and final book, was completed as Wahloo was dying from cancer and reads as a fitting, bleak conclusion to the whole project.
The series exists in both Swedish originals and English translations, with some books appearing under different titles in different markets. The Man on the Balcony, for example, also appears here in its original Swedish as Mannen pa balkongen. The core ten novels are the essential reading, and they reward readers who follow the sequence from beginning to end rather than dipping in at random.