Roseanna

Rating:
Summary: Martin Beck Arrives
Review: "Roseanna" introduces Martin Beck, an overworked but brilliant Swedish policeman. When the body of a young woman is found in a nearby lake, Beck is called in to assist. The case proves frustrating, and months pass before any progress is made. Fortunately, Beck is persistent and sticks with the case, even as it begins to haunt his life. Originally released in 1967, the plot doesn't rely on high-tech police techniques - just good old-fashioned story-telling.

Married authors Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo crafted this fine novel, as well as subsequent entries in the Martin Beck series. The style of writing is sometimes dry and always factual, which adds a great deal of realism to the story. At times, the translation is somewhat awkward, particularly in the dialogue, but it doesn't detract much from the overall impact of the book. Vintage Crime/ Black Lizard has re-released the series, and as always they've done a beautiful job. Recommended for fans of police/detective stories - I intend to read more entries in the series.

Rating:
Summary: Martin Beck Arrives
Review: "Roseanna" introduces Martin Beck, an overworked but brilliant Swedish policeman. When the body of a young woman is found in a nearby lake, Beck is called in to assist. The case proves frustrating, and months pass before any progress is made. Fortunately, Beck is persistent and sticks with the case, even as it begins to haunt his life. Originally released in 1967, the plot doesn't rely on high-tech police techniques - just good old-fashioned story-telling.

Married authors Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo crafted this fine novel, as well as subsequent entries in the Martin Beck series. The style of writing is sometimes dry and always factual, which adds a great deal of realism to the story. At times, the translation is somewhat awkward, particularly in the dialogue, but it doesn't detract much from the overall impact of the book. Vintage Crime/ Black Lizard has re-released the series, and as always they've done a beautiful job. Recommended for fans of police/detective stories - I intend to read more entries in the series.

Rating:
Summary: A Great Police Thriller Indeed - Best of the Series!
Review: A superb police mystery, one you won't be able to put down. I believe, this was Wahloo and Sjowall's first book in the Martin Beck series, and it is their best. The story is well structured, has great character development, and is most of all, well translated from Swedish. One of the finest books of the genre, bar none.

Rating:
Summary: Read them all!
Review: But, try to read them in order of their pub date. It is a fantastic series of books, where you not only enjoy the intricate plots of criminals and the thankless job the detectives do but also a lot of history about the political and social upheavels of the times in Sweden, Europe, The Vietnam War, etc.

Rating:
Summary: Taut, well-written police mystery
Review: I was recently pointed in the direction of these husband and wife novels by a fellow reviewer here at Amazon, who read, and loved, The Laughing Policeman. I figured I would start at the beginning of the series, as Roseanna is the first "Martin Beck" mystery written by the Sjowall/Wahloo team, and I was not disappointed.

The book takes place in Stockholm in the early 1970''s where a young woman's body is found in a lake, near the locks of a major waterway. The police at first have no leads, there is no identification on the body, and they have no clues whatsoever as to the identity of the victim, nor who might have killed her. Over the course of the novel, the crime is ultimatley solved through meticulous police work, including some false leads, which in this reviewer's opinion comes reasonably close to how homicides are solved in the real world. Interrogations and surveillance of the suspects have a gritty, realistic feel which is not lost at all in the translation from the authors' native Swedish.

What I found most surprising about the book, especially given the fact that it was written by a husband and wife team, is the utter lack of personality given the main character Martin Beck. Beck is married and has kids, and yet when in the midst of an investigation he seems so engrossed in the details of the crime that he barely speaks to his family, comes home essentially to sleep, and is always battling a cold. I don't think 3 sentences of true dialogue were exchanged between Beck and his wife all novel. This wouldn't be so odd, except that there are repeated scenes in his home, he just is so absorbed with the mystery he ignores all extraneous matter until the crime is solved.

Overall, I thought this was a taut, suspenseful novel and I look forward to periodically sampling other Martin Beck mysteries from this writing duo.

Rating:
Summary: read this series
Review: I'm not articulate enough to explain why this series should be required reading for 15 or 20 diferent college majors, just read several of these books. Don't worry, I believe all wings of the political spectrum will appreciate having read these gems.

Rating:
Summary: Solid Beginning to This Swedish Series
Review: I've long intended to check out the 10-book Martin Beck series by Swedish husband/wife team Per Wahloo and Maj Sjowall, and the 40th anniversary of this first book in the series seems like a good excuse. For some reason, some readers seem to think the book takes place in the '70s or late '60s, but it was written in 1963-4, published in Sweden in 1965, and appeared in English in 1967. The story begins with the discovery of a woman's corpse in Lake Vattern in central Sweden, roughly equidistant from Stockholm, Copenhagen, and Oslo. The police from the nearby town of Motala start investigating and when it's established that the woman was strangled, the homicide experts from Stockholm are called in.

Enter Martin Beck, a chain-smoking homicide detective roughly in his late 30s. Beck is a classic example of the workaholic policeman that one can find in crime fiction and film the world over. He barely speaks to his wife and children, and prefers long hard hours at the office to a home life that offers him nothing. It's such a bleak portrait that the reader is hard-pressed to imagine Beck's marriage (or lungs) surviving the series. The story is a very straightforward, and almost dry procedural account of the case. The first problem the team encounters is in identifying the victim, as she doesn't match any missing persons reports and as part of the route for touring the Gota canal system, Lake Vattern is a high-traffic tourist area, with lots of tour boats coming through. The second hurdle is that once she is identified, months have passed, and tracking down everyone who was on her tour cruise and taking statements proves very difficult. Finally, even once a suspect is identified, there's no physical evidence or eyewitness, so Beck and his laconic team must somehow force the murderer into revealing himself in another way.

As a procedural, this is a very strong book, illustrating all the police methodology available at the time. It also does a good job of showing how important it is for the detective to form a psychological portrait of the victim, a concept that was not particularly widespread forty years ago. The combination of procedure and psychology make for a decent crime novel, although the bone dry prose isn't going to enthrall anyone. The authors famously said that their books were intended to challenge conventional Swedish morality, and without revealing anything, the murder and motive in this book are clearly built around this premise. A solid beginning to a promising series.

This book was made into a film twice in Sweden, once in 1967, and again in 1993. Sadly neither of these appear to be available in English in any format.

Rating:
Summary: Police procedural as social(ist) commentary
Review: Imagine hearing this book read aloud at lunchtimes in the Hennepin County morgue: the perfect setting for hooking a young medical student on this grisly, funny, delightful series. Start with Roseanna, the first of ten books that develop the honorable, persistent, and yes, somewhat pathetic detective Martin Beck into a whole person. The setting - socialist Sweden in the 1960s - is as fully characterized as Philip Marlowe's or Easy Rawlins' L.A. And like Chandler and Mosley, the husband and wife writing team make you care about the hero and his oddball supporting cast. Only dogged police work (and a little luck) allow them to nab the murderer of an unidentified young woman whose nude body washes up on shore. Enjoy!

Rating:
Summary: Serviceable and interesting
Review: In this serviceable and interesting police procedural, a young woman's body is pulled, naked and dead from strangulation, out of a lake in Sweden. Months pass with the investigation stalled before she is identified as Roseanna McGraw from Lincoln, Nebraska, a passenger on a cruise ship that had just recently passed by. But then the thing rather stalls again as the other passengers, many of them scattered to the distant corners of the earth, by now remember little of this woman traveling alone. A promising lead involving a ship's fireman with a criminal record draws a blank. Finally painstaking examination of countless holiday snaps turns out a suspect and the hunt starts finally to close in. It is this sense of the frustrating stop-start rhythm of the investigation, the long periods when nothing much is happening in contrast with the urgent climax scene where seconds are crucial that constitutes one of the main interests of this book. From my thus characterizing it, you may correctly infer that is sometimes moves a little slowly, but it nonetheless retains one's interest and makes for a decent reading experience.

Rating:
Summary: The first Martin Beck novel.
Review: Like Freeling or Simenon, the Sjowall/Wahloo novels are excellent more for the excuse the mystery provides for an examination of everyday life, than they are for the excitement or horror of the crime itself. In the case of Martin Beck, he explores the frustrations and pleasures of Swedish life while solving his mysteries.

This is not my favorite in the series (so far, that would be _The Man Who Went Up in Smoke_), but it's not a bad place to begin. It's hurt a bit by being a little dated by some of the concerns about Roseanna herself-- she's a great view of how many saw the hippies at the time-- but not enough that it should dissuade someone from reading it.