The Martin Beck series - Roseanna Book

Roseanna is the first novel in the ten-volume Martin Beck crime series written by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo during the 1960s and 1970s. Swedish crime novels are certainly en vogue at the moment thanks to the popularity of Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander series (the television adaptation of which is currently being shown on BBC1) and Stieg Larsson's Millenium trilogy, but the importance of Sjowall and Wahloo's novels are often overlooked. The Martin Beck series was pioneering in its time and served as the inspiration for a new generation of Swedish crime novelists. Indeed, in his introduction to this edition of Roseanna, Henning Mankell acknowledges the impact that the Martin Beck stories had on him and on his own detective creations.

In Roseanna, the naked body of a young woman is dredged from a canal but, although it is clear that she was horribly assaulted before being murdered, no clue to her identity can be found. With the case pretty much cold from the get go, Detective Martin Beck and his colleagues from the Homicide Department are called in to help the local constabulary solve the crime. For six months the girl's murder plagues the minds of both Beck and local detective Ahlberg, but it is only through a chance Interpol lead that the girl is identified. Roseanna McGraw was an American tourist taking a cruise through the Swedish lakes and it soon becomes clear that any one of the other eighty people on the cruise ship could have killed her. With very little evidence to go on, Martin Beck begins a meticulous investigation to identify who else was on the cruise ship and to identify which of these people was guilty of the murder to Roseanna McGraw.

Although police procedure has clearly moved on a great deal since the days of Martin Beck (it's certainly fortunate that mobile phones mean that police officers don't have to break off from following suspects to phone in reports from convenient phone boxes!), the story does not feel dated. Martin Beck is a very sardonic, straightforward detective and the language of the novel reflects this - there are no flowery descriptions and unnecessary observations to be found here! The mystery behind the murder itself was very convincing and I particularly liked the length of time and the effort it took the police to apprehend the murderer even after they had discovered his/her (in the interests of avoiding spoilers!) identity. Roseanna is a very promising start to the Martin Beck series and I believe it will leave crime fans wanting to read the rest of the series.

Perennial launch the classic Martin Beck detective series from the 1960s -- the novels that have inspired all crime fiction written ever since.