The Laughing Policeman

Maj Sjowall (1935-2020) and Per Wahloo (1926-1975) were a husband-and-wife team who wrote a series of ten police procedural novels about Detective Martin Beck and his colleagues in the Stockholm homicide division. Sjowall and Wahloo had left-wing politics and claimed to want to "use the crime novel as a scalpel cutting open the belly of the ideologically pauperized and morally debatable so-called welfare state.” But their political agenda actually arose infrequently in their novels, and what emerged instead were a series of superb Mankell-like procedurals. In this book, the fourth in the series and one of the best, eight bus riders are murdered by a mysterious assassin, with no apparent motive or leads.