Roseanna by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo (1965)

 Martin Beck took the night train and arrived in Vaxjo at 6:30 a.m.  It was still dark and the air was mild and hazy. He walked through the streets and watched the city awaken.  At a quarter of eight he was back at the railroad station.  He had forgotten his galoshes and the dampness had begun to penetrate the thin soles of his shoes.  He bought a newspaper at the kiosk and read it, sitting on a bench in the waiting room with his feet up against a radiator.  After a while he went out, looked for a cafe which was open, drank some coffee and waited.

--Maj Sjowall, Per Wahloo. Roseanna, translated from the Swedish by Lois Roth (Random House, 1967)

Every six or seven years I reread Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald, John D. MacDonald and Dashiell Hammett.  This year I've been inspired by Wendy Lesser (see my post of Oct. 16 this year) to reread the ten detective novels of Sjowall and Wahloo, that I have not read since they originally were published from 1965 to 1975.  Part of their appeal, like the other four writers I mentioned, is that the detective work was done before cell phones and computers but, also, Wahloo and Sjowall are engaged politically, their work includes details about the good and bad in Swedish society.

Roseanna is the first in this series, with Inspector Martin Beck the lead detective.  He is an interesting and flawed character, stuck in a marriage "that had slipped into a fairly dull routine" and constantly nauseated by crowds, subways and coffee.  A girl has turned up dead in a canal and it takes many weeks before they can find out who she is.  Sjowall and Wahloo follow Beck's investigation in fascinating detail until they finally find out who she is and what she was doing on a canal boat.  When they find out who she was -- a tourist from America -- they have to track down what boat she was on, who else was on it and if any of the other passengers have photographs or film.  They only find a lead suspect by accident, as a  policeman sees a customer in a cafe whose photograph with Roseanna was widely distributed by Beck and his staff.  They then track the suspect for weeks and finally bait a trap with an undercover policewoman.

Solving the mystery only makes Beck feel melancholic, for both the policewoman they put in danger and for Roseanna herself:  "They had all sat in their offices in Motala and Stockholm and Lincoln, Nebraska, and solved this case by means that could never be made public.  They would always remember it, but hardly with pride."