Then he said magnanimously to Martin Beck, "Don't sit there thinking about all that now. Violence has rushed like an avalanche throughout the whole of the Western world over the last ten years. You can't stop or steer that avalanche on your own. It just increases. That's not your fault."
Per Wahloo and Maj Sjowall, The Terrorists (Pantheon, 1976, translated from the Swedish by Joan Tate)
It leaves one feeling melancholy, reading this last of the ten Martin Beck novels by Wahloo (who died just after it was published) and Sjowall (who died in 2020). The combination of intensive plots, insight into personalities and analysis of Swedish society is unique, simultaneously of its time and timeless. The books go in chronological order and we get to know Beck and his colleagues in the police well (I have a particular fondness for the gruff and cynical Gunvald Larsson) and the satire of Swedish bureaucrats is both funny and depressing for the effect on Swedish citizens, especially the poor and helpless.
In The Terrorists Beck and his staff try to prevent the assassination of a visiting American politician and succeed, only to see the Swedish prime minister gunned down by a young girl who felt so helpless she thought she had nothing left to lose, even after Beck had tried to help her after she was arrested for robbing a bank and was beaten by police. Beck himself is disillusioned with his job, divorced and alienated from his children, but finding some degree of happiness with a new lover. We can only speculate what might have happened to him if Wahloo had not died and the series had continued.
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