The Locked Room by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo, Harper Perennial, $19.99
Who are these people with the unprounceable names? They are the pioneers of the Scandinavian crime wave.
A husband-and-wife team who, starting in the mid-60s, wrote 10 legendary detective books — the Martin Beck series — dispelling forever the idealised image of Sweden as a country of saunas, smorgasbords and happy blondes.
Instead, we see a dark and troubled place, reeling under the failures of the Welfare State experiment, where criminals and civilians alike fall through the cracks as policeman Beck goes about his business of solving crimes and fighting with his bosses.
Yet this is also an old-fashioned locked-room mystery, requiring a Holmes-like dissection of how a tossaway drifter could have lain months dead, in a sealed room, with no gun but a bullet in his chest.
So, an interesting amalgam of new and old styles of crime-writing as fresh now as when it was written — and if you’ve ever wondered where Stieg Larsson and the rest got their start, the answer is here.
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