The Laughing Policeman
On a freezing Stockholm night, a city bus rolls slowly to a stop with nine passengers and the driver dead inside, cut down by an unseen gunman. Among the victims is Ake Stenstrom, a young detective from Martin Beck's own homicide squad, whose presence on the bus no one can explain. With the press in an uproar and no obvious motive, Beck and his colleagues sift through the lives of the dead, looking for the thread that ties them together. The investigation circles back through years of unsolved cases, missing women, and bureaucratic neglect, exposing the seams of Sweden's confident welfare state. Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo built the Martin Beck books as a ten-novel critique of Scandinavian society, and this fourth installment is their masterpiece: a slow, patient procedural where solving a single crime means understanding everything the city would rather forget.
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On a snowy night in Stockholm, a man with a submachine gun kills nine passengers and the driver of a city bus, including one of detective Martin Beck's young colleagues. With no obvious target, Beck and his team grind through the dead riders' lives looking for the one the gunman wanted.
Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo wrote 10 Martin Beck novels between 1965 and 1975, ending with Wahloo's death. The series is widely cited as the foundation of modern Scandinavian crime fiction.
Yes. The Laughing Policeman won the Edgar Award for Best Novel in 1971. The Martin Beck series as a whole received the Mystery Writers of America Grand Master Award.
The Laughing Policeman was written by Maj Sjowall, published in 1968 by Harper Perennial.
The Laughing Policeman is 288 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Laughing Policeman takes most readers 4 to 6 hours to finish.
The Laughing Policeman is a standalone novel by Maj Sjowall, not part of a series.
The Laughing Policeman is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
