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| Maj Sjöwall |
Maj Sjöwall, master of Nordic noir, dies at 84
May 1, 2020 at 9:35 p.m. GMT-5
But Ms. Sjöwall’s Beck series — widely translated and published to rave reviews and tens of millions of copies — helped inspire a popular subgenre of problem-laden rather than heroic policemen. One of her Beck novels was turned into an acclaimed 1973 film, “The Laughing Policeman,” a crime thriller starring Walter Matthau, with the gory action transposed to San Francisco from the original Stockholm setting.
Most of Ms. Sjöwall’s books, including all 10 Beck novels, were co-written with Per Wahlöö, who died in 1975 after being declared terminally ill. They had never married, although their early publishers billed them as a husband-and-wife team on the book jackets of their English-language editions to avoid upsetting the sensibilities of those less liberated than the Swedes.
Ms. Sjöwall died at 84 on April 29 in Landskrona, Sweden, according to Ann-Marie Skarp of the Swedish publishing firm Piratförlaget. No cause was announced.
The Beck series was built around the eponymous detective and his (all-male) mixed-up cops in the Swedish National Homicide Bureau. What set the books — and subsequent movie and TV versions — apart was Ms. Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s backdrop of crime, brutality and poverty lurking beneath the well-publicized vision of Sweden’s healthy welfare state and its better-off blue-eyed, blond population.
Wahlöö had been a committed Marxist. Ms. Sjöwall was, too, although she later preferred to be called a socialist. “We wanted to show where Sweden was heading: towards a capitalistic, cold and inhuman society, where the rich got richer, the poor got poorer,” she once told the Guardian. Until her last days, she believed that had, indeed, happened.
The Beck novels were set in the 1960s and ’70s. The police station was smoke-filled, and the detectives relied on desk phones, front-line street work, contacts, snitches and often heavy-handed methods.
Nevertheless, modern audiences continued to be drawn to their depiction of bleak landscapes, complex moralities, troubled or even mentally unstable officers, and plotlines focused on rape and racism. The work of Ms. Sjöwall and Wahlöö influenced TV shows such as “The Killing,” “The Bridge,” “Bordertown,” Henning Mankell’s “Wallander” series and Stieg Larsson’s “Millennium” trilogy.
The Scandi-noir influence spread around Europe, including with the British series “Marcella,” starring Anna Friel as a London detective with (or without) mental health issues, depending on how the viewer saw it. It was written and directed by the Swede Hans Rosenfeldt, who long credited the Beck series as a chief inspiration.
Maj Sjöwall was born in Stockholm on Sept. 25, 1935. Her father was manager of a Swedish hotel chain, and she grew up in a top-floor hotel room with round-the-clock room service.
“I was a boyish girl, climbing trees and kicking footballs, but I was very introverted,” she told the Daily Telegraph in 2015. “My mother thought I was crazy. She said: ‘She never talks, she never answers when you talk to her, and she’s very thin, and not very beautiful.’ ”
She became sensitive about her privileged status at the hotel in stark contrast to the treatment of the low-paid staff, many black or from ethnic minorities. Such inequality would shape her life and her writing and, as she later put it, “I became rather wild.”
She got pregnant when she was 21 with a young man who had already left her. Ignoring her father’s insistence on an abortion, she married a family friend in his 40s, magazine editor Gunnar Isaksson, and had a daughter from her earlier relationship. The marriage ended in 1958 and she subsequently married and divorced another older man, photographer Hans J. Flodquist. “I think I had a father complex,” she once said.
After several years working as a journalist, art director and English-Swedish translator at various publications, she met Wahlöö, a left-wing journalist with a wife and child. After Wahlöö left his wife, he and Ms. Sjöwall went on to have two sons. Survivors include her children and five grandchildren.
Having decided on what they called a literary “project” — ambitiously planning 10 crime novels featuring Beck — they set to work. After putting the kids to bed, they sat across the dining table from each other, often writing into the night. Each would hand-write a chapter. The next night, each would edit and type up the other’s chapter.
Ms. Sjöwall recalled to the Observer how she got the theme for her first book with Wahlöö, “Roseanna,” published in 1965, while they were on a boat trip: “There was an American woman on the boat, beautiful, with dark hair, always standing alone. I caught Per looking at her. ‘Why don’t we start the book by killing this woman?’ I said.”
Unlike modern-day Scandi-noir writers, Ms. Sjöwall never got rich from her work, largely because it was subject to early contracts with her Swedish publishers. After Wahlöö’s death, she returned to a more bohemian life. She also wrote and translated the American private-eye novels of Robert B. Parker (“Spenser”) into Swedish.
She won the 1971 Edgar Award for best mystery novel from the Mystery Writers of America, for “The Laughing Policeman.” In 1990 she published another thriller, “The Woman Who Resembled Greta Garbo,” in collaboration with the Dutch writer Tomas Ross. She disliked writing on her own and declined many offers to restart the Beck series.
In 2009, one of Britain’s finest magazine editors, Louise France, writing in the Guardian, summed up Ms. Sjöwall’s work: “Pick up one book, preferably beginning with the first, ‘Roseanna,’ because they are best read in chronological order, and you become unhinged. You want to block out a week of your life, lie to your boss, and stay in bed, gorging on one after another, as though eating packet upon packet of extra strong mints. I began to worry that I was in love with Martin Beck. . . . This was strange, because not only is he not a real person, he also isn’t my type. He may be empathetic and dogged but mostly he’s dour, humourless, dyspeptic, antisocial.
“It’s easy to forget,” she added, “that Beck is the prototype for practically every portrayal of a policeman ever since, in this country, or America, or continental Europe.”
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