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| Per Wahlöö |
Per Wahlöö, Author With Wife Of Detective Beck Series, Dies
June 24, 1975
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Per Wahlöö, who achieved worldwide recognition for the detective novels that he and his wife, Maj Sjöwall, created while their children slept, has died. His death, at the age of 48, was announced yesterday in Malmo, Sweden, where he lived.
Although Mr. Wahlöö won favorable comment as the author of Kafkaesque allegories set in police‐procedurai novels, he was perhaps best known—and most popular—for the collaboration with his wife that introduced Detective Martin Beck of the Stockholm police force to mystery fans.
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| Per Wahlöö and Maj Sjöwell |
Mirror to Society
In such novels as “The Man on the Balcony,” “The Man Who Went Up in Smoke,” “The Laughing Policeman,” “Murder at the Savoy” and “The Abominable Man,” the team set out to mirror society through the novel of crime.
And, although the plots ostensibly were woven around a brutal mugging, perhaps, or the disappearance of a globetrotting journalist, or the shooting of eight people on a bus, they had a purpose beyond the traditional entertainment of the genre.
As Mr. Wahlöö put it while here in 1971 with his wife to accept an Edgar Allan Poe Award from the Mystery Writers of America for “The Laughing Policemen,” judged the best mystery novel the previous year, the aim of their work was to trace a man's personality.
He and his wife, who, like him, had a background in journalism, planned a series of 10 books, covering a 10‐year‐span in the career of Martin Beck.
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| Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö |
Mr. Wahlöö said they wanted to show “the man's personality changing under the years, the milieu and the atmosphere changing, the political climate, the economic climate changing, the crime rate, so you can get the whole picture.”
The Wahlöös, who also edited the Swedish literary magazine Peripeo, prided themselves on accuracy of detail.
“If you read of Martin Beck taking off on a certain flight, there was that flight, at that time, with those same weather conditions,” Miss Sjöwall once said.
During their visit here, Mr. Wahlöö explained how the collaboration had begun. “We met,” he said, “working for two separate magazines for the same publisher in 1961. She worked for Idun, a women's magazine. I worked for Se, which is ‘look’ in Swedish.
“We were sitting in a restaurant during lunch one day, and we suddenly started talking about this idea we had both been nursing,” he said. It was the concept of the crime novel as a mirror to society.
Exactly 300 Chapters
They began plotting their escape from the magazine business and working out the outline of the Martin Beck series, which they looked upon as one very long novel of exactly 300 chapters.
With the spare, disciplined style of their journalistic past, the Wahlöös were able to collaborate in singular style—writing alternate chapters. “While Per is writing chapter one, I am writing chapter two,” Miss Sjowall said.
“If Maj had written the first part and I had written the second, there had been no difference,” Mr. Wahlöö said.
They made their home in a $125 ‐a ‐ month, seven ‐room apartment overlooking a graveyard; and they wrote at night, after 10 or 11, when their children were asleep.
They found the silent hours between 2 and 5 A.M. their most productive. Sitting at opposite ends of a table in their study, writing in longhand, they worked until the children awoke.
“I don't see how you do it,” an American mystery writer teld Mr. Wahlöö. “My wife and I can't even collaborate on boiling an egg.”
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