| Maj Sjöwall |
Sweden's crime writers too interested in love, says Maj Sjöwall
Too much romance and too little police work in today's thrillers, says architect of modern Scandinavian crime thrillers
Charlotte Higgins, chief arts writer
Wed 14 Aug 2013
The grandmother of Scandinavian crime writing has said her counterparts today are too concerned with screen adaptations of their work and "are not about police work and crime, but very much about love and relationships – like girls' books".
Maj Sjöwall wrote the 10 bestselling Martin Beck novels with her partner in life and writing Per Wahlöö over a decade from 1965. Together they invented the Swedish police procedural, preparing the ground for authors such as Stieg Larsson and Henning Mankell, and TV series such as The Bridge and The Killing.
By the time of the 10th novel, The Terrorists, Wahlöö was ailing: he died in 1975, aged 49, before the book came out. Now 77, Sjöwall has barely written a detective story since: there has been a short story and another cowritten book, but mainly she has worked as a translator. "It's a bit boring to go on writing the same kind of novel. I don't want to publish any more. I don't want to be part of this circus."
The Martin Beck novels – although they were bestsellers and eventually became the basis for TV and film adaptations – never made her a wealthy celebrity author in the manner of such figures as Henning Mankell. "When we were writing no one was interested in the authors. Now the writers are themselves almost like film stars," she told audiences at the Edinburgh international book festival.
She described how a political engagement as Communist party members led to her and Wahlöö writing the Beck novels.
"When we began, there were no police procedurals, just Agatha Christie-type stories with amateur detectives," Sjöwall said. "But we wanted to present a view of our society and to describe an era and a time in Sweden."
This "new kind of genre", she said, produced a new kind of reader: a young, politically radical generation of Swedes. Their project was to show "how the social democrats were pushing the country in a more and more bourgeois and rightwing direction".
She met the political activist and former crime reporter in 1961, after he had been deported from General Franco's Spain in 1957. "It was the Spanish civil war that made him a socialist," she said. The last word of the last novel in the series is "Marx" – though Sjöwall left the party and describes herself now as a socialist.
The couple would discuss the stories in detail, establishing a shared language between them. "We were talking, talking, talking about our characters: what did they think, what did they do." Having worked out a 30-chapter synopsis, at night, after the three children were in bed (a girl from a previous relationship of Sjöwall's and two boys) they would set out to write. They would sit at opposite ends of the table: one of them would take the first chapter, the other the second. The next night they would swap, typing up each other's work and editing along the way.
Crime writer Ian Rankin, who was chairing the event, pointed out that it was Sjöwall who "we have to blame for all us British crime writers who have to walk past tables and tables of Scandinavian crime fiction". "Jo", she replied succinctly – and with a wicked grin.
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