4 novels from the Martin Beck Series - Book haul near Sangeet, Secunderabad

Despite wanting to visit Abids on Sunday for months now, to look for second hand books and to meet Vinod and friends, I couldn’t go for so many reasons … and unable to bear the desperation, I decided to visit the second hand book stall near Sangeet last Tuesday which is open all through the week … and see if I could satisfy my second hand book cravings … I have passed the book stall on Sangeet road many a times recently while going elsewhere in the car and always looked longingly at the stall as it fleeted past … at one point of time when Sangeet was still a movie theatre and this book stall was housed in the nearby building, I was a frequent visitor and have bought many books worth remembering and cherishing … now the book stall has ‘come to the road side,’ and I still visit it, but the pickings have become less and less as numbers dwindled and range narrowed and became predictable …

There was some difference this time … the stall looked healthier and I saw more hard-bound coffee table books on the far side … there were more books, it looked like … apart from the shelves inside the temporary roofing, there were a couple of tables in the open ‘under the permanent roofing’ with books arranged neatly on them … the book-laden tables looked inviting … but there was a warning sign … the price sign … which said ‘Any book Rs. 100’ … that was helpful actually … the search would now be slow and careful …

Lots of good books on the tables … some of them I had and had read … some of them I wanted to read … I browsed and browsed … made two rounds … something caught my attention … I thought I’d come back for a third round and check and then went inside … the collection inside was predictable … didn’t find anything interesting … finished that part quickly and then came to the tables … at the farthest end were stacked around five books that looked like a set … picked them up and saw that they were books of the Martin Beck series by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo … I remember having bought a book by the same authors a couple of years ago, but the name eluded me … I’d go home and check …

At that time I had read about the authors and discovered that the authors, Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo, were Swedish and were married to each other and that they wrote ten crime novels with Martin Beck as the detective … these ten novels were written between 1965 and 1975 … the authors planned to write only ten novels and this Decalogue was subtitled ‘The Story of a Crime’ …

To get back to the table … there were five novels in the set and one was a double, so there were four Martin Beck books on offer … I thought … hesitated … and then re-thought … and then, ‘what the heck,’ I told myself and picked up the four novels … The Laughing Policeman, The Abominable Man, The Locked Room, and The Terrorists … the books were also conveniently numbered according to their order in the series … 4, 7, 8, and 10 …

After I bought the books, I noticed that this particular series was in many ways unique … there were a lot of extras in each book … for instance, The Laughing Policeman had an introduction by Sean and Nicci French, another crime-writer pair, and an essay inside by Richard Shepard, and an interview, and other articles, and information about the authors … so, a lot of related reading material … I liked that … The Locked Room has an introduction by Michael Connelly and similar essays and articles at the end … and the other two novels too have these ‘extras’ … not bad, I thought …

Of the novels, The Laughing Policeman had blurbs raving about the book and I read in one of the extra articles at the end that this novel was made into a film by Hollywood, probably one of the earliest Swedish crime novels to be made into an English film … these kind of gave me the impetus to read this novel first …

What a novel! Till the middle almost, you are following the solving of a crime and then slowly you find yourself looking at two crimes … an old unsolved one and the current one … and it is done so smoothly that it is after some time that you realise that …

Martin Beck is a police detective and solves crimes along with his colleagues and the writers provide a parallel ‘opinionated’ commentary of contemporary Sweden through the novel … these are ‘police procedure’ novels … and it is said that Martin Beck sort of provided the template for later police detectives in police procedure crime novels like John Rebus (Ian Rankin), Kurt Wallander (Henning Mankell), Alan Banks (Peter Robinson), and others … you know, the kind of police detective who is very much attached to his work, has a drinking problem, married, but a marred married life and moving towards divorce, very few people in the force find him congenial, and so on …

After I reached home, I noticed that each book had a different letter above the serial number on the spine … I wondered what these letters meant … it didn’t make any sense to me at that time …

And then when I went online to see if there are pictures of similar jacket covers which I could use for my post, I saw a photo of the Martin Beck series books which unravelled the mystery of the letters … each book has one letter from the name ‘Martin Beck’ starting from M … how convenient or how coincidental? … did the authors write only ten books and name their detective Martin Beck, a name which has only ten letters, so that a publisher can put each letter on the spine and release the series as a set?  Or was it a smart publisher who has a sudden flash and put ten and ten together? Anyway, I have only four books in the series, and now the combined spines look like this …

And when I complete the set, it would look like this … cool na?

 (picture taken from http://fleurinherworld.com/2010/04/28/roseanna-by-maj-sjowall-per-wahloo/ )

I now have to hunt and hunt like anything for the other 6 books in the series … but, What the Beck maan, I am going to pound the streets and won’t rest till I find them …