. - THE LOCKED ROOM

The Locked Room

Maj Sjowall -Per Wahloo

I came back home just before midnight on Sunday (thanks to a 2-hour delay in my flight), but I could not sleep. I still had about 50 pages to go in The Locked Room; I just had to finish it. And what an ending! The Locked Room is rated by some as the best work of Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, and while I haven’t read all their works to have a substantial view on this, it certainly is the best of the five I have read so far. (The other four I've read are The Laughing Policeman, Roseanna, The Man on the Balcony, and The Man who went up in Smoke.) The book runs on two parallel streams: Martin Beck investigating a locked room suicide / murder and “Bulldozer” Olsson going after a murder-cum-bank-robbery. The contrast between the methods used by the two of them exemplifies what a police procedure is and what it perhaps is not. Beck goes through the drill, follows every trail until it leads to a new one, and completely avoids making any assumptions or playing any hunches; Olsson, on the other hand, is purely driven by “inspiration” – he starts with a hypothesis, and goes all out to prove himself right. By the end of the book, both Beck and Olsson succeed, and both of them don’t. The finish leaves you completely stunned, packed as it is with misery, pathos, and a tantalizing sense of incompleteness – depressingly realistic. The Locked Room has all the other elements that are staple fare from this author duo – the socialistic touches, a sense of forlornness about Stockholm, a conspicuous absence of joy and happiness among the characters, and a diversity of characters that represents a good sweep of the Swedish middle-class. (Notice how there are rarely any rich people in these books?) Another feature that make the works of Sjöwall and Wahlöö so compellingly readable is the plaintive language (kudos to Paul Britten Austin for the translation of The Locked Room) – a combination of wry humor, bleak reality, and socialistic undertones. The sequence in which Martin Beck extracts the confession from Mauritzon is a classic. But my favorite is this paragraph: “Martin Beck had been in his profession long enough to know that if something in a report appears incomprehensible, it’s because in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred someone has been careless, made a mistake, is guilty of a slip of the pen, has overlooked the crux of the matter, or lacked the ability to make himself understood.” It sums up Martin Beck; it sums up Sjöwall and Wahlöö.

Murderous Schemes: An Anthology of Classic Detective Stories http://books.google.com.tr/books?id=h7O ... hnPk&hl=tr

İÇİNDEKİLER

THE LOCKED ROOM 7
locked room mystery, Bell House, John Dickson Carr
What No Butler? Damon Runyon 27
Justin Veezee, gendarmes, Guys and Dolls
The Leopold Locked Room Edward D Hoch 40
Ted Moore, Thursby, zip gun
The Man Who Read John Dickson Carr William Brittain 59
John Dickson Carr, locked room mysteries, Gideon Fell
ONLY ONE AMONG You 67
Father Brown, Neil O'Brien, Brayne
The Necklace of Pearls Dorothy L Sayers 88
Lord Peter Wimsey, Richard Dennison, mistletoe
They Can Only Hang You Once Dashiell Hammett 99
Dundy, Jarboe, DASHIELL HAMMETT
Busted Blossoms Stuart M Kaminsky 113
Dollard, D. W. Griffith, Vann
THE CAPER 125
Caper stories, A. J. Raffles, crime fiction
The Impossible Theft John F Suter 143
Button Gwinnett, Chisholm, Alexander Graham Bell
Dont Know Much About Art Simon Brett 157
Loxton, Peugeot, SIMON BRETT
The Ultimate Caper Donald E Westlake 182
PURLOINED LETTER, minesweeper, armchair detective
The Mysterious Death On the Underground Railway 190
Hazeldene, prussic acid, Maud Allan
The Blue Geranium Agatha Christie 206
Miss Marple, George Pritchard, Instow
The Adventure of Abraham Lincolns Clue Ellery Queen 221
Nero Wolfe, Archie Goodwin, flyleaf
The Landlady Roald Dahl 287
ROALD DAHL, BED AND BREAKFAST, dachshund
The Orderly World of Mr Appleby Stanley Ellin 297
Martha Sturgis, marriage, blobby
Bless This House Christianna Brand 316
CHRISTIANNA BRAND, Nellie, arthritic
Someday Ill Plant More Walnut Trees Lawrence Block 329
Livia, Bernie Rhodenbarr, LAWRENCE BLOCK
CONFESS 345
Edgar Allan Poe, Shuttleworthy, ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE
The Adventure of the Dying Detective 363
Culverton Smith, Watson, delirious
The Master of Mystery Jack London 378
shaman, Scundoo, Hooniah
The Fat Man Isak Dinesen 390
ISAK DINESEN, Hjalmar, Oslo
HOIST ON THEIR OWN PETARDS 401
ANNA KATHARINE GREEN, RAYMOND CHANDLER, Miss Cressy
The Possibility of Evil Shirley Jackson 432
SHIRLEY JACKSON, soda shop, Harris boy
The Secret Lover Peter Lovesey 443
Clive Jones, medical receptionists, Nicotine
OVER THE EDGE 455
Dickson County, SUSAN GLASPELL, county attorney
Tang Chester Himes 497
blackfaced, T-bone, nigger
Little Apple Hard to Peel Fredric Brown 504
John Appel, Les Willis, FREDRIC BROWN
Acknowledgments 517
Fredric Brown, Rex Stout, Roald Dahl