I told a Swedish acquaintance I was reading the novels and she gave a grunt of disgust and didn't believe me when I said they were leftist. She's only familiar with those adaptations, and, yeah, it sounds like they've been sterilized into a mainstream mismatched-partners cop show. I haven't seen them myself, but from what I've gathered they're less of an ensemble piece and more about the Martin Beck / Gunnvald Larsson pairing, simplified to something like "Beck is the methodical one, Larsson is the boorish one."
Larsson is a character who really grew on me. He starts off just as an asshole who (occasionally) gets results, dammit, but it turns out he's a class traitor with nothing but contempt for his 1%er family. There's also a great scene where he berates a witness for going on vacation to junta-era Greece, which angers him so much that he doesn't even seem to notice how shamelessly she's flirting with him. His loathing for the rich doesn't make him a "good cop," of course, because there are no good cops, and that's why he makes for an especially interesting contrast not with Beck but with Kollberg, who in the later books comes to realize what his conscience and subconscious had been trying to tell him for the whole series - that the whole institution of policing is irredeemable, and he'd be better off quitting than attempting to change it from within.
The whole series is ultimately worthwhile, I'd say, but the early ones are a little plodding and the later ones are a bit too sensational. If I had to pick just one to start with, I'd go with The Laughing Policeman (consensus choice for the best) or Murder at the Savoy (when the political subtext starts to really ramp up and become text, in a way that ought to be satisfying to the average Hexbear user). There's also The Abominable Man, which talks about the fascist influence on Swedish police practices, but that one gets too thriller-y toward the end.
From an interview with Sjöwall:
“We wanted to describe society from our left point of view. Per had written political books, but they’d only sold 300 copies. We realised that people read crime and through the stories we could show the reader that under the official image of welfare-state Sweden there was another layer of poverty, criminality and brutality. We wanted to show where Sweden was heading: towards a capitalistic, cold and inhuman society, where the rich got richer, the poor got poorer.”
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/nov/22/crime-thriller-maj-sjowall-sweden
The introductions to the books mention a famous interview Wahlöö gave about how his Marxism informed the series, but I can't seem to find it online right now.
I told a Swedish acquaintance I was reading the novels and she gave a grunt of disgust and didn't believe me when I said they were leftist. She's only familiar with those adaptations, and, yeah, it sounds like they've been sterilized into a mainstream mismatched-partners cop show. I haven't seen them myself, but from what I've gathered they're less of an ensemble piece and more about the Martin Beck / Gunnvald Larsson pairing, simplified to something like "Beck is the methodical one, Larsson is the boorish one."
Larsson is a character who really grew on me. He starts off just as an asshole who (occasionally) gets results, dammit, but it turns out he's a class traitor with nothing but contempt for his 1%er family. There's also a great scene where he berates a witness for going on vacation to junta-era Greece, which angers him so much that he doesn't even seem to notice how shamelessly she's flirting with him. His loathing for the rich doesn't make him a "good cop," of course, because there are no good cops, and that's why he makes for an especially interesting contrast not with Beck but with Kollberg, who in the later books comes to realize what his conscience and subconscious had been trying to tell him for the whole series - that the whole institution of policing is irredeemable, and he'd be better off quitting than attempting to change it from within.
The whole series is ultimately worthwhile, I'd say, but the early ones are a little plodding and the later ones are a bit too sensational. If I had to pick just one to start with, I'd go with The Laughing Policeman (consensus choice for the best) or Murder at the Savoy (when the political subtext starts to really ramp up and become text, in a way that ought to be satisfying to the average Hexbear user). There's also The Abominable Man, which talks about the fascist influence on Swedish police practices, but that one gets too thriller-y toward the end.
From an interview with Sjöwall:
The introductions to the books mention a famous interview Wahlöö gave about how his Marxism informed the series, but I can't seem to find it online right now.