Word: becks
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Poirot: deceased. Maigret: retired. Martin Beck, Commander Gideon, Inspector West: gone, all gone with the recent deaths of their creators. Of the old breed, only Nero Wolfe is still doing business at the same old stand, his orchidaceous town house in Manhattan, backed and fronted as always by the ineffable Archie Goodwin. Like his corpulent hero, Author Rex Stout, 89, continues to confound the actuarial tables-and his followers. In this latest outing, Stout ups the stakes of the game he plays with readers. Three-quarters of the way through, Narrator Archie realizes the identity of the criminal and concedes...
...thinks first of Beck himself, chief (since The Abominable Man) of Sweden's National Homicide Squad. A laconic fellow with bad digestion and a fear of flying, he has only two diversions: building model boats and working jigsaw puzzles. In The Man on the Balcony, Beck considers his close associates: "He disliked Gunvald Larsson and had no high opinion of Rönn. He had no high opinion of himself either, for that matter." That is one of Beck's few mistakes in judgment. The dyspeptic, broody official is that rarest creation, an ideal policeman...
Keystone Klutzes. His best friend, Lennart Kollberg, is nearly as important to the series as Beck. Kollberg is a paunchy, garrulous perfectionist. Like Holmes and Hercule Poirot, he deeply believes that "chance has no part in police work"-but his hunches tend to be inspired. These two are supported by a sturdy cast: Fredrik Melander, who has a prodigious memory and spends much of his day in the bathroom; Gunvald Larsson, an impetuous dropout from what he calls "upper-class riffraff;" Einar Rönn, who writes execrable official reports; Per Mänsonn, who is chief in Malm...
These characters do more than provide incidental entertainment. Kollberg's sexy wife Gun, Larsson's billingsgate, Beck's wretched rides on the subway are points of reference and stability in books that have become increasingly radical...
...speech, his death mask etched in mashed potatoes. He turns out to have been a major white-collar crook with, among other things, a far-flung gunrunning empire. The eponymous Abominable Man is, of all things, a police superintendent. After someone slices the man in half with a bayonet, Beck compiles an appalling dossier of his brutalities. Many instances are easily available in the Ombudsman's files, all marked "No action...