Word: wahl
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...among writers too. One of the most influential pros is Ed McBain. He did not invent the police "procedural," but his 87th Precinct books have attracted several imitators, especially in Europe. The most famous is the Martin Beck series by the Swedish couple Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, who made their Stockholm cops into moody eccentrics and stopped their plots for digressions into psychology and politics...
...Dutch writer Janwillem van de Wetering writes about Amsterdam policemen and the statutes and terrors that govern their lives, but this casual author makes Sjöwal-Wahlöö look like Ellery Queen. Van de Wetering's novels meander along, with asides on the foibles of human nature and gracefully written filaments of Eastern philosophy. The plot is announced early in the narrative and dispatched at the end as quickly as a victim. The author, 48, was once a Buddhist monk in Japan (he wrote about that arduous life in An Empty Mirror). He returned to The Netherlands...
...with nary a thought for such behavioral patterns as the film's earlier sequences may have established for the participants. Not so in Man on the Roof, the Swedish-made policier based on one of the Martin Beck novels by Mãj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö. One by one, the technological hopes for victory over the crazed killer are thwarted by his cunning and his quick reflexes. Even the usually infallible Beck is almost killed trying his hand against the killer. In the end, it is three quite ordinary men, unaided by anything fancier...
...beginning of The Laughing Policeman, a Stockholm bus is found with eight people sitting in their seats, all shot to death. For thriller readers, a parallel tragedy has just struck. Last month Per Wahlöö died at 48 of pancreatic disease. Since his widow does not intend to continue their Martin Beck series, the literary toll seems higher than the one in the bus. It is as if an entire family of friends were abruptly wiped out. Few thriller writers have interwoven so many good recurring characters with their plots; only the late Margery Allingham comes to mind...
...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 Malmö, where trouble often occurs (and where the Wahlöös lived). Finally, there are the Keystone Klutzes, Kvant and Kristiansson-patrolmen stuck with each other because neither can get along with anyone else. They impede every investigation, but when Kvant is killed in The Abominable Man, the authors award Kristiansson a virtually identical replacement called Kvastmo...