MURDER AT SAVOY

Rating:
Summary: Superb!
Review: Along with Roseanna and The Man on the Balcony, Murder at the Savoy easily ranks in the top three out of the ten Martin Beck series. Logical, crisp plot. Great references to the political climate of the 60's. A real pleasure.

Rating:
Summary: Not one of the best
Review: The eighth Martin Beck novel. For the first time in the series, Sjowall and Wahloo feel like they're treading water. The crime this time is the mysterious murder of a wealthy industrialist at a fancy supper club. The murderer shoots him once in the back of the head at dinner, with thirteen witnesses in attendance, exits through a window, and rides away on his bicycle. But amazingly, Stockholm homicide detective Beck finds the crime virtually unsolvable.

As in some of their previous novels (particularly "The Man who Went Up in Smoke") very little happens during the course of the book, the ending is anticlimactic and the solution to the crime has less to do with police work than dumb luck. However, in their previous novels, the extra space with filled in with the fascinating details of police investigation: false leads, lying witnesses, and bueracratic incompetence. Although those elements are again present in this work, here the focus is on heavy-handed political and social criticism, particularly the evils of capitalism (Sjowall and Wahloo were Marxists.)

Still, the book has its own paticular charm.

Rating:
Summary: Average Compared to Roseanna
Review: This was my second contact with Sjowall and Wahloo's Martin Beck police detective novels, and while I like the taut no-nonsense style of these novels, I think this one falls quite a bit short of Roseanna. In Murder at the Savoy, a wealthy businessman named Palmgren is shot in the head and killed while addressing a group of people at dinner in the elegant Savoy Hotel in Malmo, a Swedish coastal resort town. The killer calmly escapes out the window and leaves the scene on a bicycle, and we learn that nobody at the table got a decent look at the shooter.

Martin Beck is soon brought in from Stockholm, since the case has political repurcussions arising from Palmgren's shady business transactions, including international arms sales. I was a little disappointed in the way the crime was solved, since Beck was ultimately a bit player in the novel, and the interplay between the various Malmo detectives was a little stale since the authors had not given us much background information. I found myself getting confused between "Larsson" and "Kollberg", and not much caring who was who.

As usual with this series, the crimes are solved by thorough detective work, including chasing some leads that go nowhere, without a lot of contrivances in the plot like extended gunplay, strange coincidences or mystical psychic citizens who identify the killer through hypnosis. I am not a detective, but it seems to me these novels give a more accurate account of how crimes are actually solved by municipal detectives. All in all a pretty good read, suspenseful and engaging at times, but not up to the level of the authors' best.