Roseanna - Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo

On the back of this is a quote from the Birmingham Post, “they (Sjowall and Wahloo) are the best writers of police procedure in the world"

The best writers of police what now?

Bing! Another genre I knew nothing about.
Bing! Another country! Of course Sweden.
Bing! Another series to get in to!

Resistance was futile: written by two Swedish marxists, a couple in fact, this series follows a morose, terribly Scandinavian police inspector, documenting along the way Swedish social changes of the ‘60s and ‘70s. I’d sort of forgotten about Sweden; when I was a child I wanted to live there - thanks pretty much to the flag and those little red horses. If I needed as good a reason to get interested in the place again this will do just fine.

So, police procedurals* - they’re alright. There’s no whodunit aspect - but that gets tiresome anyway after a while - instead you follow the police as they try and solve a case. If done well, this allows some time for character development; luckily here it is done well, you wouldn’t know this was written by two people, though there is the occasional jarring point of view change.

There are ten of these in the series, and unusually the characters develop throughout - they are not “tales from the precinct” style cases where the chronology is fuzzy and the personalities static. They had been out of print but are sneaking back in. I’m getting in now. I’ll let you know how it goes.