Sjöwall, Maj and Wahlöö, Per - The Man on the Balcony

A man in his forties watches the world from his balcony. An elderly woman spies on him with binoculars and, concerned, raises the matter with the police. Gunvald Larsson, the policeman who takes the call, is more concerned with the professional mugger preying on helpless individuals in the scattered parks of Stockholm. He tells her, “All this man has done is to stand on his own balcony...As a matter of fact there's no law forbidding people to stand on their balconies, madam.” She hangs up, he shares an exasperated few minutes with fellow policemen Martin Beck and Frederik Melander, and the matter is forgotten. A few days later, a young girl is raped and murdered. A few days after that, another girl is killed. Coincidence?

Not in the world of detective fiction, and certainly not in the Stockholm of Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö. The mildly observant reader will connect the first chapter, which is concerned with the man on the balcony, with the rest of the novel, which follows the frustrated attempts of the police to locate their killer. So, if the end result is known from the first, and all that is left is to connect the dots, what then?

Ah, see, this is the crime genre territory in which Wahlöö and Sjöwall have staked their claim. The duo were committed Marxists, and strongly against what they considered as Sweden's failings as a nation, particularly as a Welfare State. To show this, the novel is filled with nonchalant descriptions of prostitutes, pedophiles, junkies, and the homeless – vagrants and criminals of a sort that shouldn't easily exist given Sweden's efforts to combat these problems. The police, rather than being heroic figures struggling mightily against the dark, are in fact simply just men and women who have a job to do and do it well enough – some poorly, some well, but most are there serving time. Wahlöö and Sjöwall's technique of showing the world of crime and policing as exciting as office work, coupled with the near-constant barrage of murder, rape, drugs and sex, creates a wholly unnerving reading experience, and one that often highlights the police as barely more able to fight crime that a concerned citizen. Characters often comment to one another that their efforts have gotten them nowhere, that no matter what they try they never seem to find an answer. They work late, they have disgruntled family members, and for what? They aren't really catching many criminals.

There are flaws to this technique, however. For all that prostitutes, murders and drugs have been listed above, the novel never really takes flight and remains horribly unexciting throughout. The titillating aspects of dark crimes and sordid sex never reveal themselves, though there is plenty of both throughout the novel. This makes for what seems to be a natural, realistic rendering of day-to-day police life but my, how boring the book can be!

The Man on the Balcony is the third in the ten book Martin Beck series, though each may be read on its own. As the series progresses, characters enter and leave, some through death, others retirement or by being transferred to another area. Martin Beck remains the protagonist throughout, though it is curious that in The Man on the Balcony he seems to do less than some of his fellow police officers, and in the end he is not the man to capture the killer. Wahlöö and Sjöwall slyly subvert the crime genre by making the hero unusually ineffective; for all his thoroughness and hard work, he is only mildly effective.

But a crime thriller would not be a crime thriller without its hard-boiled characters and conflicts back at home – but here Wahlöö and Sjöwall surprise again. Beck may be unhappy at home, but Kollberg, possibly the strongest character in the novel, is pretty comfortable with his wife, though he enjoys talking to pretty young women. Similarly, many of the other police officers, and the satellite characters with whom they interact, are generally ordinary, pleasant, inoffensive people who just happen to be discussing, or affected by, a terrible child-rapist and murderer. One very much has the impression that these characters had regularly lives before the beginning of the novel, and will continue to live (perhaps not happily, but...) after the climax and resolution.

The Man on the Balcony is an enjoyable thriller made somewhat exotic because it is set in Stockholm. What makes it even more interesting is its wholly different method from the more familiar English-speaking crime writers. The Deus Ex Machina ending is unfortunate, but at the same time it seems to fit the nature of the piece. It would hardly make sense for Martin Beck, a hard working but otherwise undistinguished police officer, to swoop in with guns blazing and save the day. Certainly, his use of intuition to connect some of the dots is an admirable skill, but one suspects that this intuition is something shared with all good police officers.

Authors	Sjöwall, Maj and Wahlöö, Per
Title	The Man on the Balcony (Original Title: Mannen på balkongen)
Translator	Andrew Taylor
Nationality	Swedish
Publisher	Harper Perennial
Published	1968 (English) 1967 (Swedish)
Pages	208
Availability: ---Amazon (US)

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