On a July afternoon, the body of a young woman is dredged from a lake in southern Sweden. Raped and murdered, she is naked, unmarked and carries no sign of her identity. As Detective Inspector Martin Beck slowly begins to make the connections that will bring her identity to light, he uncovers a series of crimes further reaching than he ever would have imagined and a killer far more dangerous. How much will Beck be prepared to risk to catch him?

According to Henning Mankell’s introduction, ‘Roseanna‘, the first of ten Martin Beck books, re-wrote the rules for Swedish crime novels by making the plot more realistic and the policemen more human, paving the way for the emergence of Nordic Noir.

I think the realism part worked better than the making the policemen more human part. The novel offered a realism that might have crossed the threshold into mind-numbingly dull had it not been for how much fun it was to see how times have changed since 1965. Everyone smokes all the time. When Becks wants to know where Lincon Nebraska is, he has to visit a reference library and consult and atlas. When he gets a call from the US, he’s given a thiry minute warning before the connection is made. The only female police officer is seconded in to act as bait. For some reason, the authors seem to have decided that the best way to make Beck more human was to have him feel sick most the time. Even drinking coffee can knock him off his game. He is almost phobic about using the train, is unable to communicate with his wife and seems unable to sleep through the night. He also has no ability to talk to his colleagues about anything. If making Beck seem like he needs counselling made him more human then this was a comlete success.

The adoption of realism means that for long periods of time, nothing much happens and when it does happen it takes forever to cross check and verify. I chafed at the pace at first Then, I realised that the book set out to show that a key virtue for a policeman was patience. In doing so, it requited the same virtue of the reader.

I enjoyed the painstaking effort Beck and his team put in over many months to gather evidence of a murder for which there were no witnesses and for which they had no viable suspects. I liked the use of transcripts of interviews conducted in Americ and the examination of holiday snaps for clues. I suspect both were innovative at the time.

I slow and realistic relating of events reminded me of the Maigret stories, except without Maigret’s gnomic mutterings and inexplicable insights. Beck does do insight, he does facts.

I liked the unfiltered picture that Beck built up of Roseanna as a young woman who mostly enjoyed her own company, needed solitude but liked to have sex with an attractive man from time to time as long as he didn’t get too clingy. Beck seems to make no judgement on her character or her lifestyle. For him, it seems all to be data to be ground through his analytical mind. I wonder how Roseanna was viewed by readers in 1965.

In the last fifteen per cent of the book, the pace changed. The tension rose. The action happened quickly, offering the possibility of a disastrous and violent ending. This was well done and gave the book an exciting finish, but I was a little disappointed that the denouement didn’t maintain the slow but inexorable pace of the pursuit of justice that made the book so distinctive.