Reviews

The Man Who Went Up in Smoke by Maj Sjöwall, Per Wahlöö

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krobart's review against another edition

3.0

Inspector Martin Beck is sent to Budapest to try to find out what happened to a reporter who disappeared. Sjowall and Wahloo are credited for creating the conventions of the modern police procedural. They liked to focus on ordinary crimes and people. Their books feature interesting situations, although characterization is minimal.

See my complete review here:

http://whatmeread.wordpress.com/tag/the-man-who-went-up-in-smoke/

kcfromaustcrime's review against another edition

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4.0

I'm still dipping into this reprint series from Harper Perennial with a profound sense of gratitude for the fact that they are bringing these fabulous books back to our attention. Originally copyrighted in 1966 THE MAN WHO WENT UP IN SMOKE sees the only time Wahloo and Sjowall take Martin way outside his comfort zone - to Budapest to investigate the disappearance of a Swedish journalist - he seems to have literally gone up in smoke!

Martin is called back from a family holiday - sort of - well not quite - grudgingly to work on this task in the heights of the European summer - in a country he's never been to before; with a local police force that doesn't really know why he's there; in the height and strangeness of another culture; in an Eastern European underworld that doesn't make sense. And he has to do this in an era before fax machines, before mobile telephones, before email - just an infrequent scratchy telephone call back home to try to find some details about who the missing man is in the first place.

In classic Sjowall/ Wahloo style Martin wanders his way around the problem, doing a little, thinking a lot and seeing more than anybody realises to find, firstly what on earth this journalist was up to and finally where he ended up.

In this edition, Val McDermid wrote the forward and, as is the way with this series, these forwards provide a valuable insight into just how wide the influence of this Swedish pair of writers has been - just to quote one small part of the excellent introduction:

"Discovering dedicated mystery booksellers was a bit like going to heaven without having to die first. There were so many crime writers whose books were available in the US only - ironically, some of them British - and in those pre-Internet days, the only apparent way to acquire them was physically to go there and buy them. Which I did. In industrial quantities. Among the books in the holdall were ten paperbacks in the black livery of Vintage Press. They comrpised a decalogue of crime novels written by the Swedish husband-wife team of Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo. They'd been on my must-read list since I'd read about them in Julian Symonds' definitive overview of the genre, Bloody Murder. "

Val's introduction is as worth reading as the book itself.

kate66's review against another edition

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3.0

I've come to the conclusion that this series isn't my sort of thing at all. I don't know if it's the seeming oddity of the crimes or the descriptions of the people or what. To be honest I just want to give everyone in them a good shake. They all do a fair bit of complaining about everything but don't ever change. There's also the translation which seems clunky at times and the repeated use of Beck's full name- he's rarely just Beck, never Martin but usually Martin Beck no matter how many times his name has been mentioned before. I find it a tad irritating.

So I've read two and I've still to work out what everyone else enjoys about them. Back to Agatha Christie, Henkell Manning, Vaseem Khan and Ragnar Jonasson for me.

saltycorpse's review against another edition

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2.0

A work more of technical aspects of crime fiction rather than an all-around good book. You can see the foundations of the genre as it is today being built on in this novel. Really sudden and unsatisfying ending, and not in a "realistic" way.

writermattphillips's review against another edition

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5.0

Great mystery!

marco5599's review against another edition

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3.5

If you want to visit Budapest, but you are pretty sure you will never ever actually go there, give The Man Who Went Up in Smoke a try. Martin Beck's second case is again a slow one, so what does a sleuth do when he has nothing to sleuth? Right. He enjoys the scenery. Quite a bit of couleur locale in the first half of the book, with a sunny vibe and an atmosphere one could describe as the melancholy of a born detective. You really don't want to be this guy's wife. The case does make some progress, but really picks up speed when Martin Beck is back on home soil. Not a nerve-racking finale though, not this time, this time silence is key. Sometimes that's all it takes to make a suspect crack. Brilliant.