Eden Sharp's Blog - Posts Tagged "maj-sjöwall"

Lee Child on Maj Sjöwall – “We’re here today for Martin Beck, written 50 years ago. That’s an impact.”

Yesterday I was lucky enough to witness Lee Child interviewing the legendary Maj Sjöwall. The godmother of Scandi-noir was a featured guest author of this year’s CrimeFest in Bristol and it was a memorable and moving occasion to be present at this particular event.

Euro noir, sponsored by the Norwegian Embassy, was a panel topic this year so it was definitely apt that one half of the forerunners of much of the current popular obsession with Scandinavian and Nordic crime should be a guest of honour. (Nordic noir – includes Iceland and Finland).

Two hundred of us stood reverently as Maj entered the room and took her rightful place centre-stage both literally and figuratively as such a worthy featured guest. Lee Child, awestruck himself, reminded us that we were all there because of a series, featuring protagonist Martin Beck, that had been written fifty years previously. Such had been the impact that we were so keen to recognise her importance at a crime fiction festival in 2015.

Swedes Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, both life and writing partners, met in the 1960s when a socially democratic country was turning increasingly right-wing and like many other young people of the time they were reacting against what they saw as the creeping militancy of the police.

Maj was working at a book publishers and needed the Father Brown stories translating and sought help with this from Per who was working as a journalist and had written a couple of political novels which hadn’t received much recognition. Both were keen to comment on the times and together found a way to say what they wanted by including their views on society in the crime fiction they devised.

‘We wanted to write entertainment but feed into that what we wanted to say. There were no police novels at the time and the police were a very closed system.’



The first book, of what they had always intended to be a ten-part Martin Beck series with an overall story arc, was Roseanna. At the time no one had written about a policeman’s private and family life and they wanted to do something new and radically different.

Maj revealed that as there was no police PR department like there is today, and no way into what amounted to a very closed system, they had to guess a lot.

Charmingly, Maj shared how the book’s plot idea, about the body of a young woman found in the Göta Canal, came about:

‘It started when Per and I were on a boat trip and there was this beautiful girl. He was watching her and my thought was, let’s kill her.’

The pair, so aware of consciously communicating a message, were encouraged by good reviews. After the second and third books were published, young people started to get on board and read them.

‘Crime fiction was seen as very low-brow at the time. At university if people wanted to read Ed McBain they had to wrap their copy in a more literary cover.’

One reviewer posited that they had been inspired by McBain but Maj stated they had already begun writing their series though they did start to look at his work afterward.

Maj continued ‘it was a gamble to have a character who was so boring. Martin Beck was a policeman who didn’t want to go to war. Also a typical civil servant. Dutiful but with empathy.’

It is hard to imagine crime stories now that don’t include the detective’s private life in them but Maj and Per really were the first to do this. Lee asked if it p***ed Maj off that today everybody writes about policeman’s private lives something which no one did before them. She replied it didn’t but perhaps authors could find some other way to write about society.

I don’t think books can change the world but they can change the way people think – Maj Sjöwall

Permeating the occasion’s sense of joy was a real underlying sense of sadness. For this fifty year journey from obscurity to dominance had become a solitary one. Per Wahlöö died in 1975 and Maj spoke very movingly about no longer writing fiction and not wanting to carry on afterward, for it being ‘too lonesome’ after losing him. It was easy to understand how emotionally difficult it must have been to continue on alone after they had spent so much time together as a partnership, creatively and intimately, writing across the kitchen table from one another as they raised their family.



Maj now writes letters to friends for fun ‘and to my waste paper basket’ but is no longer interested in being published. Speaking as a true writer she concluded ‘I don’t want to be looked at. Now, I want to look at.’