The Laughing Policeman

They sat in silence, waiting. Now and then the telephone operator's voice was heard, and the buzz from the switchboard as she put the calls through. Otherwise the only sound was the faint noise of the traffic. Martin Beck turned the pages of a year-old issue of Industria, Melander leaned back with the pipe in his mouth and his eyes half-closed.

At twenty past nine the outer door was pulled open and a woman came in. She was dressed in a fur coat and high leather boots and had a large handbag over her arm.

She nodded to the girl at the switchboard and walked quickly towards the half-open door. Without slowing her steps she cast an expressionless glance at the men in the armchairs. Then she banged the door behind her.

After another twenty minutes Forsberg arrived.

He was dressed in the same way as the day before and his movements were brisk and energetic. He was just about to hang up his overcoat when he caught sight of Martin Beck and Melander. He checked himself in the middle of the movement, for a fraction of a second. Recovered himself quickly, hung the coat on a hanger and came towards them.

Martin Beck and Melander stood up together. Björn Forsberg raised his eyebrows questionirigly. He opened his mouth to say something, and Martin Beck put out his hand and said, 'Superintendent Beck. This is Detective Inspector Melander. We'd like a word with you.'

Björn Forsberg shook hands with them.

'Why, certainly,' he said. 'Please come in.'

The man appeared quite calm and almost gay as he held open the door for them. He nodded to his secretary and said, 'Good morning, Miss Sköld. I'll see you later. I'll be engaged with these gentlemen for a little while.'

He preceded them into his office, which was large and light and tastefully furnished. The floor was covered from wall to wall with a deep-pile grey-blue carpet, and the big desk was shining and empty. Two telephones, a dictaphone and an intercom stood on a small table beside the swivel chair covered in black leather. On the wide windowsill stood four photographs in pewter frames.

His wife and three children. On the wall between the windows hung a portrait in oils, presumably of his father-in-law. The room also contained a cocktail cabinet, a conference table with water carafe and glasses on a tray, a sofa and two easy chairs, some books and china figures in a case with sliding-glass doors, and a safe discreetly set into the wall.

All this Martin Beck saw as he closed the door behind him and as Björn Forsberg walked towards his desk with deliberate steps.

Laying his left hand on the top of the desk, Forsberg leaned forward, pulled out the drawer on the right and put his hand into it. When his hand reappeared, the fingers were closed around the butt of a pistol

Still supporting himself against the desk with his left hand, he raised the barrel of the pistol towards his open mouth, pushed it in as far as he could, closed his hps round the shiny, blue-black steel and pulled the trigger. He looked steadily at Martin Beck the whole time. His eyes were still almost cheery.

All this happened so quickly that Martin Beck and Melander were only halfway across the room when Björn Forsberg collapsed sprawling over the desk.

The pistol had been cocked and a sharp click had been heard as the hammer fell against the chamber. But the bullet that was to have rotated through the bore, shattered the roof of Björn Forsberg's mouth and flung most of his brains out through the back of his head never left the barrel. It was still in its brass casing inside the cartridge that lay in Martin Beck's right trouser pocket, together with the other five that had been in the magazine.

Martin Beck took out one of the cartridges, rolled it between his fingers and read the text punched around the copper envelope of the percussion cap: METALLVERKEN 38 SPL. The cartridge was Swedish but the pistol American, a Smith and Wesson 38 Special, made in Springfield, Massachusetts.

Björn Forsberg lay with his face pressed against the smooth desktop. His body was shaking. After a few seconds he slipped to the floor and began to scream.

'We'd better call an ambulance,' Melander said.

So Rönn was sitting once more with his tape recorder in an isolation ward at Karolinska Hospital. This time not in the surgical department but at the mental clinic, and in his company he had Gunvald Larsson instead of the detested Ullholm.

Björn Forsberg had been given various treatments with tranquillizing injections and a lot of other things, and the doctor concerned with his mental recovery had already been in the room for several hours. But the only thing the patient seemed able to say was, 'Why didn't you let me die?'

He had repeated this over and over again and now he said it once more, ‘Why didn't you let me die?'

'Yes, why didn't we?' Gunvald Larsson mumbled, and the doctor gave him a stern look.

They would not have been here at all if the doctors had not said that there was a certain risk that Forsberg really would die. They had explained that he had been subjected to a shock of enormous intensity, that his heart was weak and his nerves had gone to pieces; they rounded off the diagnosis by saying that his general condition was not so bad. Except that a heart attack might be the end of him at any moment.

Rönn pondered over this remark about his general condition.

'Why didn't you let me die?' Forsberg repeated.

'Why didn't you let Teresa Camarão live?' Gunvald Larsson retorted.

'Because I couldn't, I had to get rid of her.' 'Oh,' Rönn said patiently. 'Why did you have to?' 'I had no choice. She would have ruined my life.' 'It seems to be pretty well ruined in any case,' Gunvald Larsson said.

The doctor gave him another stern look.

'You don't understand’ Forsberg complained. 'I had told her never to come back. I'd given her money even though I was badly off. And still —

'What are you trying to say?' Rönn said kindly.

'Still she pursued me. When I got home that evening she was lying in my bed. Naked. She knew where I used to keep my spare key and had let herself in. And my wife... my fiancée was coming in fifteen minutes. There was no other way.'

'And then?'

'I carried her down into the cold-storage room where the furs were.'

‘Weren't you afraid that someone might find her there?'

'There were only two keys to it I had one and Nisse Göransson the other. And Nisse was away.'

'How long did you let her lie there?' Rönn asked.

'For five days. I wanted to wait for rain.'

Yes, you like rain’ Gunvald Larsson put in.

'Don't you understand? She was crazy. In one minute she could have ruined my whole life. Everything I had planned.'

Rönn nodded to himself. This was going well.

'Where did you get the submachine gun from?' Gunvald Larsson asked out of the blue.

'I brought it home from the war.'

Forsberg lay silent for a moment Then he added proudly, 'I killed three Bolsheviks with it'

'Was it Swedish?' Gunvald Larsson asked.

'No, Finnish. Suomi model 37.'

'And where is it now?'

'Where no one will ever find it'

'In the water?'

Forsberg nodded. Seemed to be deep in thought 'Did you like Nils Erik Göransson?' Rönn asked after a while. 'Nisse was fine. A good kid. I was like a father to him.' 'Yet you killed him?'

'He was threatening my existence. My family. Everything I live for. Eveiything I had to live for. He couldn't help it. But I gave him a quick and painless end. I didn't torment him as you're tormenting me.'

'Did Nisse know that it was you who murdered Teresa?' Rönn asked. He spoke quietly and kindly the whole time.

'He figured it out,' Forsberg replied. 'Nisse wasn't stupid. And he was a good pal. I gave him 10,000 kronor and a new car after I was married. Then we parted forever.'

'Forever?'

'Yes. I never heard from him again, not until last autumn. He called me and said that someone was shadowing him day and night. He was scared and he needed money. I gave him money. I tried to get him to go abroad.'

'But he didn't?'

'No. He was too down. And scared stiff. Thought it would look suspicious.'

'And so you killed him?'

'I had to. The situation gave me no choice. Otherwise he would have ruined my existence. My children's future. My business. Everything. Not deliberately, but he was weak and unreliable and scared. I knew that sooner or later he would come to me for protection. And thereby ruin me. Or else the police would get him and force him to talk. He was a drug addict, weak and unreliable. The police would torture him till he told eveiything he knew.'

'The police are not in the habit of torturing people,' Rönn said gently.

For the first time, Forsberg turned his head. His wrists and ankles were strapped down. He looked at Rönn and said, 'What do you call this?'

Rönn dropped his eyes.

‘Where did you board the bus?' Gunvald Larsson asked. 'On Klarabergsgatan. Outside Åhléns.' 'How did you get there?'

'By car. I parked at my office. I have a reserved space there.'

'How did you know which bus Göransson would take?'

'He called and was given instructions.'

'In other words, you told him what he was to do in order to be murdered,' Gunvald Larsson said.

'Don't you understand that he gave me no choice? Anyway, I did it humanely, he never knew a thing.'

'Humanely? How do you make that out?'

'Can't you leave me in peace now?'

'Not just yet. Explain about the bus first'

'Very well. Will you go then? Promise?'

Rönn glanced at Gunvald Larsson, then said, 'Yes. We will.'

'Nisse called me at the office on Monday morning. He was desperate and said that that man was following him wherever he went. I realized he couldn't hold out much longer. I knew that my wife and the maid would be out in the evening. And the weather was suitable. And the children always go to sleep early, so I...'

'Yes?'

'So I said to Nisse that I wanted to have a look myself at the man who was shadowing him. That he was to entice him out to Djurgården and wait until a doubledecker bus came and to take it from there at about ten o'clock and stay on until the end of the line. Fifteen minutes before he left he was to call my direct number to the office. I left home soon after nine, parked the car, went up to the office and waited. I did not put the light on. He called as agreed and I went down and waited for the bus.'

'Had you decided on the place beforehand?'

'I chose it earlier in the day when I'd taken the bus all the way there. It was a good spot -1 didn't think there would be anyone in the vicinity, especially if the rain kept up. And I reckoned that only very few passengers would go all the way to the last stop. It would have been best if only Nisse and the man who was shadowing him and the driver and one other had been sitting in the bus.'

'One other?' Gunvald Larsson remarked. 'Who would that be?'

'Anybody. Just for the sake of appearances.'

Rönn looked at Gunvald Larsson and shook his head. Then, turning to the man on the stretcher, he said, 'How did it feel?'

'Making difficult decisions is always a trial. But once I've made up my mind to carry something out -'

He broke off.

'Didn't you promise to go now?' he asked.

'What we promise and what we do are two different things,' Gunvald Larsson said.

Forsberg looked at him and said bitterly, 'All you do is torture me and tell lies.'

'I'm not the only one in this room telling lies,' Gunvald Larsson retorted. 'You had decided to kill Göransson and Inspector Stenström weeks beforehand, hadn't you?'

‘Yes.'

'How did you know that Stenström was a policeman?'

'I had observed him earlier. Without Nisse's noticing.'

'How did you know he was working alone?'

'Because he was never relieved. I took it for granted that he was working on his own account. To make a career for himself.'

Gunvald Larsson was silent for half a minute.

'Had you told Göransson not to have any identification papers on him?' he said at last.

'Yes. I gave him orders about that the very first time he called up.'

'How did you learn to operate the bus doors?'

'I had watched carefully what the drivers did. Even so, there was nearly a hitch. It was the wrong sort of bus.'

'Whereabouts in the bus did you sit? Upstairs or down below?'

'Upstairs. I was soon the only one there.'

'And then you went down the stairs with the submachine gun at the ready?'

‘Yes. I kept it behind my back so that Nisse and the others sitting at the rear wouldn't see it. Even so, one of them managed to stand up. You have to be prepared for things like that'

'Supposing it had jammed? In my day those old things often misfired.'

'I knew it was in working order. I was familiar with my weapon and I had checked it carefully before taking it to the office.' 'When did you take the submachine gun to the office?' 'About a week beforehand.'

'Weren't you afraid that someone might find it there?' 'No one would dare go to my drawers,' Forsberg said haughtily. 'Besides, I had locked it up.' 'Where did you keep it previously?'

'In a locked suitcase in the attic. Together with my other trophies.'

'Which way did you go after you had killed all those people?'

'I walked eastward along Norra Stationsgatan, took a taxi at Haga air terminal, collected my car outside the office and drove home to Stocksund.'

'And chucked the submachine gun away en route,' Gunvald Larsson said. 'Don't worry. We'll find it.'

Forsberg didn't answer.

'How did it feel?' Rönn repeated gentiy. 'When you fired?'

'I was defending myself and my family and my home and my firm. Have you ever stood with a gun in your hands, knowing that in fifteen seconds you will charge down into a trench full of the enemy?'

'No,' Rönn replied. 'I haven't'

'Then you don't know anything!' Forsberg shouted. 'You've no right to speak! How could an idiot like you understand me!'

"This won't do,' the doctor said. 'He must be given treatment now.'

He pressed the bell. A couple of orderlies came in. Forsberg went on raving as the bed was rolled out of the room. Rönn started packing up the tape recorder.

'How I loathe that bastard,' Gunvald Larsson muttered suddenly. 'What?'

'I'll tell you something I've never said to anyone else,' Gunvald Larsson confided. 'I feel sorry for nearly everyone we meet in this job. They're just a lot of scum who wish they'd never been born. It's not their fault that everything goes to hell and they don't understand why. It's types like this one who wreck their lives. Smug swine who think only of their money and their houses and their families and their so-called status. Who think they can order others about merely because they happen to be better off. There are thousands of such people and most of them are not so stupid that they strangle Portuguese whores. And that's why we never get at them. We only see their victims. This guy's an exception.'

'Hm, maybe you're right,' Rönn said.

They left the room. Outside a door farther down the corridor stood two police officers in uniform, legs apart and arms folded.

'Huh, so it's you two,' Gunvald Larsson said morosely. 'Oh yes, of course, this hospital is in Solna.'

'You got him in the end, anyway,' Kvant said.

'Yes,' Kristiansson chimed in.

'We didn't,' Gunvald Larsson said. 'It was really Stenström himself who fixed it.'

About an hour later Martin Beck and Kollberg sat drinking coffee in one of the rooms at Kungsholmsgatan.

'It was really Stenström who cleared up the Teresa murder,' Martin Beck said.

'Yes,' Kollberg said. 'But he went about it in a silly way all the same. Working on his own like that. And not leaving so much as a piece of paper behind him. Funny, that lad never grew up.'

The phone rang. Martin Beck answered.

'Hello, it's Månsson.'

'Where are you?'

‘I’m out at Västberga at the moment I've found that sheet of paper.' ‘Where?'

'On Stenström's desk. Under the blotter.' Martin Beck said nothing.

'I thought you said you'd looked here,' Månsson said reproachfully,'And-' 'Yes?'

'He's made a couple of notes on it in pencil. In the top right-hand corner it says: "To be replaced in the Teresa file." And at the bottom of the page he has written a name. Björn Forsberg. And then a question mark. Does that tell us anything?'

Martin Beck made no reply. He just sat there with the receiver in his hand. Then he began to laugh.

Out of the Past

by Richard Shephard

PUBLISHED IN 1968, Sjöwall and Wahlöö's fourth novel was the first of their books to gain commercial success in America, and it remains to date the only foreign book to have won the prestigious Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Mystery Novel, which was presented to the pair in April 1971, in New York

Perhaps the reason for its appeal to American tastes was that it actually features two crimes: the mass murder on the bus that occurs early in the novel and the years-old, unsolved murder of a nymphomaniac brought to light in its wake.

With its solution eluding Beck and his cohorts for sixteen years, the Teresa Camarão case, while a fictitious crime, has echoes of the notorious Black Dahlia affair, the most famous unsolved murder in the history of Los Angeles. Both incidents concern the murder of an attractive young woman of supposedly easy virtue, and both point to other killings.

Sjöwall and Wahloo's most complex novel so far, The Laughing Policeman is also about money, position and status, staple fare in more conventional crime fiction that would have been familiar to American readers. But it also offers them the satisfaction of experiencing the solution of two rather than one crimes, a narrative ploy that occurs in the work of writers such as Ross Macdonald, much admired by the Swedish scribes and whose excellent books invariably had an earlier murder being uncovered during the investigation of a subsequent crime.

Just as Macdonald's books have been described as intense family dramas doubling as crime novels, so the work of Sjöwall and Wahlöö could be described as political indictments doubling as crime novels. The Laughing Policeman opens with a scene that immediately places it in the late 1960s, specifically 1968, the year of the student riots in Paris, demonstrations in London's Grosvenor Square and anti-war protests, marches and demos all across America and various parts of the Western world.

On a rain-swept, wintry night in Stockholm, the police are busy clashing with peaceful and-Vietnam demonstrators outside the American embassy. Outnumbered by roughly two to one, the police are obliged to bring to their assistance a highly impressive arsenal of 'tear gas bombs, pistols, whips, batons, cars, motorcycles, shortwave radios, battery megaphones, riot dogs and hysterical horses', wielding them against demonstrators armed to the teeth with'a letter and cardboard signs'. In case we don't get the joke, Sjöwall and Wahlöö helpfully inform us that the latter 'grew more and more sodden in the pelting rain'. Although this incident helps to date-stamp the novel and is an amusing aside, it also allows the authors to set their pro-Marxist stall out as early as possible and imbues the comical proceedings with a darker hue as they note that one demonstrator, a thirteen-year-old girl, is grabbed by a trio of hefty cops who dragged her into a squad car, where they twisted her arms and pawed her breasts'. Well, that'll give her something to protest about.

More importantly the scene acts as a prelude to another confrontation that is the crux of the novel, for while the scene at the embassy is being played out, and while Beck and Kollberg are engaged in a game of chess in the latter's apartment, a few miles away in yet another part of Stockholm, a double-decker bus, along with the driver and passengers, is shot to smithereens by a man with a machine gun, who leaves behind nine victims, eight of them dead and one seriously wounded. One of those killed happens to be Åke Stenström, a young colleague of Beck and Kollberg's whose now lifeless hand is still holding his service pistol. Why was he on the bus? Just to get from A to B? Then why have his gun with him? These questions lead Beck into one of the most difficult cases of his career since, like the fateful bus, it too is a double-decker, leaving him with not one but two crimes to solve.

While the slaughter on the bus initially seems a random act of appalling violence, Beck and his team, after weeks of frustration and effort, are rewarded with a glimmer of hope. Having methodically examined Stenström's work load, they come across the legendary Teresa Camarão case and it gradually dawns on them that the two incidents might be connected. The carnage, they deduce, might have been carried out by a rational and shrewd individual, a person with something to hide.

In procedural scenes masterfully staged by Sjöwall and Wahlöö, the police begin to peel back the years to reveal their secrets. What has always been opaque now grows more distinct, more visible, and as the truth slowly emerges, the past joins up with the present and the two cases become one.

Outside the office, it's life as usual for Beck (in other words, he doesn't have one).

The marital void depicted in the earlier novels continues to expand in The Laughing Policeman: Beck has actually distanced himself from his long-suffering and often insufferable wife, Inga, by moving out of their room and sleeping by himself on a sofa bed. A terse description of their courtship and conjugation - 'He had met her seventeen years ago, made her pregnant on the spot and married in haste' – speaks volumes. Apart from a brief moment where Beck pleasantly bids good night to his daughter, Ingrid, the only member of his family to whom he seems close, domestic bliss seems utterly conspicuous by its absence. Even the usually highly vocal Inga is mosdy silent and remote and, except for momentarily reminding him that he's 'not the only policeman', an admonition that's more like a mantra, she's no longer moved to scold or argue with her husband.

It seems that for Beck there can be little hope for the survival of a marriage - that roundelay of shared intimacies, of mutual displays of trust and kindness, the pleasing routine of mundanities and creature comforts - when one partner has his head full of murder, assault, robbery and deceit, or ) when circumstances, perhaps choice, have compelled him to take on the seemingly impossible task of protecting and serving a society that spurns his help, however much it needs it, and constantly derides and abuses him. In Beck's case, the ties of matrimony and fatherhood have been realigned to form a noose that is tightening around his neck, and the cloying confines, the saccharine strictures of a family Christmas - the one time of year when it's impossible to avoid such proximity - are threatening to choke him.

Conversely, Beck's friend and colleague, Lennart Kollberg, seems to be remarkably content once he is away from his desk and at home. Any potential marital trouble hinted at in the third novel, The Man on the Balcony, where he was tempted by the allures and overtures of a sexy witness, is entirely absent here and he is full of love and longing for his wife, 'a long-legged girl of normal build and sensual nature' who enticingly tells him that she'll see him in bed. 'Or on the floor or in the bathtub or wherever you goddam like.' Gazing at her as she stands naked at the kitchen sink, making the feed for their baby's bottle, a seemingly perfect combination of maternal care and desirability, he reflects that she 'was exactly what he wanted, but it had taken him over twenty years to find her and another year to think it over'.

Never ones to over-egg the pudding, Sjöwall and Wahlöö discreetly demonstrate the enormous contrast between the two men's marriages by showing Beck at night, waiting until he hears his wife start snoring before he telephones Kollberg, who, we realize, is making love with his wife and still entwined when he answers the call from his fellow officer. Apart from its other attributes, Kollberg sees sex with his wife as a handy way of clearing from his mind 'the thought of Stenström and the red doubledecker bus', a diversion of which Beck, alone in his sofa bed, smoking and poring over old cases, is unable, or unwilling, to take advantage. Presumably angry at having been transported away from his wife's charms and dragged back onto the bus, as it were, Kollberg concludes the conversation by telling his colleague to 'Go to hell' and promptly hanging up. Standing there'with the phone to his ear for a few seconds', Beck retreats to the sofa bed and lies down in the dark, 'feeling he had made a fool of himself.

Despite the difference in each man's home life, Beck and Kollberg are professionally as united as ever as they investigate first the bus murders and, eventually, the cold case from the past. There are instances, as in the preceding novel, when they literally think as one, although on one significant occasion when they don't, when Beck has finally grasped that Stenström had been working on the Teresa Camarão case and his friend hasn't, the two men both have 'the same thought', voiced by Kollberg:'One can't communicate merely by telepathy.' Naturally, though, they do get on each other's nerves, as when Kollberg's irritation at Beck's persistent cough causes the latter to rudely tell him he gets 'more and more like Inga every day. Still, they function brilliantly together and they are 'a good complement to one another' When Beck first learns of the incident on the bus and that one of his colleagues has been shot, he immediately fears that it's Kollberg, whom he left after their walk together earlier and whom he discovers has still not returned home. But at the scene of the crime, as Beck silently scans the feces of the victims, Kollberg suddenly appears as if nothing had happened. Too relieved to trust himself to speak, Beck says nothing, as Kollberg gives him 'a searching look’. In such brief and telling instances as these, the reader comes to understand just how the two men 'had learned to understand each other's thoughts and feelings without wasting words'.

Sjöwall and Wahlöö took the novel's title from the famous 1920s music hall song of the same name. Sung by the aptiy named Charles Jolly, but under the pseudonym of Charles Penrose, it's a song about a fat policeman who laughs all the time and has been unaccountably popular over the years. A record of it is given to Beck for a Christmas present by his daughter, Ingrid, who clearly thinks it's hilarious and tells him it's 'Pretty appropriate, eh?' As his family sat around him and 'howled with mirth', Beck himself, this driven, dyspeptic detective, 'was left utterly cold. He couldn't even manage a smile.' It is only at the very end of the novel when the two cases have been solved, when Stenström's death has been avenged and when the final twist is delivered by the authors, that Beck starts laughing. The joke is on him and the rest of the police force, but still he laughs.

Beck at the Box Office

The American success of The Laughing Policeman was boosted by its adaptation for the big screen, filmed in the USA in 1973, after its triumph at the Edgar Allan Poe Awards. Directed by Stuart Rosenberg and starring Walter Matthau as 'Sergeant Jake Martin', the American version of Martin Beck, it also featured Bruce Dern and Lou Gossett as Beck's colleagues, and the setting was changed from Stockholm to San Francisco. Perhaps because of a possibly inappropriate association with that humorous Charles Penrose record, the title was changed in the UK to the rather dreary An Investigation of Murder. The film received solidly good reviews from US critics and Rosenberg's next project, in 1975, was to direct The Drowning Pool This was adapted from Ross Macdonald's crime novel of the same name which, as it neatly closes the circle on the cinematic side of things, leaves us with a happy ending.

Further Interrogation of Maj Sjöwall

Q and A by Richard Shephard

Unlike the hot, sultry summer of the previous book, this is set in the winter, near Christmas, with lots of rain and cold winds. How important was the weather as a backdrop to the events in the novels? In Scandinavia we have shifting seasons and to make a book's setting the cold winter or grey autumn or slushy pre-spring or hot summer can spice up the story a little. Sometimes we simply used the weather as it was at the time of writing.

You seemed particularly interested in what you call the ‘poison' of status in this book. Did you think Sweden especially succumbed to this?

I'm not sure I understand the question, but I suppose that the development we described in Sweden was similar to that in the rest of the world.

There is a very powerful use of the past in this novel, more so than in the preceding books. Was that deliberate and, if so, why did you wait until now?

I think it turned out to be the right time to look back in history and give both the reader and us some background. We hadn't really planned it or postponed it, though.

This novel won the Edgar Award in 1971 and remains the only European novel to have done so. Why do you think this book was so popular with American readers? I honesdy don't know. Perhaps it took time for American readers to find their way to our books and that particular tide might have created an interest for Sweden and the so-called 'Swedish Model' which Prime Minister Palme spread abroad.

Maj Sjöwall was born in 1935 in Stockholm, Sweden. She studied journalism and graphics and worked as a translator, as well as an art director and journalist for some of the most eminent magazines and newspapers in Sweden. She met her husband Per Wahloo in 1961 through her work, and the two almost instantly became a couple. They had two sons together and, after the death of Per Wahlöö, Sjöwall continued to translate. She also wrote several short stories and the acclaimed crime novel The Woman Who Resembled Greta Garbo, with the Dutch crime writer Tomas Ross. She is arguably Sweden's finest translator and is still at work today.