The Locked Room
First English edition
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| Author | Sjöwall and Wahlöö |
|---|---|
| Original title | Det slutna rummet |
| Translator | Paul Britten Austin |
| Country | Sweden |
| Language | Swedish |
| Series | Martin Beck series |
| Publisher |
Norstedts Förlag (Swedish) Pantheon Books (English) |
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Publication date
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1972 |
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Published in English
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1973 |
| Pages | 291 pp |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 11577021 |
| LC Class | PT9876.29.J63 S54 |
| Preceded by | The Abominable Man |
| Followed by | Cop Killer |
The Locked Room (1972) is a novel by Sjöwall and Wahlöö in their detective series revolving around Martin Beck and his team. (Original Swedish title: Det slutna rummet.)
The Locked Room has two plots running simultaneously. Larsson and Kollberg are extremely reluctantly part of a special task force that needs to solve a spree of bank robberies. Martin Beck is given a pity job after recovering from being shot at the conclusion of The Abominable Man; he needs to solve a classic situation of the genre: the locked room mystery.
The incompetence of the Swedish police force has spread to the point that all three detectives are severely hindered in their work. One criminal walks free for a heinous crime he did commit, then gets to do hard time for a crime he did not.
The story begins with Beck recovered after his injury sustained at the end of the previous book and now returning to the National Police Bureau; he discovers that the police force still is amateurish and unprofessional for the most part, which he was accustomed to previously. Patrolmen have found a highly decomposed corpse (as it turns out later, a murdered man--found in a locked from inside apartment. An incompetent detective, Bo Zachrisson, had the case shelved as suicide. No one was much disturbed by the fact that the weapon had not been found in the apartment.
The novel now has two storylines: the locked room investigation and the bank robbery specialists.
The latter take by accident the petty criminal Mauritzon, a mate of Malmstrom and Mohren, and accuse him of a bank robbery in which a bank customer was shot. At the same time Martin Beck solves the locked room mystery- the gun was shot from outside by Maurtizon, when the windows was open. The window had fallen so that the latch had closed by itself.
Since the evidence collected by Martin Beck is insufficient, Mauritzon is acquitted of murder; but for the bank robbery, of which he is innocent, but whose evidence he cannot refute, he is sentenced to manslaughter with lifetime imprisonment.
The bank robbers pursued by Attorney Olsson manage to fool the police (the robbery does not occur in Stockholm, but in Malmö instead).
During the investigation, Beck meets a woman named Rhea Nielsen in a depressive phase of his life and he finds new courage which in the following novels plays an important role.
Beck meets Rhea Nielsen, and it is love at first sight, sort of, in slow motion. Contrary to his ex-wife, she is a no-nonsense left-wing type of person and his intellectual equal.
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