It’ll be easier to talk afterward.’
Let me, at last, come to the story—although not too much about the story. The blurbs of some books occasionally, albeit inadvertently, give too many hints about the twists and turns of a plot, sometimes even about the guilty party. Such lapses are irritating, and in the US particularly may provide mines of unwanted and unnecessary information. Why not allow readers to discover for themselves exactly what is going to happen? So let me be brief. We know about the fire already, and it is no secret from the first few pages that we are going to be teased about the respective merits of accident, arson, and wilful murder. Expertly, the theories are juggled in front of our eyes as clues emerge to point the way to shady and deadly dealings in car theft and drugs, with the action shifting eventually from Stockholm down to Malmö in the south and the short crossing to Denmark. It is pleasing, at least for me, to reveal that as the plot develops the reader is not encumbered, as in many crime novels these days, with so much technical forensic detail, often to me unintelligible, that one needs the company of Gray’s Anatomy. Although the autopsies and post-mortems carried out here are of crucial importance, their results are reported with succinct clarity, and no degree in pathology is required to follow them.
For me, the best criterion of a good read is to wish that it had gone on a bit longer. I felt that here. If I am truthful, I cannot pretend that my life has been unduly influenced by the right-wing Sunday Telegraph—just as the lives of Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö would not have been, either. But now I can only feel grateful to the crime critic of that newspaper, upon whose recommendation I have started to read the Martin Beck Series.
Colin Dexter
The man lying dead on the tidily made bed had first taken off his jacket and tie and hung them over the chair by the door. He had then unlaced his shoes, placed them under the chair and stuck his feet into a pair of black leather slippers. He had smoked three filter-tipped cigarettes and stubbed them out in the ashtray on the bedside table. Then he had lain down on his back on the bed and shot himself through the mouth.
That did not look quite so tidy.
His nearest neighbour was a prematurely retired army captain who had been injured in the hip during an elk hunt the previous year. He had suffered from insomnia after the accident and often sat up at night playing solitaire. He was just getting the deck of cards out when he heard the shot on the other side of the wall and he at once called the police.
It was twenty to four on the morning of the seventh of March when two radio police broke the lock on the door and made their way into the flat, inside which the man on the bed had been dead for thirty-two minutes. It did not take them long to establish the fact that the man almost certainly had committed suicide. Before returning to their car to report the death over the radio, they looked around the flat, which in fact they should not have done. Apart from the bedroom, it consisted of a living room, kitchen, hall, bathroom and wardrobe. They could find no message or farewell letter. The only written matter visible was two words on the pad by the telephone in the living room. The two words formed a name. A name which both policemen knew well.
Martin Beck.
It was Ottilia’s name day.
Soon after eleven in the morning, Martin Beck left the South police station and went and stood in the line at the off-licence in Karusellplan. He bought a bottle of Nutty Solera. On the way to the metro, he also bought a dozen red tulips and a can of English cheese biscuits. One of the six names his mother had been given at baptism was Ottilia and he was going to congratulate her on her name day.
The old people’s home was large and very old. Much too old and inconvenient according to those who had to work there. Martin Beck’s mother had moved there a year ago, not because she had been unable to manage on her own, for she was still lively and relatively fit at seventy-eight, but because she had not wanted to be a burden on her only child. So in good time she had secured herself a place in the home and when a desirable room had become vacant, that is, when the previous occupant had died, she had got rid of most of her belongings and moved there. Since his father’s death nineteen years earlier, Martin Beck had been her only support and now and again he was afflicted with pangs of conscience over not looking after her himself. Deep down, inwardly, he was grateful that she had taken things into her own hands without even asking his advice.
He walked past one of the dreary small sitting rooms in which he had never seen anyone sitting, continued along the gloomy corridor and knocked on his mother’s door. She looked up in surprise as he came in; she was a little deaf and had not heard his discreet tap. Her face lighting up, she put aside her book and began to get up. Martin Beck moved swiftly over to her, kissed her cheek and with gentle force pressed her down into the chair again.
‘Don’t start dashing about for my sake,’ he said.
He laid the flowers on her lap and placed the bottle and can of biscuits on the table.
‘Congratulations, Mother dear.’
She unwound the paper from the flowers and said:
‘Oh, what lovely flowers. And biscuits! And wine, or what is it? Oh, sherry. Good gracious!’
She got up and, despite Martin Beck’s protests, went over to a cupboard and took out a silver vase, which she filled with water from the handbasin.
‘I’m not so old and decrepit that I can’t even use my legs,’ she said. ‘Sit yourself down instead. Shall we have sherry or coffee?’
He hung up his hat and coat and sat down.
‘Whichever you like,’ he said.
‘I’ll make coffee,’ she said. ‘Then I can save the sherry and offer some to the old ladies and boast about my nice son. One has to save up the cheerful subjects.’
Martin Beck sat in silence, watching as she switched on the electric hotplate and measured out the water and coffee. She was small and fragile and seemed to grow smaller each time he saw her.
‘Is it boring for you here, Mother?’
‘Me? I’m never bored.’
The reply came much too quickly and glibly for him to believe her. Before sitting down, she put the coffee pot on the hotplate and the vase of flowers on the table.
‘Don’t you worry about me,’ she said. ‘I’ve got such a lot to do. I read and talk to the other old girls, and I knit. Sometimes I go into town and just look, though it’s awful the way they’re pulling everything down. Did you see that the building your father’s business was in has been demolished?’
Martin Beck nodded. His father had had a small transport business in Klara and where it had once been, there was now a shopping centre of glass and concrete. He looked at the photograph of his father that stood on the chest of drawers by her bed. The picture had been taken in the mid-twenties, when he himself had been only a few years old and his father had still been a young man with clear eyes, glossy hair with a side-parting, and a stubborn chin. It was said that Martin Beck resembled his father. He himself had never been able to see the likeness, and should there be any, then it was limited to physical appearance. He remembered his father as a straightforward, cheerful man who was generally liked and who laughed and joked easily. Martin Beck would have described himself as a shy and rather dull person. At
