Roseanna

[sawyl]

Prompted by R4s recent series on European detective fiction, I thought it was time I tackled Sjöwall and Wahlöö's Martin Beck Mysteries starting with Roseanna.

The mystery begins when the body of a young woman is dredged up out of the Göta Canal and Inspector Martin Beck is dispatched from Stockholm to assist the police in Motala. Clues are frustratingly thin on the ground and it takes weeks of legwork before the victim is identified as an American tourist called Roseanna McGraw. Gradually over six months, through a combination of luck and hard graft, Beck and his colleagues Kollberg and Melander eventually start to home in on their suspect.

Roseanna is a good solid police procedural with a strong mystery plot and an excellent cast of characters. Martin Beck is a likeably lead: intelligent, humane, dedicated and meticulous, he combines a professional calm with a certain personal anxiousness. Kollberg, whose jolly, bluff exterior conceals a clever and sensitive mind, is the perfect partner for Beck while the phlegmatic Melander, whose prodigious photographic memory is a wonder of the pre-computer age, keeps his colleagues from straying too far off course