The Man Who Went Up in Smoke

[sawyl]

In the second of Sjöwall and Wahlöö's Martin Beck Mysteries, The Man who Who Went Up in Smoke, Beck decides that he's better off working on an informal investigation behind the Iron Curtain than spending a month in the Stockholm archipelageo with his wife and children.

Mere hours after starting his holiday, Martin Beck gets called to the Foreign Office and asked to investigate the case of an odious Swedish journalist who has mysterious vanished while working on a story in Budapest. Due to concerns about the impact on international relations, Beck is dispatched to Hungary alone and told to find out what he can about the case. Initially disillusioned and unsure where to start, Beck soon picks up on a handful of clues that suggest that the journalist, Alf Matson, was involved in something rather shady.

Although I'm not entirely sure I buy the portrait of 1960s Budapest as some kind of paradise, I enjoyed the way the book wrong-footed my Le Carré-ish preconceptions. I also enjoyed Beck's initial bafflement and boredom at the complete absurd situation he finds himself in and though the eventual solution to the mystery worked really rather well.