- Paperback: 288 pages
- Publisher: Harper Perennial; (Reissue) edition (Aug 2006)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0007232845
- ISBN-13: 978-0007232840
- Product Dimensions: 19.2 x 12.8 x 2 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 76,928 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
The Martin Beck series - The Man Who Went Up in Smoke
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Product Description
Review
‘The decalogue about the Swedish Chief Inspector Martin Beck created by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo during the 1960s and 1970s are indeed classic police fiction. They changed the genre. Whoever is writing crime fiction after these novels in inspired by them in one way or another.’ Henning Mankell
‘If you haven’t read Sjowall/Wahloo, start now.’ Sunday Telegraph
‘Their mysteries don’t just read well; they reread even better. Witness, wife, petty cop or crook – they’re all real characters even if they get just a few sentences. The plots hold, because they’re ingenious but never inhuman.’ New York Times
Product Description
Perennial relaunch the classic Martin Beck detective series from the 1960s – the novels that have inspired all crime fiction written ever since.
Widely recognised as the greatest masterpieces of crime fiction ever written, these are the original detective stories that pioneered the detective genre.
Written in the 1960s, they are the work of Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo – a husband and wife team from Sweden. The ten novels follow the fortunes of the detective Martin Beck, whose enigmatic, taciturn character has inspired countless other policemen in crime fiction. The novels can be read separately, but do follow a chronological order, so the reader can become familiar with the characters and develop a loyalty to the series. Each book will have a new introduction in order to help bring these books to a new audience.
‘The Man who went up in Smoke’ starts as Martin Beck has just begun his holiday: an August spent with his family on a small island off the coast of Sweden. But when a neighbour gets a phone call, Beck finds himself packed off to Budapest, where a boorish journalist has vanished without a trace. Instead of passing leisurely sun-filled days with his children, Beck must troll about in the Eastern Europe underworld for a man nobody knows, with the aid of the coolly efficient local police, who do business while soaking at the public baths – and at the risk of vanishing along with his quarry.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Beck's Budapest,
By Gargoyle (Scotland) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Martin Beck series - The Man Who Went Up in Smoke (Paperback)
I've set myself to read the whole ten books in this series. I love the stripped down nature of the writing and the dialogue is realistic too - sardonic banter among cops, sometimes nonsensical.It's easy to see where Mankell get his influences from. There's a sadness in the way Beck goes about his life. His marriage doesn't look healthy. He packs a bottle of whisky when he goes travelling. I think the Budapest passages work well. Beck's alienation is, if anything, made more stark by his being planted in a foreign city. The solution to the mystery is delivered in dead pan style - Beck, his colleague and the murderer sitting about in a room till the truth emerges. No heroics.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A let-down after the superb Roseanna,
By Alexander Leach (Shipley, West Yorkshire United Kingdom) - See all my reviews (VINE VOICE) (REAL NAME)
This review is from: The Martin Beck series - The Man Who Went Up in Smoke (Paperback)
This second book in the Martin Beck decalogue didn't gel for me. Beck Abroad could be its subtitle - and like Wallander's sojourn in Latvia in Mankell's The Dogs of Riga, it doesn't quite come off. Mainly because the detective work goes out of the window and it becomes a bit of a travelogue.Plus there are too many characters and the book became a bit incomprehensible until the denouement. But the series gets back on track with the next novel, so don't worry!
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The second in this classic series,
By A Reader (Brighton, UK) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Martin Beck series - The Man Who Went Up in Smoke (Paperback)
Book two, and Martin Beck spends a lot of time on foreign soil. Despite this, we get more familiar with all the characters and the whole gestalt... Beck's failing marriage, his closeness with colleagues, especially Lennart Kollberg. Not as great as Roseanna, but still very, very good. Look out for the introduction of that wonderfully goofy pair, Kristiansson and Kvant - "who pop in and out of the series with the grisly inevitability of a pair of Shakespearean gravediggers"!
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