Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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We can take preventative measures.

The Terrorists by Maj Slowall and Per Wahloo

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The final Martin Beck novel (though it’s not entirely clear from the novel — with Per Wahloo dying) is about Beck being hired (involuntarily enlisted) to design and execute a security plan with a visiting US Senator of dubious reputation and politics. It’s 1975 and politics are fraught. We start with a terrorist bombing in a far away country showing a sophisticated network of terrorists (more so mercenaries for hire) who specialize in precision attacks. We then jump to a court case in which a […]

Skål

The Locked Room by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö

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I don’t know that the Martin Beck series can possibly be better than The Locked Room. It hits every critical talking point the writing staff have tried to address in previous tales and it becomes something else entirely. It’s almost as if this book is writing through the reader rather than to them. Some series don’t need to be read in sequential order. They may be even better if you don’t do that. I started the Lew Archer series out of order by accident and it’s my […]

Police and Brutality

The Abominable Man by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö

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One of the best in an already great series, The Abominable Man grapples with a lot and spares no emotion. At the heart of this offering is what it means for a country to be policed. It’s a discussion that’s been had by a broader swath of Americans since the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, which though originally inspired by the murder of Trayvon Martin, galvanized the deaths of young black men at the hands of law enforcement. Police brutality in the States has its […]

Martin Beck thought about these things a lot.

Cop Killer by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo

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This is the ninth of the Martin Beck mystery/police procedurals written by Maj Slowall and Per Wahloo in the 60s and 70s. They’ve adapted to several different films and tv shows, probably the most famous one, The Laughing Policeman written for Walter Mathau in the early 1970s. I have only read the first of the series besides this one, and they have about the same kind of meta-narrative as say the Harry Hole novels in that events do happen that carry over from book to […]

Eat the Rich

Murder at the Savoy by Maj Sjöwall & Per Wahlöö

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Going into reading this series, I knew Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö were avowed socialists who wrote these books in large parts as a critique of inequality in Sweden. But while their beliefs do sneak out from time-to-time, they generally ground their mysteries in the tradition of a police procedural as opposed to pedagogy cloaked in mystery drag. That goes out the window with Murder at the Savoy, which is about as didactic of a book as I’ve read from them. There’s no question about it […]



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