Quick Review

The Locked Room by Maj Sjöwall

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Wonderful fun! I'd frankly forgotten the delight of a good, Marxist police procedural. This is one of the greatest collaborations in crime fiction, and the resulting series is a classic example of the adaptability of genre entertainment to better ends. Here, those would be a devastatingly funny critique of not only the liberal State and the reactionary capitalism barely concealed therein, but also of the ridiculous conventions of the detective story. Just here: criminals, if they're punished at all, are punished for the wrong crimes, cops shoot each other in the absence of suspects, and a detective actually solving a crime makes one's police superiors suspicious. That sounds like satire of the first order -- or yesterday's headline in the Metro section of any major American or European newspaper (you know, back when we still had newspapers, and the occasional honest headline.)

View all my reviews