Per Wahlöö

Per Wahloo was a Swedish journalist and novelist who, with his partner Maj Sjowall, wrote the ten Martin Beck novels between 1965 and 1975 and in doing so invented the modern Scandinavian crime novel. The plan was explicit and political: ten books, roughly one a year, using the police procedural as a scalpel on the Swedish welfare state, with a detective who is tired, permanently ill and unhappily married. The fourth, Den skrattande polisen, won the Edgar Award for Best Novel in 1971. Wahloo also wrote alone, including dystopian thrillers with a harder political edge. Almost everything in the genre since, from Mankell to Larsson, runs back through these two.