Tom Donaghey's Reviews > The Abominable Man: A Martin Beck Police Mystery (7) (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard) by Maj Sjöwall, Per Wahlöö(October 6, 2009) Paperback

The Abominable Man (1971) (Martin Beck #7) by Maj Sjowall & Per Wahloo. The title character is killed off at the beginning of the novel which sets all the following actions in motion. The murdered, older man, is killed in his hospital bed, knifed by a stranger and unseen by security. When the homicide squad is alerted they are only surprised the killing took so long to happen. The dead man is a former policeman known for his bad treatment of perps, trainees, and fellow officers, lying while under oath and manufacturing evidence when it was needled. He was a hard man with hard ways for everything except his own family. He was nicknamed the Abominable Man by his coworkers and they meant it.
But he was a cop so there has to be justice. This book differs from the previous editions in the ten part Story of Crime series in that there is a great deal of immediate action. Spanning roughly 24 hours we read from muder, through the manhunt for the “crazed” killer and finally to the confrontation with the self same. There is the usual collection of police including Martin Beck, and there are the usual political views expressed by the authors including taking on the code of silence rampant in most police departments while also belittling the out-of-date methods of the strong-arm police tactics.
This is not your standard Police Procedural tale nor is it the normal Martin Beck story. It is something more powerful than either or those. Writing this more than 50 years after it’s original publication, I am stunned to realize that the things reported in this and the other books in the 10 volume series, are to some degree or another, happening in cities and towns all around the world. Or maybe I’m not stunned at all. It is true, the more things change…