THE LAUGHING POLICEMAN, SJÖWALL AND WAHLÖO

I find this sixties Scandinavia crime series, featuring the policeman Martin Beck, totally irresistible. Firstly, they have great covers. And for bookaholics, they have letters along the spine which, when you have the whole set, spell "MARTIN BECK". Ah, the marketing department know us completists so very well...

But the truth is I wouldn't worry about finishing the set if I didn't love the books. They are a strange mixture - preoccupied with showing a rapidly-changing Swedish social landscape, but at the same time showing a deeply sympathetic Ed McBain-type depiction of a small group of cops in a single police station. 

And evidently they were heavily influential on Mankell's later Wallander series - sometimes you can almost smell the similarities between Wallander and lovely Martin Beck. 

This story, though, is particularly good. I got to the letter 'N', before stopping reading earlier in the year, but I missed out 'T', so I went back this week. What bliss to be reading a detective novel that you know before starting is going to be good. 

I'LL GO TO BED AT NOON, GERARD WOODWARD

I read this book, which had been sitting on the shelf since approx. three weeks after it came out, after The Common Reader extolled its virtues. Actually the virtues of the whole trilogy. 

To start with I was a bit nonplussed, as the style is fairly undemanding, and there are a few bits that smelt a bit "creative writing" to me. (Sorry, but that's like my worst thing in the entire world.)

But my god, I got so into it that I sat on a chair by the boiler all day to keep warm and read the entire thing, when I was supposed to be making dinner for sixteen people. 

The things I loved: the complications of a properly dysfunctional family, laid out on paper. And like Tolstoy said, this unhappy family is unhappy in its own special way. Alcoholism haunts them, erratic behaviour, and that terrible inconsistency and unpredictability that is the hallmark of the drunk family. 

The fact is though, that amongst all this, you still manage to care about everybody, worry about everybody, and want to know what happens, which is practically amazing to me. And the fact that you sort of laugh at them, even in their tragedy. The motorbike riding through the campsite! The tragic glue-sniffing mum! The therapeutic shop-lifting! The disappearing bathroom pipework! In fact flicking back through I remember finding really quite a lot of it funny. It's a funny, laughable, terrible story. 

A book not like any other I've ever read. Though plenty enough like people I've known in real life. Well, thank you to The Common Reader, and also to my friend Ruth who lent me the book and has never asked for it back (eek). I loved TCR's point that for once the publisher's blurb is right - the characters really do haunt you: I keep thinking about them and wishing I could read more stories about them. Thoughtfully, Woodward wrote it as a trilogy. So hurray, I've got two more to go!