Sjöwall-Wahlöö

It's hard not to wonder what sort of person would come up with such eccentric ideas for pop songs, and Newman says he wonders, too.

Asked to remember why it occurred to him to write about the German killer, he can only come up with the fact that his wife is from Dusseldorf. He took the title of “Jolly Coppers On Parade” from a Swedish mystery novel.

Newman's imagery has never been more powerful than in "Jolly Coppers on Parade," which was suggested by the title of a Swedish movie:

They're coming down the street
They're coming right down the middle
Look how they keep the beat
Why, they're as blue as the ocean.

This song, its title taken from a Swedish mystery novel, got little notice then or since, probably because most people didn’t and don’t know what to make of it.

Newman himself once said, who knows how seriously, that it “isn’t an absolutely anti-police song.

Last month Per Wahlöö died at 48 of pancreatic disease. Since his widow does not intend to continue their Martin Beck series, the literary toll seems higher than the one in the bus. It is as if an entire family of friends were abruptly wiped out.

The Wahlöös’ command of police procedure has always been formidable, but they have a deep knowledge of more elusive territory: the people for whom socialism does not work. The books are full of divorced women who cannot get jobs because there is no room for their children in day-care centers and pitiable alcoholics chased from park to park by patrolmen who cannot think of anything better to do. In The Locked Room (1973), probably the best book in the series, Beck ruminates about Sweden, which has problems surprisingly similar to those of capitalistic countries: “The so-called welfare state abounds with sick, poor and lonely people, living at best on dog food, who are left uncared for until they die in their rathole apartments.”

The sole film adaptation (of The Laughing Policeman, starring Walter Matthau) might have been made by Kvant and Kristiansson.