The midnight dawn of Nordic noir began long before Stieg Larsson's Millennium series. Prior to Larsson's Lisbeth Salander, there was Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander, and before him there was Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö's Martin Beck. In 1965, Sjöwall and Wahlöö released Roseanna, the first of 10 Martin Beck mysteries (published through 1975, when Wahlöö died), setting the stage for Scandinavian crime thrillers to become the worldwide phenomenon they are today.
The 10 Martin Beck books are officially titled The Story of a Crime. Sjöwall and Wahlöö were meticulous plotters, giving the series a much-lauded depth of character and setting development. They worked on alternate chapters in each book, threading together Beck's exploits as a detective in the special homicide commission of the Swedish national police. Roseanna opens with the discovery of a molested and murdered young woman in the Göta Canal. Interpol identifies her as American tourist Roseanna McGraw, whose case leads Beck and his police colleagues into a morally ambiguous sting operation to catch the murderer. The fourth Beck book, The Laughing Policeman (1968), won the Edgar Award for Best Novel in 1971. The entire series was republished by Vintage Crime/Black Lizard between 2008 and 2010. --Tobias Mutter
