Sweden had turned into a country where people more than anything else seemed to be afraid of being bothered. But those days have irretrievably vanished, and it's questionable whether they were ever as idyllic as we remember them. We're living as if we were in mourning for a lost paradise, he thought. It's a society where folks seem to have pretty much quit trying: It's both dependent on immigrants to fill the jobs that there are no young Swedes to do and deeply resentful of the fact that the newcomers aren't being assimilated, though no one shows the slightest interest in making the effort that such assimilation would require. Where Wahloo and Sjowall used the Beck series to critique the welfare state of the 60s and 70s from a more radical Left perspective, Wallander's perspective is more conservative and the Sweden he patrols is a place that seems to be on the verge of the abyss because of the "successes" of socialism. They've an heir now though in the form of Henning Mankell and his slovenly but stolid hero, Inspector Kurt Wallander. It's unlikely anyone's read many Swedish mysteries since. But the last of them was published in 1975 and the series now appears in the Black Lizard/Vintage Crime series. We mystery fans of a certain age have all read the Martin Beck police procedurals of the husband and wife team, Per Wahloo and Maj Sjowall.
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