Mystery Review: The Man on the Balcony, the third Martin Beck outing, is very much a police procedural, calmly and carefully documenting steps the Stockholm police take as they search for the perpetrator of a series of child murders. The result is plain, gray, and mostly unemotional. The story doesn't go deep into personalities. There are few moments of excitement. Rarely do we see passion except that stemming from exhaustion. Some of the Stockholm officers we know from previous books, some are new. They don't always work well together, don't seem to like each other much, and are all too clearly human. They work slowly: quiet, methodical, deliberate. There are dead ends, wrong turns, chance plays a big part. As Beck notes: "He also knew that when the murderer was caught ... it would look like luck ... but it was a case of giving luck a helping hand, of making the net of circumstance ... as fine-meshed as possible." Some clues fall into their lap from unlikely sources, which they don't always recognize or connect at the time. There is nothing super human about these detectives, there's no Holmes, Poirot, or even a Veronica Mars in their ranks. I'm unsure how much of this reflects a Swedish personality and how much is simply steady police work. The Man on the Balcony is more than just a story, as Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö also make it a vehicle for social commentary: "Stockholm is a city in which many thousands of people sleep out of doors in the summer. Not only tramps, junkies and alcoholics but also a large number of visitors who who cannot get hotel rooms and just as many homeless people who, though fit for work ... cannot find anywhere to live, since bungled community planning has has resulted in an acute housing shortage." I don't know what their political viewpoint was, but they definitely have one. The Man on the Balcony, despite the lack of lightning bolts and fireworks, is a solid page-turner. [3★]
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