The Man Who Went Up in Smoke

The man who broke up in air ( Swedish " Mannen som gick upp i rök " ) by the Swedish author couple Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö is the second volume of the ten-volume mystery series novel om ett brott ( novel about a crime ) with Commissioner Martin Beck. The novel was published in 1966 in Swedish, 1969 at Rowohlt in the FRG and in the spring of 1989 in the publishing world and the people in the GDR.

Content

The novel, set in the 1960s, is about a Swedish journalist named Alf Matsson, who disappeared without a trace in Hungary. He had flown on behalf of a Swedish newspaper to Budapest, there to conduct an interview with a boxer and report on political events. Since Matsson has not reported for a week and you also can not reach him at the hotel, reports to the case to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. However, the case must be dealt with discreetly, because they fear political entanglements. The Stockholm police is tasked with finding the missing reporter, and sends Martin Beck, who sacrifices his vacation because of the fall, to Budapest.

Beck learns hotel in Budapest that Matsson left the hotel without a passport and luggage on the day of his arrival, and since then no more has surfaced. The Hungarian police have not yet found an unknown male corpse lying in a hospital an unconscious foreigners. Much more is the authority is not willing to do. Martin Beck then encounters a Hungarian policeman who helps him with the case. Since there is neither evidence nor traces of Matsson, Beck knows not what he could do. But one night he is attacked on the riverside of the Danube by unknown. He survived thanks to the Budapest police, and that the perpetrators can be caught. It comes out why Alf Matsson addition to his activity reporter visited cities in Eastern Europe. But he remains disappeared. Beck concludes that the solution is to be found in Sweden. There he closes the case as well.

Assessment

Martin Beck goes first, as well as Sweden and Hungary are still in the cold war, assuming that the journalist was liquidated for political reasons. The psychological trick of the authors is that the reader reconstructs this expectation, until the surprising solution shows a normal motive for murder. The protagonist of the novel is not infallible About figure ( such as Poirot, Maigret, etc.) and has what was still considered in 1966 in the crime literature as absolute novelty, also described in details private life in which their likes and dislikes far beyond the quirks of the hitherto known protagonists go.

Criticism

Ekkehard Knörer writes at the end of his detailed criticism: The Enlightenment of the ( as it turns out: quite refined ) crime is then not much more than fulfilling the mold; its greater charm, the novel has in the long latency phase in Budapest, in which hardly seems something to happen.

Edits

The novel was made ​​into a film with the same title as a German -Hungarian- Swedish co-production in 1980, directed by Péter Bacsó and from a screenplay by Wolfgang Mühlbauer with Derek Jacobi and Judy Winter in the lead roles. There is also an adaptation of an audio book.