The Laughing Policeman

A Martin Beck Police Mystery

By: Maj Sjöwall, Per Wahlöö

Narrated by: Tom Weiner

Length: 6 hrs and 41 mins

Publisher's summary

On a cold and rainy Stockholm night, nine bus riders are gunned down by an unknown assassin. The press, anxious for an explanation for the seemingly random crime, quickly dubs him a madman. But Superintendent Martin Beck of the Stockholm Homicide Squad suspects otherwise. This apparently motiveless killer has managed to target one of Beck's best detectives - and he, surely, would not have been riding that lethal bus without a reason.

©1998 Random House (P)2009 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

Critic reviews

• Edgar Award, Best Novel, 1971

"I've read The Laughing Policeman six or eight times. Each time I reach the final twist on the final page, I shiver afresh." (Jonathan Franzen)
"A tantalizing, intricate tale." (New York Times Book Review)

Review - Laughing Policeman

It's a classic, but a little too much pausing the action to denounce the real criminals - capitalists. Very late 1960s. Dreary too, and sexist. But hey, it moves right along. I don't regret buying it. Narrator ok.

Enjoyable

An absorbing fast paced story; well written. The implied social commentary is a little depressing.

A disappointing reader

I hadn't seen the film before listening (for all of fifteen minutes) to this book, nor had I read the book, but the narrator's clumsy characterizations of Beck and his sidekick sound like a parody, a bad imitation of a 1940's actor, and really put me off listening any further. I expect it might be a fun book to READ, but I cannot recommend LISTENING to it.

hard-boiled genre, not nordic noir narrator

Wrong pronunciation of Swedish names and places, slurring words and even whole sentences when imitating either Humphrey-Bogart-hard-boiled-detective-style accents or British accents. Only God knows how he even made the match between accents and characters (neither hard-boiled nor British accent have anything to do with Swedish characters). In order to understand his staccato narration + the slurred words I had to listen to this audiobook at 0.85 speed and only sometime near the end of the book I managed to figure out the names of some (not all) of the detectives (except for Martin Beck, who, luckily enough, has a very simple name). You can actually hear when he stumbled over Swedish names and had to do the recording over again. This is something I might expect from a mediocre volunteer on Librivox, not from a professional narrator working on a commercial production.

one of the great Martin Beck stories

This is a wonderful novel, one of the best in a great series. Unfortunately the narration leaves a lot to be desired - in particular the voicing of the various characters is forced and unnatural. Pity.

The Laughing Policeman

A fine tuned spy caper by Maj & Per, Every character has unique edges & nuances of style. 😎

Another good Martin Beck

Excellent performance of a very good follow-up to the previous Martin Beck procedurals. Great series.

I found this almost impossible to follow, and do not recommend it to anyone unless you’re Swedish

1- the names of the characters all sound alike, and they did not do a good job of explaining who was who, and making sure we understood the different characters.
2-the voices for the different characters were horrendous and too many sound alike, so it made it hard to distinguish, who was saying what when.
3- as an American you needed to either be reading the book so you see the names in print over and over again with the spelling or you need to see it as a movie to visualize the characters.

4- I stuck with this until the last 45 minutes. I will play parts over and over again, trying to discern who was who, and what was actually happening. Eventually, I got tired of putting in so much effort and just decided to let the end play. I never exactly understood who did it or why.

5-evidently, the movie starred Walter Matthau as Detective Beck. I thought this was interesting, considering that detective Martin back has the smallest part.

I absolutely do not recommend spending your time listening to this. Watch the movie instead.

Oh, and by the way, I have never ever recommended watching a movie over reading the book. That is how poor a production I feel this was,

Surprise me

I really didn’t expect this to be as good as it was lots of twist interns a bit of humor and a good story great decoration I enjoyed it.

Boring

Don't waste your time. The narrator warns you in the prologue that the authors were Marxists, and cautions that we now consider the hippy era free love to be normal behavior, blah, blah. sorry, I don't need anyone to tell me how to listen to a book.