STOCKHOLM, April 30 — Maj Sjowall, one half of a Swedish crime-writing couple credited with inventing “Nordic Noir”, has died aged 84, her publisher said on Wednesday.
Sjowall “passed away today after an extended period of illness,” Ann-Marie Skarp head of publisher Piratforlaget, told AFP.
With her partner Per Wahloo, who died in 1975, Sjowall penned a 10-book series centred on the dour, middle-aged and decidedly unheroic Martin Beck and his team of detectives in Stockholm’s National Homicide Bureau.
Books like Roseanna, The Laughing Policeman and The Abominable Man, featured tightly structured plots packed with realistic details, charting the unglamourous slog and grind of police work.
“Her and Per Wahloo’s 10 novels about Martin Beck... will become classics and have inspired, I dare say, all now living authors of crime novels,” Skarp said.
The books have been translated into 40 languages, according to news agency TT and served as the source material for dozens of movies.
Born on September 25, 1935 in Stockholm, Sjowall studied journalism and graphics. She worked as a translator, and art director and journalist for Swedish magazines and newspapers.
It was through her work that she met Wahloo, a successful political journalist, in 1961. The two quickly became a couple and had two sons.
Then they decided to launch the Martin Beck series.
After dinner and having put their sons to bed, they would sit opposite each other and write through the night, a chapter each.
“We worked a lot with the style,” she explained to The Guardian newspaper in 2009. “We wanted to find a style which was not personally his, or not personally mine, but a style that was good for the books.” — AFP
