The Laughing Policemen

"This book was made into a Hollywood film and it got the Best Novel Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America. The hero of the story is Martin Beck, a Swedish police detective. But you also get the story from the point of view of many different policemen who are all contributing to solving the story. And that is one of the things we have inherited from Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö that we use in our books – we try to write from different people’s perspectives. They had a very different way of working from me and Börge. According to them they wrote a chapter each and they imitated each other’s styles. I know for a fact that that is very very hard – at least for us. In the end it must be one pen delivering the final version. The reader can tell if someone is trying to imitate someone else’s style and feels uncomfortable with that. So if they really did manage to write like that they are even more fantastic than I thought! To me it feels like one person was writing the story and it doesn’t matter who is writing it. I re-read The Laughing Policeman a few years ago because I was writing the foreword for it and what struck me is that despite some of their descriptions obviously coming from the 1970s the plot is timeless. So even though in the book they talk about the price of electricity very much in terms of back then and people are lying about in bed smoking all the time, the story isn’t old. The plot still works. Forty years later the story is still gripping. The way they switch between the different policemen contributing to the investigation is really good. Börge and I are very happy to talk about anything apart from the actual process of how we write our books together. We gave a promise never to talk about the actual process of writing the books. I like to keep some mystery around that. But I can tell you about the lead up to writing our books. We have worked together for 15 years and when we are thinking of writing a book we divide it into three periods. Our latest book took us three years. We had a year of research to get the unique people we needed for the story. Then there was one year of sitting face to face plotting about 120 pages. So we know exactly what is going to happen in chapter 18 and chapter four before the writing process even starts. And then the actual writing takes eight months to a year. We had to invent this style because there are two of us and we had to agree on everything before the writing process, when we turn those 120 pages into 500 pages. But we have seen that it works. Our books have been turned into movies both in Hollywood and here in Sweden and when the script writers get in touch with us they often comment on how they haven’t been able to find anything which is illogical and doesn’t work within the story. Yes."