Suzie Eisfelder
July 18, 2016
The Man on The Balcony by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö
The Man on The Balcony by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö

 

Before I start I’m going to add the words ‘trigger warning’ in here before giving more details later on.

I love the first paragraph of this book. Here is it is and then I’ll explain why.

At a quarter to three the sun rose.

This could be anything, with this sort of opening it could be a science fiction book or it could be in poles of the earth or who knows what. I read it several times and then went back and read it again later on. I must have read the blurb on the back when it was added to my To Be Read Pile but not remembered the details, I’d never heard of these authors and knew nothing about it when I opened the covers and put eyes to text. That first paragraph really floored me and I puzzled over it for some time until I realised it was set in Sweden in the summer. A little googling found this site which tells me that Stockholm gets 19 hours of sunlight a day in June and if you go to Kiruna in the northwest you’ll experience 24 hours of sunlight! But we never find out the reason for the horrific crimes mentioned in the next paragraph.

This text pulls few punches and we’re told with no graphic details that these children have been raped and murdered. We’re not told the whys and wherefores, just that it’s been done.

I had to keep reminding myself it’s translated from the Swedish. The word usage was only a little odd and the police procedures slightly different to those I’m used to reading or watching from English speaking countries. This book is all about the chase, the hunt for the criminal and not on why he’s done what he did. It’s short, as they all were in the 1960s and ’70s, have a look at all the Agatha Christie whodunnits, they’ll all like this book somewhere around 200 pages, this is 179.

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