The Man Who Went Up In Smoke: A Martin Beck Novel

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The second book in the classic Martin Beck detective series from the 1960s–the novels that shaped the future of Scandinavian crime writing. ‘The Man Who Went Up in Smoke starts as Martin Beck has just begun his holiday: an August spent with his family on a small island off the coast of Sweden. But when a neighbour gets a phone call, Beck finds himself packed off to Budapest, where a boorish journalist has vanished without a trace. Instead of passing leisurely sun-filled days with his children, Beck must troll about in the Eastern Europe underworld for a man nobody knows, with the aid of the coolly efficient local police, who do business while soaking at the public baths–and at the risk of vanishing along with his quarry.

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Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo, both left-wing journalists and politically radical, met in 1961 while working for magazines published by the same company. They married the next year and together created the Martin Beck crime series, famously writing alternate chapters at night after putting their children to bed. Wahloo died at the age of 49 just as their 10th book was going to press. Sjowall currently lives in Sweden and continues to work as a writer and translator. They won the esteemed Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Crime Fiction Book in 1971.