The man who vanished into thin air
The man who vanished into thin air ( Swedish Mannen som gick upp i rök ) by the Swedish author couple Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö is the second volume of the ten-volume crime series Roman om ett brott ( novel about a crime ) with Commissioner Martin Beck. The novel was published in Swedish in 1966, in 1969 by Rowohlt in the FRG and in spring 1989 by Volk und Welt in the GDR.
content
The Swedish journalist Alf Matsson has disappeared without a trace. He had flown to Hungary on behalf of a Swedish newspaper to interview a boxer and to report on political events. Since Matsson has not contacted him for a week and he cannot be reached at the hotel in Budapest , the case is reported to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The case should be handled discreetly, as there are fears of political implications. The Stockholm police are assigned to find the missing reporter and send Martin Beck, who is sacrificing his vacation because of the case, to Budapest.
At the Budapest hotel, Beck learns that Matsson left the hotel on the day of his arrival without a passport or luggage and has not shown up since. The Hungarian police have not found an unidentified male body, nor is an unconscious foreigner lying in a hospital. The authorities are not prepared to do much more. Martin Beck then meets a Hungarian policeman who gives him some information. Since there are no clues or traces from Matsson, Beck doesn't know what to do. When he learns that Matsson may have a lover in Budapest, he visits her, but this does not seem to lead any further. But one night he is attacked by two strangers on the Danube quay. He survived thanks to the Budapest police, the perpetrators can be caught. It turns out that in addition to his reporter work, Alf Matsson ran a lively drug smuggling business. Matsson's accomplices smuggled the drugs from Turkey into Eastern Europe and Matsson then through the Iron Curtain into Western Europe. Matsson's partners feared that Beck was on their trail and tried to take him off. Matsson remains missing, however. After an intensive examination of the testimony and other evidence, Beck comes to the conclusion that Matsson did not even travel to Hungary, but that someone else should look for the solution in Sweden. There he also closes the case.
assessment
Martin Beck initially assumes, since Sweden and Hungary are also still in the Cold War , that the journalist was liquidated for political reasons. The authors' psychological trick is for the reader to understand this expectation until the surprising solution reveals a normal motive for murder . The main character of the novel is not an infallible over- character (like Poirot, Maigret etc.) and has, what was considered an absolute novelty in crime literature in 1966, also a private life described in detail, in which her likes and dislikes far exceed the quirks of to date well-known protagonists .
criticism
Ekkehard Knörer writes at the end of his detailed criticism: The elucidation of the (as it turns out: quite sophisticated) crime is then not much more than the fulfillment of the form; The novel has its greater attraction in the long latency phase in Budapest, in which hardly anything seems to happen.
Edits
The novel was filmed under the same title as a German-Hungarian-Swedish co-production in 1980 under the direction of Péter Bacsó and based on the script by Wolfgang Mühlbauer with Derek Jacobi and Judy Winter in the leading roles. There is also an adaptation as a radio play .
Individual evidence
- ↑ Crime Corner: Maj Sjöwall / Per Wahlöö: The man who vanished into thin air - A review by Ekkehard Knörer ( Memento from October 22, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ film portal