The dead woman in the Göta Canal

Crime scene: Diana

The crime novel Die Tote im Götakanal (Swedish original title: Roseanna ) by the author couple Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö is the first novel in the ten-volume crime series Roman om ett brott ( novel about a crime ) starring inspector Martin Beck. It was first published in Sweden in 1965, in 1968 in the Federal Republic of Germany and in 1981 in the GDR.

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A woman's corpse is found when a lock basin on the Göta Canal near Motala is being dredged. Inspector Beck, here still the first detective assistant, and his colleagues determine that the woman rode on the tourist steamer Diana and was raped and strangled there.

However, since no corresponding missing person has been reported, no further clues can be found initially. Months later, it turns out that the woman is an American named Roseanna McGraw from Lincoln, Nebraska . Since she was traveling alone, but the male passengers recorded on the booking list are ruled out as perpetrators and the fellow travelers do not remember any companion or other contact person from Roseanna, Martin Beck came up with the idea of the photos and films of all the tourists who were on this cruise were to evaluate.

This ultimately leads to a reference to the deck passenger Folke Bengtsson, who had only used the ship for part of the route. Martin Beck is convinced after the first interrogation that Bengtsson is the perpetrator, but there is no evidence to convict him. The criminalists therefore use a colleague as a decoy on the suspect. But it takes several weeks before Bengtsson is finally ready to commit another murder. Just as the emergency occurs, a breakdown occurs during the surveillance and the police officers struggle to get to their colleague's apartment in time to prevent Bengtsson from strangling the officer who was set on him.

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Maj Sjöwall, Per Wahlöö: Roseanna. Roman om ett brott . Pan, Stockholm 1994, ISBN 91-1-931621-6 .
- German: The dead in the Göta Canal. A Kommissar Beck novel . Rowohlt, Reinbek 2008, ISBN 978-3-499-24441-4 .
- Radio play: The dead in the Göta Canal . DAV, Berlin 2006, ISBN 3-89813-590-X (1 CD, spoken by Rita Russek , Matthias Ponnier and others)

Adaptations

Roseanna was made into a film by the Swedish directors Daniel Abramson (1967) and Hans Alfredson (1993). In 1978, SWF and WDR produced a radio play adaptation under the direction of Peter Michael Ladiges.