Locked and locked

The novel closed and locked (Swedish original title: Det slutna rummet ) by the author couple Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö belongs to the decalogy novel about a crime and follows the detective novel Das Ekel aus Säffle , at the end of which Inspector Martin Beck suffers a serious gunshot wound. Thematically he deals with the eponymous puzzle of a locked room .

The book was published in 1972 in Sweden, in 1975 in West Germany by Rowohlt Verlag and in 1977 in the GDR by Verlag Volk und Welt (under the title The Locked Room ).

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When Inspector Beck recovered from his injury and returned to the Reich Police Headquarters, he found that the police corps was for the most part more amateurish and unprofessional than he was used to before. Patrolmen had found an already badly decomposed corpse (as it later turns out, of a person who had been shot) in an internally locked apartment. A detective had shelved the case as a suicide . Nobody noticed that the gun was not in the apartment. Martin Beck now has to reopen the case from a somewhat earlier time and fight against people's forgetfulness . To make matters worse, his colleagues and friends have been transferred to the bank robbery department, where they are investigating the bank robber Werner Roos and his cronies Malmström and Mohrén, who are planning a big coup, under the direction of the prosecutor “Bulldozer” Olsson.

The novel now follows two storylines: that of Martin Becks and that of the bank robbery specialists.

The latter accidentally arrests the petty criminal Mauritzon, an assistant to Malmström and Mohrén, and suspects him of a bank robbery in which a bank customer was shot. But the robbery - without Mauritzon knowing it - committed his former girlfriend with his weapon and then fled to Yugoslavia . At the same time, Martin Beck finds out that the "suicide" had blackmailed Mauritzon and was therefore shot through an open window by him. The window was closed so that the bolt closed by itself.

Since the evidence collected by Martin Beck was insufficient, Mauritzon was acquitted in the court proceedings for the murder he had committed , but sentenced to life imprisonment for the failure to commit bank robbery , the evidence of which he could not refute .

The bank robbers pursued by Prosecutor Olsson manage to deceive the police (the robbery does not take place in Stockholm, but in Malmö), but they can be caught more or less by accident.

In the course of the investigation, Beck meets a woman named Rhea Nielsen who gives him new courage in a depressive phase of his life and who also plays an important role in the following novels.

In addition, this novel has a self-referential component: Together with Rhea Nielsen, Martin Beck reflects on the problem of locked space , which otherwise "only exists in detective novels". Nielsen gives Beck a theoretical essay on this phenomenon to read in novels. The form of the solution that is treated in this novel is not included in the essay.

The motive that a criminal is punished for a crime he has not committed instead of one he has committed, but of which he cannot be convicted, can already be found in Friedrich Dürrenmatt's novel Der Richter und seine Henker (1951) .

Movie

The book was filmed in 1993 with the Dutch-Belgian production Beck - De gesloten Kamer , director was Jacob Bijl .