consider any one of the Sjowal Toand Wahloo novels out of its canonical context is unthinkable. While The Terrorists has been chosen here for its timeliness and its critical status as one of the two best of the series featuring policeman Martin Beck, it can only be considered as the last thirty chapters of a major novel that began 270 chapters earlier. Maj Sjowal and Per Wahloo entered their collaboration — the literary one and the social one are utterly intertwined — because of their mutual ambition to analyze Swedish society through the crime novel and their mutual revulsion at what they saw happening to their nation. The first of the novels, Rosanna (1965), was written shortly after Sweden had nationalized its police force and shortly after Swedish policemen were first required to carry weapons. From that beginning through to The Terrorists, these two social issues were dominant...