Writers from Daniel Defoe and Samuel Pepys through Charles Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle to Bernard Malamud and Dashiell Hammett have used urban crime to examine social ills. To this tradition must also be added Sjowal and Wahloo, but today's police procedural novel owes less to literary tradition than to cross fertilization between roughly contemporary writers.

Sjowal and Wahloo have been aptly compared to Georges Simenon, Ross Macdonald, and Raymond Chandler, at least in Chandler's The Long Goodbye (1954). Each of these authors of detective fiction has, like the writers of the Martin Beck series, made the personal life of the continuing detective character integral to his professional accomplishments, and in each case the character has matured as he has grown older in succeeding books. Each of these authors has been recognized as transcending the detective fiction medium and writing "novels" in the truest sense, and each...