An old lady is attacked and robbed despite the police vigilance, but this is not the worst thing to happen in the park that day. The action shifts to a local park, where police are on the look-out for a mugger, a young couple is sneaking out from a family gathering, and children are playing. Based on a spare description of his ordinary domestic actions, an atmosphere of menace begins to build. One hot summer, a man sits on his balcony, quietly observing the activity on the long street below. It is a lean, compelling novel, told with simplicity and power.
"THE MAN ON THE BALCONY is the third of Sojwall and Wahloo's ten novels featuring Martin Beck and his Stockholm police colleagues. If you have not read this genre-defining ten-book series, I cannot recommend it highly enough, especially in the reprinted Harper-Collins edition. NEXT POST 6: The Man on the Balcony My sixth book-review choice is The Man on the Balcony, by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo. Out of the blue, Margaret receives a letter in terrible handwriting, which she deciphers as being an invitation from Vida Winter, who wants Margaret to write her biography." She's written a few articles on her non-fiction research, one of them having been published in an academic journal. All her life she has loved reading, but has never attempted a contemporary novel. Margaret Lea is a young, repressed woman who lives in a bare room above her father's antiquarian bookshop.
Throughout her career, she's been interviewed many times but has always given different and fantastical stories about her life, so that she's preserved an aura of mystery. Vida Winter is the most respected and widely read living writer, now coming to the end of her life. "THE THIRTEENTH TALE is a magnificent, beautifully written and involving story, a modern version of a Victorian novel. Seventh in my series of retrospective book reviews is another from February, The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield.
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