THE CULTURE WARS ARE A ROUT:

"They broke with the previous trends in crime fiction," Henning Mankell wrote in an introduction to the 2006 English edition of "Roseanna". His own Inspector Kurt Wallander series would owe much to Beck three decades later.

Sjöwall was "the giant on whose shoulders the titans of modern Scandi crime fiction stand," Britain's Daily Telegraph wrote in 2015, in a story headlined "The couple who invented Nordic Noir".

Both committed Marxists, they went beyond crime fiction, breaking new ground by carrying out a forensic examination of the failings of Swedish society. The modern themes they tackled included paedophilia, serial killers, the sex industry and suicide.

"Through the eyes of Martin Beck and his colleagues, they held a mirror up to Swedish society at a time when the ideals of the welfare state were beginning to buckle under the realities of everyday life," Scottish crime writer Val McDermid wrote in the introduction to the 2006 edition of "The Man Who Went Up In Smoke".

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