The Abominable Man is a Swedish

Sweden

Sweden , officially the Kingdom of Sweden , is a Nordic country on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe. Sweden borders with Norway and Finland and is connected to Denmark by a bridge-tunnel across the Öresund....

 crime novel by Maj Sjöwall

Maj Sjöwall

Maj Sjöwall is a Swedish author and translator. She is best known for the collaborative work with her partner Per Wahlöö on a series of ten novels about the exploits of Martin Beck, a police detective in Stockholm...

 and Per Wahlöö

Per Wahlöö

Per Fredrik Wahlöö was a Swedish author. He is perhaps best known for the collaborative work with his partner Maj Sjöwall on a series of ten novels about the exploits of Martin Beck, a police detective in Stockholm, published between 1965 and 1975...

 from 1971 in the series revolving around police detective Martin Beck

Martin Beck

Martin Beck is a fictional Swedish police detective who is the main character in a series of ten novels by Sjöwall and Wahlöö, collectively titled The Story of a Crime...

. One of Donald Knuth

Donald Knuth

Donald Ervin Knuth is a computer scientist and Professor Emeritus at Stanford University.He is the author of the seminal multi-volume work The Art of Computer Programming. Knuth has been called the "father" of the analysis of algorithms...

's favourite novels, "one of Sjöwall and Wahlöö

Sjöwall and Wahlöö

Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, a common-law wife and husband team of detective writers from Sweden. Together they conceived and wrote a series of ten novels about the exploits of detectives from the special homicide commission of the national police in which the character of Martin Beck was the...

's brilliantly Swedish detective novels".

Plot summary

A senior policeman known for brutality is violently knifed while in his hospital bed. Within a 24 hour period, Martin Beck searches through the policeman's many enemies for the killer, for whom the murder was only a precursor to a Charles Whitman

Charles Whitman

Charles Joseph Whitman was a student at the University of Texas at Austin and a former Marine who killed 16 people and wounded 32 others during a shooting rampage on and around the university's campus on August 1, 1966....

-style attack on Stockholm.

Characters and their development

Martin Beck and his now grown-up daughter Ingrid develop their friendship; they eat out together.

Film

The book was made into a film in 1976, by director Bo Widerberg, renamed The Man on the Roof

The Man on the Roof

The Man on the Roof is a 1976 Swedish film directed by Bo Widerberg, based on the 1971 novel The Abominable Man by Sjöwall and Wahlöö. The film is a crime thriller about the police officer Martin Beck trying to catch a killer, and it reaches its climax when the killer barricades himself on a roof...

(Mannen på taket).