The Man Who Went Up in Smoke (1966) is a novel by 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...

 in their detective series revolving around 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...

and his team. (Original Swedish title: Mannen som gick upp i rök.)

Plot summary

Beck leaves his holiday and travels to Hungary to search for a missing journalist called Alf Matsson. After intersecting with the Budapest police and the criminal underground, he begins to wonder if Matsson ever entered the country.

Characters and their development

Beck and Kollberg have their first, short run-in with detective Backlund of the Malmö police force, who lacks the imagination required for his line of work, for which he thinks bureaucracy is a replacement.

It might be argued that Beck and his wife are already getting estranged. It only takes the flimsiest amounts of passive-aggressiveness from his superiors to make him give up his holiday, even though both make clear to him that he does not have to go if he does not want to. Although he reflects on his marriage several times (as does the narrator on marriage in general), he does not draw any conclusions yet.