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Steven Mackintosh stars as dogged, dyspeptic detective Martin Beck, with Neil Pearson as his friend and colleague Lennart Kollberg, in this BBC Radio 4 dramatization of "Cop Killer."

The Martin Beck books are widely acknowledged as some of the most influential detective novels ever written. Coauthored by Swedish husband and wife team Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo between 1965 and 1975, the ten-book series set a gold standard for all subsequent Scandinavian crime fiction.

Long before Kurt Wallander or Harry Hole, Beck was the original flawed policeman, working with a motley collection of colleagues to uncover the cruelty and injustice lurking beneath the surface of Sweden s seemingly liberal, democratic society.

In "Cop Killer," adapted from the ninth book in the series, a woman is murdered in a small village outside Malmo in Southern Sweden. This wouldn t normally warrant the attentions of Detective Inspector Martin Beck and his team but this woman lived next door to a man who has already killed once, and the press are taking a lot of interest in the case. Beck and Kollberg aren t getting anywhere when a shootout between two teenage boys and the police starts a series of events that eventually leads them to the killer and sets the seal on a significant decision for Lennart Kollberg."