Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö's ten Martin Beck novels (1965 to 1975) set the pattern for the Swedish police procedural: a tired, unglamorous detective, the slow collective work of a police team, and each case used to examine what was going wrong in Swedish society. Henning Mankell's Wallander novels take up that pattern a generation later, with a middle-aged detective in poor health and a series that reads as a running commentary on Sweden in the 1990s. The line from Beck to Wallander is the standard account of the genre's history. MEDIUM: a genre and a character type rather than a specific borrowing.