(Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo; HarperPerennial, £6.99)

FEW authors can have had as much of an impact on modern police procedural as husband-and-wife writing team Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo, writes Steve Bell.

Four decades ago, at the height of the swinging Sixties, the Swedes set out to write a series of 10 novels which combined detailed detective work with wider social commentary.

Their style influenced authors from Henning Mankell to Jonathan Frantzen. Now a number of top names have attached themselves to the latest reissue of the series.

Saga opener Roseanna begins on a July afternoon, when the body of a young woman is dredged from Sweden’s beautiful Lake Vattern.

Three months later, all that Inspector Beck knows is that her name is Roseanna, that she came from Lincoln, Nebraska, and that she could have been strangled by any one of 85 people.

Martin Beck is the template from which countless fictional detectives would later be cut — morose, devoted to his job, unhealthy and with a crumbling marriage.

Most striking is his frustration, not just at the slow progress of the case but also at a Swedish society which found itself at a crossroads between old-word morality and the youthful abandon of the decade.

As fellow Swede Henning Mankell says of the authors in his new introduction, “They wanted to use crime and criminal investigations as a mirror of Swedish society — and later on include the rest of the world.”

With its intelligent prose and vividly realized characters, and its command over the intricately woven details of police detection, Roseanna is a masterpiece of suspense and sadness.