Were Sjöwall and Wahlöö the last romantics?

Why not? Their observations about urban decay wrought by technology are less polemical than wistful (or, at most, gloomy), whether about factory-produced bread putting an end to local bakeries or, as in The Fire Engine That Disappeared, about cars and highways:

"It was not exactly a scintillating panorama that lay spread out before his eyes. A dismal industrial area and a motorway, of which all lanes leading into the city centre were crammed with vehicles jerking along at a snail's pace. Martin Beck loathed cars."

How could such a pair of Marxists be so philosophically Romantic? (That unimpeachable source, Wikipedia, quotes a definition of Romanticism as "In part ... a revolt against aristocratic social and political norms of the Age of Enlightenment and a reaction against the scientific rationalization of nature.")

And then it hit me that Marx flourished smack in the heyday of High Romanticism in music. His most productive period coincided almost perfectly with Wagner's, for example, and they died the same year. (That year, 1883, was a watershed for artists and thinkers who made our view of modern life. Édouard Manet died then, too.)

So now I can relate Marx to Romanticism in one direction and to Sjöwall and Wahlöö in another. Who says crime writing is not educational?

© Peter Rozovsky 2011