Per Wahlöö is one of Sweden´s most famous crime writers. Together with Maj Sjöwall he revolutionized the swedish crime novel in the mid-sixties with the Martin Beck-series. Before that he was working as a reporter in the fifties and started writing novels about the oppression of man, power and totalitarian mentality in the end of the decade. Those novels (1959-1968) are called “The dictatorship”-series. This paper has focused on his contemporary writings about Spain where Wahlöö lived for a couple of years in the mid-fifties. How did the fascist Franco regime take place in his writings between the years 1951 to 1962? The material investigated is both journalism articles and fictional writings with the two novels The Wind and the Rain (1961) and The Lorry (1962) as the prime motives. This paper shows that the dictatorship of general Franco is quite invisible in Wahlöö´s early writings. On the other hand it takes almost the entire thematic space in the novels from the sixties. Per Wahlöö´s ideological agenda is also moving from being rather bleak and invisible in the 1951-articles to be more concerned with the class discrimination and fascist oppression in the later pieces. Spain is also an interesting paradox with it´s exploding tourist industry in the fifties and sixties while the ruthless fascist government still controlls the poor people in the country. The relationship between the individual man and the overall social structure is also something that Wahlöö is writing about. The dictatorship-man in Wahlöös novels is someone who is programmed by a fascist structure which in turn creates their own antithesis; the (socialist) dissident, an anti-heroe who´s only way out is armed rebellion proclaimed by an awokened class conscousness.

This paper investigates the science fiction novels of Swedish crime writer Per Wahlöö, most famous for his collaboration with his writing partner Maj Sjöwall on the ten Martin Beck mysteries. During two important years, 1964 and 1968, Wahlöö wrote the novels Murder On the 31st Floor and The Steel Spring, set in a near future land ruled by a social fascist power structure where political opposition is eradicated. The pretexted notion of this paper is that these novels consists of extensive quantities of criticism against the Swedish welfare state and the monopoly-capitalistic Swedish press during the sixties. Through the lens of science fiction theory and the notion of the novels as historical sources this paper concludes that Per Wahlöö´s science fiction becomes a bridge between the classic Swedish detective novel and the new social critic crime fiction in the style of Sjöwall-Wahlöö and others. The novels are also representations of the historical process in the mid-sixties during the radical turn: the sci-fi novels as social criticism of the contemporary society – an utopian flare. Other conclusions of this paper are the connections between Wahlöö´s novels and marxist critical theory as well as their relation to the Swedish labour literature´s view on the individual in the modern society. Especially Murder On the 31st Floor forebodes a lot of the radical marxist criticism so widely spread in the latter part of the sixties.