"Sjöwall and Wahlöö's World of Crime" - presents the background and inspiration of their 10 crime novels. The starting point was to describe a collective of police officers, where the first criminal assistant - later the criminal commissioner and the head of the National Homicide Commission - Martin Beck is crystallized as the main character. The novels are written in a realistic tradition, which is based on the work of the police, with a typically strong socially critical perspective for the time when the books were written.—SVT