Steven Mackintosh stars as dogged, dyspeptic detective Martin Beck, with Neil Pearson as his friend and colleague Lennart Kollberg, in this BBC Radio 4 dramatization of The Terrorists.

The Martin Beck books are widely acknowledged as some of the most influential detective novels ever written. Coauthored by Swedish husband and wife team Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo between 1965 and 1975, the ten-book series set a gold standard for all subsequent Scandinavian crime fiction.

Long before Kurt Wallander or Harry Hole, Beck was the original flawed policeman, working with a motley collection of colleagues to uncover the cruelty and injustice lurking beneath the surface of Sweden s seemingly liberal, democratic society.

In The Terrorists, adapted from the final book in the series, Martin Beck leads a team trying to prevent a terrorist attack on a controversial American senator paying an official visit to Sweden. Meanwhile, an eighteen-year-old woman is accused of a bank robbery she never meant to commit.