Sure one can read "The Girl Who"... books by Stieg Larrson, or the Wallander Series by Henning Mankell but the classic work that they both are definitely heirs to is The Story of Crime by Sjowall & Wahloo.
The series of ten books are basically police procedurals that follow detective Martin Beck and his co-workers at the Central Bureau of Investigation is Stockholm from mid sixities to early 1970's. The period during which the books were written.
Wahloo states that they were trying to "use the crime novel as a scalpel cutting open the belly of the ideological pauperized and morally debatable so-called welfare state of the bourgeois type." Even though the authors had a more socialist philosophy, this critique through story provides much more a view of society that shows that societies ills are fairly immune to well meaning half-baked solutions we frequently throw at them. Good people do good, but society not so much. Regardless, the politics lose out to the stories and the characters themselves. People with problems. People with ideals, fighting with the pragmatism that life forces on us all.
The First book is "Roseanna" and deals with a murdered of a young woman. Like many great mysteries, it is less about the mystery of the crime than the mystery of how we face life.
The Laughing Policeman is probably my favorite and won the Edgar Allen Poe award from the Mystery Writers of America in 1971. But you really need to read the first three to appreciate it.
Although they definitely take place in a given time, they still resonate today which really is the definition of a classic.
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