The Laughing Policeman is a mystery novel by the Swedish writing duo Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, originally published in Sweden in 1968 as Den skrattande polisen and translated into English in 1970.

When Beck receives the record as a Christmas gift from his daughter, Ingrid, who has noticed her father's behaviour, he does not find it funny.

A gunman shoots the passengers of a bus with a sub-machine gun, killing eight people, including Detective Åke Stenström, and wounding one.

After a painstaking investigation, Detective Beck and his team come to suspect that the mass killing is designed to hide the true target, Stenström himself, who was spending his free time unofficially investigating the murder of a Portuguese prostitute sixteen years earlier in an attempt to solve the case and demonstrate his skills to his older police comrades.

His character was renamed "Jake Martin", the action was relocated to San Francisco, California, and much of the novel's plot was altered.