New Girl With the Dragon Tattoo novel will be 'Chandleresque' | Books | The Guardian Books New Girl With the Dragon Tattoo novel will be 'Chandleresque' Swedish author David Lagercrantz, who is continuing the bestselling crime novels begun by the late Stieg Larsson, promises ‘a lighter, more hardboiled affair’ David Lagercrantz, photographed at home in Stockholm, Sweden. Photograph: Olle Nordell for the Observer Wednesday 20 April 2016 08.29 EDT Last modified on Wednesday 20 April 2016 08.31 EDT Close This article is 9 months old The new Girl With the Dragon Tattoo novel will be written in the hardboiled style of Raymond Chandler, according to its Swedish author David Lagercrantz. Lagercrantz published his official follow-up to the late Stieg Larsson’s Millennium novels, The Girl in the Spider’s Web, last summer.

Continuing the adventures of hacker Lisbeth Salander and journalist Mikael Blomkvist, made famous in Larsson’s three hit novels The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played With Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, the fourth book in the series was authorised by Larsson’s father and brother, who run his estate. His long-term partner Eva Gabrielsson, however, made clear her opposition to the extension of the series . Larsson had intended to write 10 books , before he died in 2004. The Girl in the Spider’s Web review – a controversial addition to Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy Read more Lagercrantz told Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter that he was writing a follow-up to The Girl in the Spider’s Web, which topped book charts around the world and has sold 3.5m copies to date. The fifth book will be published in 2017, said Lagercrantz, explaining that he would be writing it in the style of noir master Raymond Chandler.

In The Girl in the Spider’s Web, Lagercrantz said, he featured passages about popular science, as he did in his novel about the death of Alan Turing, Fall of Man in Wilmslow. “It won’t be like this in Millennium Five … Now I’m starting to write more like Raymond Chandler … And it is becoming a lighter, more hardboiled affair.” Lagercrantz pointed out that Larsson himself changed his writing style in the Millennium trilogy, but admitted that turning his prose hardboiled had been challenging in the first 200 pages of the new novel. “It’s much more difficult to write hardboiled than you might think,” he told Dagens Nyheter. “Good hardboiled prose needs a rhythm. You have to vary sentences, even if they’re short, and when the punchline comes, you have to be ready for it.” A sixth book in the Millennium series is projected for publication in 2019.

‘Dragon Tattoo’ trilogy sequel set for August FacebookEmail Twitter Google+ LinkedIn Pinterest ‘Dragon Tattoo’ trilogy sequel set for August The new “Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” book will follow the story of Mikael Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander as well as familiar characters from the first three novels. Post to Facebook ‘Dragon Tattoo’ trilogy sequel set for August The new “Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” book will follow the story of Mikael Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander as well as familiar characters from the first three novels. Check out this story on Freep.com: CancelSend A link has been sent to your friend's email address. Posted! A link has been posted to your Facebook feed. Join the Conversation To find out more about Facebook commenting please read the Conversation Guidelines and FAQs ‘Dragon Tattoo’ trilogy sequel set for August Kelly Lawler, USA TODAY 12:41 p.m. ET Jan. 29, 2015 Rooney Mara starred in the U.S. film adaptation of “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.” (Photo: Merrick Morton, Sony Pictures) An authorized sequel to the wildly popular “Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” series will hit bookshelves on Aug.

27, publisher Knopf announced Thursday. The novel, written by David Lagercrantz, is an original story based on the books by Stieg Larsson, who died in 2004. The project is in cooperation with his estate. “By letting David Lagercrantz write his own Millennium novel we keep the characters and the universe Stieg Larsson created alive. This new work hews closely to the first three Millennium novels and is faithful to those characters; it is wholly new and contemporary – the perfect way for readers to resume their acquaintance with Lisbeth and Mikael, “Joakim and Erland Larsson, of the Stieg Larsson Estate, said in a news release. It’s not unusual for the estates of deceased authors to allow new writers to continue series; it’s happening for Ian Fleming (James Bond), Robert Ludlum and Tom Clancy, to name a few. The new “Tattoo” book will follow the story of Mikael Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander as well as familiar characters from the first three novels. Its Swedish title is “Det som inte dödar oss” (”What doesn’t kill us”), but it will have a different U.S.

title containing one “four-letter word,” according to the release. Lagercrantz is a Swedish author and journalist. Larsson had planned his series to include 10 books and had written a good portion of the fourth volume when he died. It has not been published, and Lagercrantz’s novel does not use Larsson’s unseen material. The first three novels in the series have sold 80 million copies worldwide. A film adaptation of the first novel, “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” hit theaters in 2011, directed by David Fincher and starring Daniel Craig and Rooney Mara. Follow Kelly Lawler ( @klawls ) on Twitter.

Read or Share this story: The Moralist | by Tim Parks | The New York Review of Books Music Box Films/Everett Collection Noomi Rapace as Lisbeth Salander in The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, 2009 In The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the first volume of Swedish writer Stieg Larsson’s trilogy Millennium, a disgraced journalist, Mikael Blomkvist, retires to the remote, fictional island village of Hedeby, three hours north of Stockholm, where an octogenarian industrialist, Henrik Vanger, has invited him to solve the mystery of his great-niece, who disappeared forty years before, aged sixteen. The key to the puzzle would appear to lie in five names and numbers that the girl, Harriet Vanger, wrote in her diary shortly before vanishing without trace: Magda—32016 R.L.—32027 Mari—32018 Since 32 and 30 are local area codes, it seems reasonable to suppose that these are phone numbers, yet the police found no correspondence between names and numbers.

Perplexed, Blomkvist copies the list out and pins it up on the wall of the cabin where he is staying. After he has been on the island some months, his sixteen-year-old daughter turns up out of the blue. Blomkvist is divorced and rarely sees his daughter, who has hardly been mentioned to this point. She is heading for a Christian summer camp and though the island is very much out of the way it just happens to be on her way. Blomkvist isn’t happy about the girl’s religious inclinations and admits as the two say goodbye that he doesn’t believe in God; at which his daughter points out that nevertheless he reads the Bible: she “saw the quotes you had on the wall.” And she adds: “But why so gloomy and neurotic?” Blomkvist doesn’t understand. The girl hurries off. Then it dawns on him: the first digit of the mysterious numbers indicates a book of the Bible, the second and third a chapter, the fourth and fifth a verse. Of course!

Despite the fact that Blomkvist spends hours a day surfing the net on his computer, he now rushes off to find a Bible, strangely unaware that the holy book is freely available online in almost any language you care to mention. The digit 3 corresponds to Leviticus and he finds verses like: If a woman approaches any beast and lies with it, you shall kill the woman and the beast; they shall be put to death, their blood is upon them. And the daughter of any priest, if she profanes herself by playing the harlot, profanes her father; she shall be burned with fire. Now at last it’s clear that the names Magda, Sara, etc. refer to the Jewish victims of a sexually perverted, anti-Semitic serial killer, something that would hardly surprise those reading the original Swedish and most European editions of the novel, which, in line with the author’s wishes, are more bluntly entitled Men Who Hate Women. At this point, however, any half-awake reader is bound to object.

First, since there are many more than ten books in the Bible, biblical references (book, chapter, verse) are never displayed with five-figure codes, so no one, however great their knowledge of the Bible, would assume them to be text references. Second, even imagining that the daughter made this connection, she would hardly be familiar with the content of these obscure verses from Leviticus; and even if she did make this connection and did recognize the verses, she would surely be concerned to inquire of her father why he was associating such disquieting material with specific girls’ names. All this suggests that Larsson’s trilogy has not achieved its spectacular success thanks to the author’s impeccable skills as a detective story writer or any scrupulous attention to psychological realism.

Loose ends and incongruities abound, lending the trilogy an endearingly amateurish feel, emphasized by a translation from the Swedish that, though for the most part fluent, occasionally treats us to decidedly muddled idiom (“He’s pulling the load of an ox and walking on eggshells”) or very curious register shifts, as for example when we have a young, uneducated punk Swede saying things like “you chaps” and “gad around.” From time to time, whether due to translation or otherwise, the imagery is plain comic; for example, Blomkvist remarks of the Leviticus murderer that “he was a cut and dried serial killer.” Never mind. These failings pale to insignificance when one considers the sales figures. Published in 2005 in Sweden, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo has now sold 50 million copies worldwide and was the first book to sell over a million on the Kindle. It has been on US best-seller lists for more than two years, and the other volumes of the trilogy show every sign of following suit. What is the attraction? One character holds our attention throughout the trilogy and dominates discussion of the work: Lisbeth Salander.

From the first pages, it’s evident that the journalist Mikael Blomkvist is an authorial alter ego. As Larsson once was, he is involved in running a left-wing magazine specializing in courageous investigative journalism; he is idealistic, committed, and of course in the novel he assumes the central, private detective’s role in a situation that sets him up to be a hero protecting vulnerable women from sadistic men. Not that Blomkvist is without his complications: he married and had a child with one woman while openly continuing an affair with another (his editorial partner Erika Berger), who in turn is happily married to a man who apparently has no problems with the arrangement. An experienced financial journalist, Blomkvist has the courage to take on big industry and as the story opens has just received a three-month prison sentence for libeling a major industrialist who deliberately fed him a false scoop in an attempt to destroy both him and his magazine. When Blomkvist decides to take time away from journalism to tackle the mystery of Harriet Vanger, we feel sure that he will be the book’s main focus of interest.

Then Lisbeth Salander, the girl with the dragon tattoo, becomes his researcher and rapidly takes over both the inquiry and the trilogy. All the real energy of the book will now come from her, to the point that it is only Blomkvist’s interest in Salander that keeps us interested in him. Lisbeth Salander is a pitifully thin young woman of twenty-four, not five feet tall, flat-chested, “a strange girl—fully grown but with an appearance that made her easily mistaken for a child.” When Blomkvist first meets her, he finds her “altogether odd”: Long pauses in the middle of the conversation. Her apartment was messy, bordering on chaotic…. She had obviously spent half the night in a bar. She had love bites on her neck and she had clearly had company overnight. She had heaven knows how many tattoos and two piercings on her face and maybe in other places. She was weird. How does Blomkvist know that Lisbeth maybe had piercings “in other places”? He doesn’t. But that is the kind of thing that Larsson’s alter ego likes to think. Blomkvist is, as we are frequently told, a ladies’ man.

Needless to say, a taciturn young woman of punk appearance flaunting aggressive, antisocial behavior must have had a traumatic childhood. So it is. For reasons unrevealed until the second part of the trilogy (though the reader has no difficulty guessing that male violence is involved), Lisbeth was locked in a psychiatric ward at age twelve and is still under the control of a legal guardian who disposes of her income. She is thus extremely vulnerable, a “perfect victim,” one character thinks of her. On the other hand she is also a “world class hacker,” a brilliant, self-taught mathematician, and “an information junkie with a delinquent child’s take on morals and ethics.” Working freelance for a security firm that installs sophisticated alarm systems and carries out private investigations, Salander has a magical ability to get inside anyone’s computer at any time and find everything relevant there in just a few moments (something many of us can’t do on our own computers); she has a photographic memory, reads all she sees in a flash, and recalls it word for word; and, or so Blomkvist imagines, she also has “Asperger’s syndrome…. Or something like that.

A talent for seeing patterns and understanding abstract reasoning where other people perceive only white noise.” Finally, when circumstances demand, Salander can be extremely violent, even sadistic. She is victim, superhero, and torturer. To emphasize this paradoxical, almost cartoonish aspect of her character, Larsson has the anorexic-looking girl wear T-shirts with aggressive slogans: I CAN BE A REGULAR BITCH, JUST TRY ME or KILL THEM ALL AND LET GOD SORT THEM OUT. Salander’s dealings with her new guardian, Nils Erik Bjurman—which form the first novel’s main subplot—establish a pattern for the trilogy’s treatment of sexuality, which is arguably its central, if sometimes disguised, subject. Salander’s previous guardian, who generously gave her near-total freedom, has suffered a stroke and his substitute, Bjurman, a fifty-five-year-old lawyer, decides to take advantage of his new charge and satisfy a lust for domination: “[Salander] was the ideal plaything—grown-up, promiscuous, socially incompetent, and at his mercy…. She had no family, no friends: a true victim.” Bjurman tells Salander that she can only have access to her income in return for sex.

After forcing her to engage in oral sex in one encounter, at the next he handcuffs and brutally rapes her: “So you don’t like anal sex,” he said. Salander opened her mouth to scream. He grabbed her hair and stuffed the knickers in her mouth. She felt him putting something around her ankles, spread her legs apart and tie them so that she was lying there completely vulnerable…. Then she felt an excruciating pain as he forced something up her anus. Salander, however, turns the tables. With access, through her work, to high-tech security equipment, she has placed a digital camera in her bag and pointed it at the bed where Bjurman rapes her. How easy, you would have thought, for her now to launch this on the Internet and destroy the man. But “Salander was not like any normal person,” Larsson tells us.

She attends the next meeting with Bjurman as promised and when he tries to repeat the scene, she stuns him with a Taser, handcuffs him to the bed, and performs the same anal abuse on him; then she forces him to watch the video of the previous rape and spends a whole night tattooing on his chest in large letters “I AM A SADISTIC PIG, A PERVERT, AND A RAPIST.” From now on Bjurman must do exactly as she tells him, otherwise the video will be made public and he will be destroyed. “She had taken control,” thinks Bjurman in italics. “Impossible. He could do nothing to resist when Salander bent over and placed the anal plug between his buttocks. ‘So you’re a sadist,’ she said….” There is an element of the graphic novel in all this, a feeling that we have stepped out of any feasible realism into a cartoon fantasy of ugly wish fulfillment. The same comic book tone returns whenever Salander takes retaliatory action: Stieg Larsson Her teeth were bared like a beast of prey. Her eyes were glittering, black as coal.

She moved with the lightning speed of a tarantula and seemed totally focused on her prey as she swung the club again…. Having investigated Blomkvist’s past for Henrik Vanger, the man who commissioned him to solve the mystery of the missing girl, Salander will eventually meet the journalist when he asks Vanger’s lawyer for a researcher to help him establish the identities of the victims in the strange list of biblical texts. Meanwhile, however, Salander’s unpleasant encounters with her guardian are intercut with a developing sexual adventure of Blomkvist’s. When the young Harriet Vanger disappeared forty years before, all the many members of the extended Vanger family had been on the island of Hedeby to attend a shareholder’s meeting of the company they jointly owned. Much aged, some of those members are still in residence and must of course be questioned as part of Blomkvist’s investigation. Cecilia, a headmistress in her mid-fifties, abused in the past by her estranged husband, invites Blomkvist for coffee. When he turns up, she greets him in a bathrobe, is happy to talk about her need for an “occasional lover,” and props her bare foot on his knee.

Very soon, She sat astride him and kissed him on the mouth. Her hair was still wet and fragrant with shampoo. He fumbled with the buttons on her flannel shirt and pulled it down around her shoulders. She had no bra. She pressed against him when he kissed her breasts. Their embraces become routine, but after Blomkvist is obliged to take time away from his investigation to serve his brief prison sentence, he learns on his return that Cecilia wants to end the affair because she is becoming too attached and losing control. Shortly afterward, Lisbeth Salander is engaged to help Blomkvist with his research and comes to live with him in his cabin, sleeping in a spare room. After they have spent seven days gathering information about women raped, burned, bound, strangled, and mutilated over the last fifty years, Salander realizes that Blomkvist “had not once flirted with her.” For his part Blomkvist is concerned about being seen around with Salander because she looks “barely legal” and hence he might appear to be “a dirty old middle-aged man,” something that worries him greatly.

Irritated because she knows the journalist likes women but has made no move on her, Salander goes to his bed and climbs in. Like Cecilia she sits on top. And she doesn’t mind that he has no condoms. What matters is that she has control. Again, like Cecilia, she prefers separate beds once the fun is over. The reader is thus presented with quite an array of sexual behavior, all strictly divided into the grotesquely obscene and the charmingly promiscuous. On the one hand there are Bjurman’s anal sadism and the gruesome, sexually motivated murders, child abuse, and incest that lie at the heart of the investigation into Harriet’s disappearance (to which, in the later parts of the trilogy, will be added prostitution rackets and S&M pedophile porn). On the other hand, there are “transgressive” but harmless encounters between consenting individuals: Blomkvist with his married lover, Erika Berger (who, we hear, prefers sex with two men at a time), Blomkvist with Cecilia, Blomkvist with Salander, Salander with her lesbian lover, Mimmi (they play domination games), and so on.

Notably, all sexual encounters in which men take the initiative are violent and pathological; all encounters in which women run the relationship (avoiding commitment) are okay. There is nothing in between and no space for the conventional, assertive male libido. One might say that the emphasized and elaborately fantasized ugliness of one kind of sex makes the softer variety the only one possible and permissible. The Millenium trilogy offers much entertainment typical of genre fiction: the puzzle of the complex crime in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the suspense of the police investigation in The Girl Who Played with Fire, the drama of the political thriller in The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest. None of this is remarkable. What is surprising is the novels’ energetic focus on ethical issues and in particular the question of retribution. Fear and courage, so often central to thrillers and suspense narratives, are hardly discussed or dramatized; nor does Larsson make more than token efforts to have us really worry for his characters. We feel he is going through the motions when he has Blomkvist with a noose around his neck at the end of part one, or when Salander is shot in the head and buried in a shallow grave at the end of part two.

We know our heroes are in no real danger because Larsson is not interested in these predicaments and makes little effort to imagine them. They are comic strip material. His two main characters themselves seem aware of this and hence are quite fearless. Half choked, apparently about to die, Blomkvist has time to reflect of his torturer, who is explaining how his father abused him: “Good Lord, what a revoltingly sick family.” What matters instead is the division of the world into good and evil, a division that begins with splitting sex into positive and negative experiences, then ripples out from that in fascinating ways. On the side of rape and abuse are Nazism and anti-Semitism (the Vanger family includes many Nazi sympathizers), every kind of large organization (which is always understood as conspiratorial and always at some point involved in preying on young women), government, the secret services, big business, fundamentalist religion, and so on. Even families are potentially dangerous insofar as they impose a closed world in which abuse can take place, or even be taught: Martin Vanger, the missing Harriet’s brother, was initiated in sex crime by his father, who helped him to rape and strangle a girl when he was just sixteen.

Of the hugely extended Vanger family we are repeatedly told that none of its members, however unhappily married, ever divorced, as if this were an indication of a deep malaise. Investigate sex abuse and you come across a sick family and a corrupt organization. Investigate a corrupt organization and invariably someone is involved in sex abuse. Every attempt by one person to control another is evil. On the side of cheerful promiscuity is the free person, able to move in and out of relationships and maintain more than one in openness and honesty. Lending her apartment rent-free to her lover Mimmi, Salander says she would like to come around for sex from time to time, but that it is “not part of the contract”; Mimmi can always say no and still keep the apartment. “What Berger liked best about her relationship with Blomkvist,” we are told, “was the fact that he had no desire whatsoever to control her.” Reassuringly, he “had all manner of terminated relationships behind him, and he was still on friendly terms with most of the women involved.” So concerned are the candid, free individuals when they hear of sexual exploitation or any abuse of power that they inevitably become involved in pursuing it.

Indeed Blomkvist, Salander, and their author draw most of their energy and motivation from the abuses they hate, to the point that you can no more imagine them renouncing pursuit of a sex abuser than renouncing sex itself. So while the first book turns up a sexually perverted serial killer, the second, The Girl Who Played with Fire, starts with a freelance investigation into sex trafficking (bringing underage Eastern European girls into Sweden as prostitutes), revealing complicity in the highest places. “Girls—victims; boys—perpetrators…there is no other form of criminality in which the sex roles themselves are a precondition for the crime.” In this world male prostitutes do not exist. But what power does the ordinary person have to right these wrongs? Blomkvist and his steady lover Berger use their magazine, Millennium, to draw attention to crime and invite the authorities to take action, often a frustrating strategy, particularly when it comes to sex trafficking, because “everybody likes a whore—prosecutors, judges, policemen, even an occasional member of parliament.

Nobody was going to dig too deep to bring that business down.” Salander, on the other hand, as the supreme victim (we are aghast when we discover the full list of what she has been through), is unimpressed by the “insufferable do-gooder” Blomkvist, who thinks he can “change everything with a book.” She takes the law into her own hands and has no qualms about using violence and inflicting pain. Blomkvist, speaking for the modern liberal conscience, can’t condone this; he is always ready to consider mitigating circumstances. “Martin didn’t have a chance,” he says of the serial killer who followed his father’s footsteps. Salander’s response is doggedly simplistic: “Martin had exactly the same opportunity as anyone else to strike back. He killed and raped because he liked doing it.” He deserves violent punishment.

The gratification that the trilogy offers comes when, mediated through Larsson’s and Blomkvist’s troubled but admiring contemplation, Salander exposes herself to every kind of risk in order to mete out retribution to monstrous criminals, a retribution all the more satisfying when, in fine Old Testament fashion, it resembles the crime: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, an anal rape for an anal rape. The greatest monster of them all, it turns out, is Salander’s Russian father, who beat her mother savagely, was a key man in the Russian secret services and a sex and drug trafficker to boot. The moment when, still filthy with the soil that has been heaped on her, Salander drags herself and three bullet wounds from a shallow grave to take an axe to her perverted father’s head can serve as an image of the pervading spirit of the book. However, Salander never actually kills. Not by herself. Once she has reduced a victim to total vulnerability, fastening his feet to the floor with a nail gun, for example, she will anonymously contact some rival criminal eager to finish the job.

It might be hard for the reader, or more pertinently her creator, to love her and the violence she deals out if she became a killer. As it is, we are invited to admire her ingenuity and expertise. Not all is lurid. Food is important. Shopping. Furniture. Domesticity. Larsson invites us to identify with his heroes by filling in the ordinary moments of their lives, the humdrum aloneness that makes colorful sexual encounters so desirable. A cookbook could be compiled from Blomkvist’s efforts in the kitchen in the first novel of the trilogy. Salander prefers to get herself pizza and Coke. Both of them are used to eating alone in front of a computer screen. As independent spirits, they prefer Apple to Microsoft. Both pay more attention to technical stats than nutritional value. Replacing her computer after an accident, Salander set her sights on the best available alternative: the new Apple PowerBook G4/1.0 GHz in an aluminium case with a PowerPC 7451 processor with an AltiVec Velocity Engine, 960 MB Ram and a 60 GB hard drive. It had BlueTooth and built-in CD and DVD burners.

One is reminded of the frequently cited technical specs of guns in Mailer’s Why Are We in Vietnam? The computer is Salander’s weapon. Unlike firearms, however, this is a weapon every ordinary reader handles every day: Best of all, it had the first 17-inch screen in the laptop world with NVIDIA graphics and a resolution of 1440 x 900 pixels, which shook the PC advocates and outranked everything else on the market. It is through the computer screen that the free individual can hack into the evil world of the great corporation with its corrupt practices and pedophile porn rings and begin the duty or the fantasy of striking back. Not quite Alice in Through the Looking-Glass but not unrelated; when Salander goes online she is transformed, omnipotent. Many novels have captured the global imagination by presenting modern man as in thrall to a vast international conspiracy; one thinks of Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum or Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code.

The hidden organization that conditions and controls us is the antithesis of individualism and its natural enemy, an evil extension of the potentially perilous family that wields such power over us from birth, or the traditional marriage that restricts our sexual encounters, or the incompetent if not nakedly evil state that tangles us in a web of bureaucracy and is always complicit with organized crime. From all these things, Salander shows us how to be free, with inspired use of our laptops. It is the ingenuousness and sincerity of Larsson’s engagement with good and evil that give the trilogy its power to attract so many millions of people. There really is no suspicion in these books that his heroes’ obsessions might be morbid. Certainly the reader will not be invited to question his or her enjoyment in seeing sexual humiliation inflicted on evil rapists. That pleasure will not be spoiled. It’s not surprising, reading biographical notes, that as an adolescent Larsson witnessed a gang rape and despised himself for failing to intervene, or that in his twenties he spent time in Eritrea training guerrillas—women guerrillas, of course—and then much of his mature life investigating and denouncing neo-Nazis.

Indeed he was so active in these matters that he felt it wise not to make his address public, or even his relationship with Eva Gabrielsson, his partner of thirty years. The two didn’t marry, she has explained in an interview, because under Swedish law marriage would have required publication of their address. Nor did they have children. As a result, when Larsson died of a heart attack at fifty in 2004, shortly before the first part of the trilogy was published and without having made a will, his estate passed to his father and brother, to whom he was not particularly close, leaving Gabrielsson with none of the vast income that was about to accrue. A man with a better eye for plot, one feels, would not have allowed such a loose end to threaten his achievement; unless these are precisely the pitfalls of remaining a free individual outside any confining social system. Man of Mystery - The New Yorker Man of Mystery Why do people love Stieg Larsson’s novels?

By Joan Acocella In part because Larsson was not alive when the books were published, the trilogy has been surrounded by a number of controversies.CreditIllustration by SEAN MCCABE; PHOTOGRAPH by JAN COLLSIOO / AP PHOTO Having got American readers to buy more than fourteen million copies, collectively, of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy books—“The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” (2008, American edition), “The Girl Who Played with Fire” (2009), and “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest” (2010)—the management at Knopf has decided that it would like them to buy some more. So the company has issued a boxed set: the three crime novels, plus a new book, “On Stieg Larsson,” containing background materials on the late Swedish writer. If you have been in a coma, say, for the past two years, and have not read the Millennium trilogy, about a crusading journalist, Mikael Blomkvist, and a computer hacker, Lisbeth Salander, battling right-wing forces in Sweden, the set, at ninety-nine dollars, is not a bad bargain.

But if you decided to pass on the novels your resolve should not be shaken by this offer. As for “On Stieg Larsson,” don’t worry. It is a small thing—eighty-five pages—and nothing in it solves the central mystery of the Millennium trilogy: why it is so popular. Larsson, who was born in a village in the north of Sweden in 1954, was an ardent leftist all his life. In the nineteen-eighties, because of immigration, Sweden, like other European countries, saw a sharp increase in racism. Suddenly, there were neo-Nazis and Aryan leagues, and the people involved were no longer crazed souls operating mimeograph machines in basements but smooth characters, in suits, running for public office. In 1995, Larsson and some friends in Stockholm founded a quarterly magazine, Expo, with the declared mission of safeguarding “democracy and freedom of speech by . . . documenting extremist and racist groups in society.” Expo was undisguisedly the model for Millennium, the journal that is Blomkvist’s home base in the trilogy. Larsson’s anti-authoritarian writings won him and Expo many enemies.

The printers and distributors of the magazine had their windows smashed. Larsson received death threats. He took precautions. He allowed no photographs. In restaurants, he and his companion, Eva Gabrielsson, sat so that he could watch one exit, she the other. Despite all this, Larsson is said to have been a happy man, who lived the life he wanted. He smoked three packs a day, subsisted on hamburgers, and often worked around the clock. He consumed popular novels, especially crime fiction, by the cartload. And then, in 2001, in a move that no one has been able to explain satisfactorily—and about which, for a long time, he told almost no one—he began writing crime fiction. Later, he said that he did it for fun. Or he said that it was for money—that the books were going to be his “retirement fund.” He wrote fast, easily, and late at night.

By 2003, he had the trilogy’s first volume, which, in English, is called “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.” This is a rather conventional detective novel, except that the villains are Nazis and neo-Nazis, and the crimes are unusually grisly: incestuous rape (homo and hetero), plus murders of the most appalling sort. One victim is gagged with a sanitary napkin and stoned to death. Another is tied up and placed with her face in a bed of dying embers. Larsson submitted the manuscript to Piratförlag, a publishing house with a strong line of crime novels. The editors there never opened the package. (They did not read manuscripts from first-time authors.) Today, one almost pities them. The publisher that accepted the Millennium trilogy—Norstedts Förlag, the second firm Larsson contacted—has sold three and a half million copies of the books. The editing went slowly, because Larsson was always overscheduled. “On Stieg Larsson” contains a series of e-mail exchanges between him and his Norstedts editor, Eva Gedin.

In them we find Gedin asking Larsson politely, but with increasing emphasis, to make room in his schedule to meet with her and hear her editorial suggestions. He responds blithely that he will do so, eventually. One afternoon, seven months after the contract was signed, he went to work at Expo, found that the elevator was broken, climbed seven flights of stairs, had a heart attack, and died. He was fifty. In part because Larsson was not alive when the books were published, the Millennium trilogy has been surrounded by a number of controversies, the juiciest being the question of who should be receiving the fortune the books have earned. The most deserving beneficiary, as many people saw it, was Eva Gabrielsson, who was not only Larsson’s companion for three decades but who also, at various times, supported him, not to speak of putting up with the fact that he normally came home around midnight. The two of them never married, however. Larsson—and, later, Gabrielsson—said that this was a way of protecting her; she would not run his risks.

Years earlier, Larsson had written a will leaving his entire estate to the Communist Workers’ Party of his home town, but the will was not witnessed and therefore was not valid. When Swedes die intestate, everything is awarded to their kin—a strange law in a country where unregistered unions are almost the rule. In any case, Larsson’s money has gone to the two surviving members of his immediate family, his father and his brother. These two men were not unaware of the awkwardness of their position. They gave Gabrielsson Larsson’s half of the apartment that she shared with him. They also proposed to pay her $2.7 million, by way of a settlement. She refused this offer, at which point the dealings between the two parties grew nasty. Gabrielsson told the press that Larsson had been alienated from his father and brother. They, in turn, suggested that Gabrielsson was psychologically disturbed.

The story became even more exciting when the news got out that Gabrielsson had Larsson’s laptop, which, according to several sources (including her), contained more than half of a fourth novel, plus notes for the remainder—in other words, enough material so that someone else could finish it and it could still be called a Stieg Larsson novel. (Some of Larsson’s associates say that he had plans for ten novels, and had started the fifth as well as the fourth.) Does Gabrielsson really have the laptop? At one point, she told the press that she had given it to Expo. Elsewhere, she has said, “No comment.” Reportedly, we will find out the answer when Gabrielsson’s memoir is published, next year. Meanwhile, a lot of people think that she has been terribly wronged. If you call up you can make a contribution to her upkeep. Another question that has been raised about the trilogy is: Who wrote it? A co-worker of Larsson’s at Expo, Kurdo Baksi, suggested in a recent memoir, “Stieg Larsson: Our Days in Stockholm,” that Larsson did not have a talent for writing.

Another colleague has come right out and said that someone else must have authored or at least heavily edited the books. The person most often pointed to is Gabrielsson, who is reputed to have good literary skills. (She is an architect and writer.) Asked about her contribution to the trilogy, Gabrielsson has been as elusive as she was about the laptop. In an interview with Swedish National Television, she denied having given any direct assistance. Then, repeatedly, she spoke of the books’ author as “we.” If Gabrielsson didn’t edit the trilogy, did anyone else—for example, its editors? The e-mails printed in “On Stieg Larsson” suggest that Eva Gedin, of Norstedts, was not often successful in getting Larsson to meet with her. Furthermore, they had only seven months together. When I asked Gedin whether, as a result, the books received little editing, she firmly denied this. With the second and third books, she said, she suggested some revisions, and Larsson indicated his approval. As for the first, “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” she told me that it was thoroughly edited, and that big changes were made, before he died.

She recalled, for example, that the manuscript had opened with an extensive description of a flower, which, as she put it, was “a little bit boring.” She got Larsson to let her take that out. Still, Norstedts may have been reluctant to make extensive changes that the author had not survived to oversee. As for the English edition, it was apparently not subject to any such scruples. The translation was done at top speed (because Norstedts needed to show it to a film company), and then it was heavily revised by its editor, Christopher MacLehose, of Quercus Press, in London. Gabrielsson registered bitter complaints about the changes. So did the translator, Steven Murray. He actually took his name off the novels; he is credited under a pseudonym, Reg Keeland. MacLehose stands by his work. “I did edit the translation, yes,” he wrote to me, “but it isn’t a particularly interesting fact or story and it has earned me enough abuse already from the translator and from the author’s former partner.

Perhaps [it is] sufficient to say that seven or eight houses in England turned it down in its original form”—Murray’s English translation—“and seven or eight in America. In its edited form, as many Americans bid for it.” However much the book was revised, it should have been revised more. The opening may have been reworked, as Gedin says, but it still features an episode—somebody telling somebody else at length (twelve pages!) about a series of financial crimes peripheral to the main plot—that, by wide consensus, is staggeringly boring. (And, pace Gedin, it is preceded by a substantial description of a flower.) Elsewhere, there are blatant violations of logic and consistency. Loose ends dangle. There are vast dumps of unnecessary detail. When Lisbeth goes to IKEA, we get a list of every single thing she buys. (“Two Karlanda sofas with sand-colored upholstery, five Poäng armchairs, two round side tables of clear-lacquered birch, a Svansbo coffee table, and several Lack occasional tables,” and that’s just for the living room.) The jokes aren’t funny. The dialogue could not be worse.

The phrasing and the vocabulary are consistently banal. (Here is Lisbeth, about to be raped: “Shit, she thought when he ripped off her T-shirt. She realized with terrifying clarity that she was out of her depth.”) I am basing these judgments on the English edition, but, if this text was the product of extensive editing, what must the unedited version have looked like? Maybe somebody will franchise this popular series—hire other writers to produce further volumes. This is not a bad idea. We’re not looking at Tolstoy here. The loss of Larsson’s style would not be a sacrifice. The most crippling weakness of the trilogy, however, is its hero. Mikael Blomkvist is so anti-masculinist that, in a narrative where people are brandishing chainsaws, he can take no forceful action. That goes for his sex life, too, which features heavily in the plot. Mikael is irresistible to women, we are told, yet he never makes the first move. Not that Larsson’s women have a problem with this. “Are you going to come quietly or do I have to handcuff you?” one says. Lisbeth is more direct.

She just walks into his bedroom in the middle of the night and plops down on him. He apparently gives all his bedmates a good time, but one wonders whether he has a good time. A girlfriend says to him that he seems to get a fair amount of action. “Yes, unfortunately,” he answers. Again and again, he tries to maneuver his relations with Lisbeth out of sex and into friendship. “Lisbeth, can you define the word friendship for me?” he asks. She is not sure how to answer. He tells her, avuncularly (he’s almost twenty years older than she), that friendship is built on respect and trust. Ugh! “Does the No. 1 stop here and does that go to Penn Station and can I get a train there to Philadelphia and then how do I get to Walnut Street?” Buy a cartoon In 2009, three Swedish movies were made of the novels, with Niels Arden Oplev directing “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” (the best one) and Daniel Alfredson the final two. These films were huge hits, and they certainly bumped up the sales of the books. Like many mediocre novels, the trilogy is far better on the screen than on the page.

The screenwriters, trying to bring their stories down to two hours, got rid of a lot of the clutter and scrubbed off the sugar coating that Larsson put on the relationship between Mikael and Lisbeth. Finally, the movies give us lovely things to see—fog-bound islands, dewy leaves. Sony is now producing an American movie trilogy, with Daniel Craig as Mikael. After a loud fuss in the press, the role of Lisbeth was given to Rooney Mara, who had a small part in “The Social Network.” (She was the girlfriend who dumped Mark Zuckerberg in the opening scene.) She will have big boots to fill. Nothing in the three Swedish films is better than Noomi Rapace, the actress who plays Lisbeth. In most of the first movie, to show us how surly and unapproachable Lisbeth is, Rapace wears her punk hairdo so that it covers her left eye. In the third movie, we get to see both her eyes, but, because she is in the hospital, recovering from dire wounds, and then on trial (she’s been framed by the villains), she barely speaks. Yet whether she has one eye or two eyes, she communicates something like a five-act tragedy.

It is clear what people like in these movies, but what accounts for the success of the novels, despite their almost comical faults? Larsson may have had a weakness for extraneous detail, but at the same time, paradoxically, he is a very good storyteller. (Mario Vargas Llosa, in an article on the trilogy, compared Larsson to Dumas père.) As for cheap thrills, there’s dirt aplenty and considerable mayhem. Early in the trilogy, we find out that when Lisbeth was a child her mother was regularly beaten senseless by her mate, Alexander Zalachenko, a Russian spy who had defected to Sweden, where a secret branch of the security police put him on the payroll, thinking that he could tell them useful secrets. Lisbeth told the police about Zalachenko’s assaults on her mother, only to be put away for two years in a state psychiatric hospital. This is the main source of what, in the novel’s present, is Lisbeth’s utter distrust of any government institution, down to the local police. At the end of “The Girl Who Played with Fire,” she has a showdown with Zalachenko.

This is a brilliantly orchestrated scene, if you can stand it. Zalachenko shoots Lisbeth in the head. (She runs her fingers over her skull. She finds the hole, feels her wet brain.) Zalachenko and his sidekick, Ronald Niedermann, bury her hastily, failing to notice—they’re in a dark wood—that she is still alive. Once they’re gone, she digs herself out, returns to Zalachenko’s hideout, and sinks an axe in his face. Near the end of the last book, Niedermann holes up in a brickworks that Zalachenko once owned. When he arrives, he finds two Russian girls, a brunette and a blonde, who have been deposited there by sex traffickers. They are afraid to go outside, and are starving. Niedermann brings them some soup. Then he grabs the brunette and breaks her neck with a single twist. The other watches, and puts up no resistance when it is her turn. You don’t forget such episodes—the truly innocent at the mercy of the truly evil—and they lead directly into the absolutist morals of Larsson’s books, which may also be a powerful selling point.

Lisbeth believes that people are responsible for what they do, no matter what was done to them, and plenty was done to her. The trilogy is, to some extent, a revenge story—a popular genre. (Think of “Death Wish” or “True Grit.”) Lisbeth not only cleaves Zalachenko’s skull; she beats up two large bikers simultaneously and, with a Taser, delivers fifty thousand volts to Niedermann’s crotch. The woman warrior has become a beloved feature of the movies, from Nikita to Angelina Jolie’s Lara Croft, and beyond. It is also, reportedly, a sexual fantasy popular with men—something else that may have helped to sell the books. According to certain researchers, another sexual fantasy common among men is rape. Larsson’s campaign against the abuse of power eventually became focussed on one victimized group: women. A friend of Larsson’s tells the story that, at the age of fifteen, Larsson watched as several boys he knew gang-raped a girl. Later, ashamed, he telephoned the girl and asked her to forgive him. She refused. He is said never to have forgotten this episode.

In these three violent novels, no species of assault is more highly featured than the rape of women by men. Furthermore, you can’t go twelve pages without being almost screamed at on the subject of feminism. Larsson’s original title for his trilogy was “Men Who Hate Women.” (This remained the title of the first book in the Swedish edition. Gedin says that he absolutely insisted.) All the sections of the first book are prefaced with statistics on crimes against women. The epigraphs in the third book all have to do with female warriors—the Amazons, and so on. Yet some critics have accused Larsson of having his feminism and eating it, too. They say that, under cover of condemning violence against women, he has supplied, for the reader’s enjoyment, quite a few riveting scenes of violence against women. There are indeed many such scenes, the most vile being the sex murders in the first book. It should be noted, however, that we never see those crimes. They are in the past—they are told to Mikael and Lisbeth, and hence to us. Other crimes against women get curiously brief coverage. Niedermann’s murder of the two Russian girls takes only four lines.

In terms of the plot, the most important crime in the novel’s present time is the rape of Lisbeth by her state-appointed guardian, Nils Bjurman, but, while we’re told that her clothes are torn off and that something is then rammed up her anus, we don’t hear much more. The episode occupies only one page. By contrast, when Lisbeth returns to Bjurman’s apartment to rape him, in the same way, this is given more than six pages, and the assault acquires significant embellishment. On Bjurman’s torso, from his nipples to just above his crotch, Lisbeth tattoos, in big letters, “ I AM A SADISTIC PIG, A PERVERT, AND A RAPIST .” Some of the people who accuse Larsson of double-dealing may be thinking more of the film “Dragon Tattoo,” where the two scenes are more equal in length, and where everything is more horrible just by virtue of being there, on the screen, for us to look at. Another consideration that would seem to deflect charges of misogyny is simply the character of Lisbeth. She is a complicated person, alienating and poignant at the same time. Many critics have stressed her apparent coldness.

In the scene of her revenge against Bjurman, her face never betrays hatred or fear. When the rape is over, she sits in a chair, smokes a cigarette, and stubs it out on his rug. (He is tied up.) Accordingly, some writers have called her a sociopath. Larsson, too, said that once, but elsewhere he described her as a grownup version of Pippi Longstocking, the badly behaved and happy nine-year-old heroine of a series of books, by Astrid Lindgren, beloved of Swedish children. Pippi, Lindgren wrote unsentimentally, “had no mother and no father, and that was of course very nice because there was no one to tell her to go to bed.” Lisbeth wears leather and studs. She has a ring implanted in her left labium. She doesn’t particularly like to be around people. But she is not a sociopath. The primary diagnostic feature of sociopathy is callousness—lack of feeling—toward others. Lisbeth falls in love with Mikael. She brings gifts—cake and perfume—to her mother, who is in a home for the mentally impaired.

(Zalachenko’s beatings finally caused brain damage.) She operates outside society but not outside morality. She is an outlaw, or a sprite—a punk fairy. A final drawing card of the trilogy may be its up-to-dateness, particularly of the technological variety. Other mystery writers—Patricia Cornwell, Henning Mankell—have introduced computers into their arsenal, but no one I know of uses computers as extensively as Larsson to build plot and character. Lisbeth and Mikael find each other online, solve crimes online, acquire their glamour online. (Lisbeth has an “Apple PowerBook G4/1.0 GHz . . . with a PowerPC 7451 processor with an AltiVec Velocity Engine, 960 MB RAM and a 60 GB hard drive.”) Lisbeth’s only friends are fellow-hackers. Her colleague Trinity has infiltrated the computers of the BBC and Scotland Yard: “He even managed—for a short time—to take command of a nuclear submarine on patrol in the North Sea.” One of the sweetest moments in the whole trilogy comes via an electronic device.

Mikael has been separated from Lisbeth for almost the entire length of “The Girl Who Played with Fire.” Finally, he breaks into her apartment, looking for evidence that might help her (the police are after her). His entry activates the apartment’s security system. Lisbeth, driving up a country road, is alerted by her cell phone. The system is wired so that after thirty seconds a paint bomb explodes on any intruder. There are six seconds left. Mikael, guessing the machine’s code, turns the system off. Lisbeth taps into her security camera and sees who is standing in her foyer. She smiles—a rare event. She knows now that Mikael is still on her side. Related to the trilogy’s cutting-edge quality is a revised view of Sweden. After the establishment of the Social Democratic government, in 1932, Sweden seemed, to many people—the Swedes, in particular—a kind of socialist utopia: maternity leaves, free love.

(Ingmar Bergman’s movies might appear to contradict such a view, but they are really about humankind, not about his homeland.) The writer John-Henri Holmberg, in an essay on his friend Larsson, lists what he believes are the fundamental tenets of his countrymen’s vision of their society, and, in each case, Larsson’s critique of them. Swedes think that their country is uniquely egalitarian (Larsson presents considerable differences between rich and poor), that Sweden is politically neutral (Larsson shows a burgeoning right), that the Swedish health-care system is the best in the world (Lisbeth is imprisoned in a state hospital), etc. Above all, the Swedes believe that their government is benign, and working for their benefit, whereas, in Holmberg’s words, Larsson shows the Swedish state as “an instrument of violence, wielded against individuals who threaten the privileges and power of those who have managed to gain control of it.” Larsson even denied Sweden’s fabled beauty. However pretty the countryside, his Stockholm has tattoo parlors, S & M clubs, McDonald’s. As Charles McGrath wrote, in the Times, Larsson’s Sweden is “a country . . .

a lot like our own.” The critique is not new. For decades, Sweden’s writers have been portraying the supposed welfare administered by the Swedish welfare state as an empty promise. (And that welfare state may soon be disabled by the recently elected conservative government.) But Holmberg claims that Larsson’s critique is more piercing, especially as it is embodied in Lisbeth. She is an anarchist. (She would surely enjoy the recent activities of WikiLeaks, whose files are stored on servers in Stockholm.) “She is . . . the nightmare of all doctrines, all consensus thinkers, all moralists and all politicians,” Holmberg writes. Larsson doesn’t fully endorse her view, or maybe he felt that it wouldn’t have been good for sales. The trilogy ends with a gesture of trust in the government. The police are called—and by Lisbeth! But only after she’s done the real work. ♦ Joan Acocella has written for The New Yorker, mostly on books and dance, since 1992, and became the magazine’s dance critic in 1998. Sign up for the daily newsletter: The best of The New Yorker every day. Enter e-mail address Please enter a valid e-mail address Submitting... Thank you for subscribing.

You’ll receive your first newsletter soon. View all newsletters » Most Popular Sequel to Stieg Larsson’s Millennium novels: title and cover revealed | Books | The Guardian Stieg Larsson Sequel to Stieg Larsson’s Millennium novels: title and cover revealed The Girl in the Spider’s Web, continuing the Girl With the Dragon Tattoo sequence, was written by David Lagercrantz and will be published worldwide this August Tuesday 31 March 2015 08.00 EDT Last modified on Tuesday 31 March 2015 19.35 EDT Close This article is 1 year old First, there was The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo . Then, she Played With Fire and Kicked the Hornet’s Nest . Now, more than 10 years since Lisbeth Salander’s creator Stieg Larsson died, his British publisher is preparing for the release of the fourth novel in the bestselling Millennium series, which it has announced will be called The Girl in the Spider’s Web. Pinterest Larsson redux ... The cover for The Girl in the Spider’s Web.

Photograph: PR Penned by Swedish writer David Lagercrantz with the blessing of Larsson’s estate – though not his long-term partner – the novel, based on Larsson’s universe and characters, will be published worldwide on 27 August. Amid Harry Potter-style levels of security – Lagercrantz wrote the work on a computer with no internet connection, and delivered the Swedish manuscript to his publishers by hand – UK publisher MacLehose Press has unveiled only the cover, which shows Salander herself, complete with dragon tattoo and a suitably punk pair of trousers. Called Det som inte dödar oss in the original Swedish, or What Doesn’t Kill You, it is now in the process of being translated into 38 different languages, with George Goulding working on the English version. “The Swedish original publishers Norstedts have put everyone on notice that no particle of this book can be shared with anybody,” said UK publisher Christopher MacLehose.

“There’ll be no review copies in any language before it’s launched on 27 August … Nobody will be in a position to beat the ring of steel around this book.” It is now 10 years since Norstedts published Män som hatar kvinnor, or Men Who Hate Women, which in English was called The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. MacLehose picked up the trilogy, completed with The Girl Who Played With Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, for English publication after it was rejected by eight other publishers in the UK. The three novels, tracing the violent adventures of Salander, a punk computer hacker, and the journalist Mikael Blomkvist, have now sold more than 75m copies worldwide, and more than 14m in the British market. Lagercrantz has been given “a completely free rein” by Larsson’s estate to continue their stories, said MacLehose. “The reader of this fourth book will know exactly where they are. It will be like coming home, getting back into a hot bath you wished you hadn’t left on a winter’s day – here we are, thrilled to be chained once more to the same calibre of narrator.

Lagercrantz is very, very clever.” Larsson, said MacLehose, “wrote down the shadowy outline of 10 books” in the Millennium series before he died suddenly at the age of 50 in 2004, and before his novels became a worldwide phenomenon. “I haven’t seen it, and I haven’t met anybody who has read it, but he knew he was going to go on,” said MacLehose. “I have the strongest sense that if he was unable to give his creations Salander and Blomkvist fresh life, I think he would have wanted above everything for them to be let loose on the stage.” The book is being published at the instigation of Larsson’s father and brother, who have said they wanted to “keep alive the characters and world” that Larsson created. “We see it as a way of offering his many readers the continuation they have been longing for. We chose David Lagercrantz because we think he is highly suited to the task. David is a skilled writer who has portrayed odd characters and complex geniuses throughout his career. He will be doing it his own way,” Joakim and Erland Larsson have said in a statement .

The journalist’s partner of 32 years, Eva Gabrielsson, however, has been outspoken about her opposition to the series’ continuation. Because the two never married, and because Larsson died intestate, his estate was divided between his father and brother. Gabrielsson has previously said that Larsson had written 200 pages of a fourth book in the series, but that it would never be published while she holds the draft pages. She slammed the idea of Lagercrantz’s follow-up in an interview with AFP in Stockholm earlier this month. “I wouldn’t have continued Stieg’s work. It was his language, his unique narrative,” she told the agency . “The worst thing is how saddened Stieg would have been. He never let anyone work on his literary texts. He would have been furious. Who knows, maybe he’ll send a lightning bolt at the book launch.” But MacLehose is adamant that Lagercrantz is the right person to continue the series. The author of the ghostwritten autobiography of Zlatan Ibrahimovic, I Am Zlatan, he also covered crime for Swedish daily Expressen . “He’s uniquely qualified,” he said.

“He knows what he’s talking about, about the police or the intelligence units in the Swedish government, how they work … [And] he’s a writer of tremendous gifts.” Lagercrantz, who lives on Södermalm in Stockholm, near to where much of the action in the Millennium series is set, has spoken, via a statement from Quercus, of the importance of Larsson’s legacy. “Stieg Larsson was a master at creating complex stories with a lot of different plotlines and that was something I was determined to live up to,” he has said. “[His writing style] is down to earth and unaffected. But there is a kind of journalistic authoritativeness about his work. I realised early on how idiotic it would be for me just to imitate him.

This is my own prose.” 9780739352755: Stieg Larsson Millennium Trilogy Audiobook CD Bundle: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest - AbeBooks - Larsson, Stieg: 073935275X About this title Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy is now available in a complete audio set. All across America, people are talking about Stieg Larsson’s best-selling novels, set in Sweden and featuring Lisbeth Salander—“one of the most original and memorable heroines to surface in a recent thriller” ( The New York Times). The trilogy is an international sensation that will grab you and keep you “reading with eyes wide open” ( San Francisco Chronicle). “[It] is intricately plotted, lavishly detailed but written with a breakneck pace and verve” ( The Independent, U.K.), but “be warned: the trilogy is seriously addictive.” ( The Guardian, U.K.). The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo Harriet Vanger, a scion of one of Sweden’s wealthiest families disappeared without a trace more than forty years ago.

All these years later, her aged uncle continues to try to discover what happened to her. He hires Mikael Blomkvist, a journalist recently sidelined by a libel conviction, to investigate. Blomkvist is aided by the pierced and tattooed computer prodigy Lisbeth Salander. Together they tap into a vein of unfathomable iniquity and astonishing corruption on their way to discovering the truth of Harriet Vanger’s fate. The Girl Who Played with Fire Mikael Blomkvist, now the crusading publisher of the magazine Millennium, has decided to run a story that will expose an extensive sex trafficking operation. On the eve of its publication, the two reporters responsible for the article are murdered, and the fingerprints found on the murder weapon belong to his friend Lisbeth Salander. Blomkvist, convinced of Salander’s innocence, plunges into an investigation of the murders. Meanwhile, Salander herself is drawn into a murderous game of cat and mouse, which forces her to face her dark past. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest Lisbeth Salander lies in critical condition, a bullet wound to her head, in the intensive care unit of a Swedish city hospital.

She’s fighting for her life in more ways than one: if and when she recovers, she’ll be taken back to Stockholm to stand trial for three murders. With the help of Mikael Blomkvist, she will not only have to prove her innocence, but also identify and denounce those in authority who have allowed the vulnerable, like herself, to suffer abuse and violence. On her own, she will plot revenge—against the man who tried to kill her, and against the corrupt government institutions that very nearly destroyed her life. "synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title. Review: Get to know the bestselling series that Amazon (and its customers) have loved from the very beginning with this deluxe, slip-cased set of all three hardcover books in the Millennium Trilogy, along with On Stieg Larsson, a never-before-published collection of reflections about and correspondence with the author. Read our reviews of the books: Amazon Best of the Month, September 2008: Once you start The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, there's no turning back.

This debut thriller--the first in a trilogy from the late Stieg Larsson--is a serious page-turner rivaling the best of Charlie Huston and Michael Connelly. Mikael Blomkvist, a once-respected financial journalist, watches his professional life rapidly crumble around him. Prospects appear bleak until an unexpected (and unsettling) offer to resurrect his name is extended by an old-school titan of Swedish industry. The catch--and there's always a catch--is that Blomkvist must first spend a year researching a mysterious disappearance that has remained unsolved for nearly four decades. With few other options, he accepts and enlists the help of investigator Lisbeth Salander, a misunderstood genius with a cache of authority issues. Little is as it seems in Larsson's novel, but there is at least one constant: you really don't want to mess with the girl with the dragon tattoo. Amazon Best of the Month, July 2009: The girl with the dragon tattoo is back. Stieg Larsson's seething heroine, Lisbeth Salander, once again finds herself paired with journalist Mikael Blomkvist on the trail of a sinister criminal enterprise.

Only this time, Lisbeth must return to the darkness of her own past (more specifically, an event coldly known as "All the Evil") if she is to stay one step ahead--and alive. The Girl Who Played with Fire is a break-out-in-a-cold-sweat thriller that crackles with stunning twists and dismisses any talk of a sophomore slump. Fans of Larsson's prior work will find even more to love here, and readers who do not find their hearts racing within the first five pages may want to confirm they still have a pulse. Expect healthy doses of murder, betrayal, and deceit, as well as enough espresso drinks to fuel downtown Seattle for months. Amazon Best Books of the Month, May 2010 As the finale to Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest is not content to merely match the adrenaline-charged pace that made international bestsellers out of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played with Fire. Instead, it roars with an explosive storyline that blows the doors off the series and announces that the very best has been saved for last.

A familiar evil lies in wait for Lisbeth Salander, but this time, she must do more than confront the miscreants of her past; she must destroy them. Much to her chagrin, survival requires her to place a great deal of faith in journalist Mikael Blomkvist and trust his judgment when the stakes are highest. To reveal more of the plot would be criminal, as Larsson's mastery of the unexpected is why millions have fallen hard for his work. But rest assured that the odds are again stacked, the challenges personal, and the action fraught with neck-snapping revelations in this snarling conclusion to a thrilling triad. This closing chapter to The Girl's pursuit of justice is guaranteed to leave readers both satisfied and saddened once the final page has been turned. About the Author: Stieg Larsson was the founder and editor-in-chief of the anti-racist magazine Expo. He was a renowned expert on right-wing extremist organisations. He died in 2004, soon after delivering the text of the novels that make up the Millennium Trilogy. "About this title" may belong to another edition of this title. Three Films Based on Stieg Larsson Books Due Out in U.S.

This Year - Speakeasy - WSJ Three Films Based on Stieg Larsson Books Due Out in U.S. This Year By Christopher.Farley@wsj.com Feb 25, 2010 9:00 am ET American fans of the novels of Swedish writer Stieg Larsson are eagerly awaiting the U.S. publication of the third, and possibly last, book in his ”Millennium” series, “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest.” Music Box Films, which is releasing a big-screen version of the first book in the series next month, says it plans to also issue film versions of the other two books in the U.S. this summer. The movie adaptation of the first book, “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” is due out March 19. Ed Arentz, managing director of Music Box Films, says the company tentatively plans to release in the U.S. movie adaptations of the series’ second book “The Girl Who Played With Fire” and “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest” in July and August respectively. All three films, which are in Swedish with English subtitles, have already been released in Europe. More on the coming films after the jump.

Question: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is the first in which trilogy of novels?
Answer: MILLENNIUM