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Lisbeth Salander & Mikael Blomkvist

kevinburtonsmith

Created by Stieg Larsson

“People always have secrets. It’s just a matter of finding out what they are.”
— The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Journalist MIKAEL BLOMKVIST and computer hacker LISBETH SALANDER are the mismatched detective duo who appear in a series of internationally acclaimed, posthumously published thrillers by Swedish author Stieg Larsson. The three books are known as the “Millennium Trilogy,” after the magazine Blomkvist works for.

When we first meet Mikael in 2005’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, he’s a middle-aged financial reporter for a left-wing magazine, Millkennium, whose career has gone straight into the dumpster, thanks to a conviction for libelling a high-flying Swedish tycoon and a pending jail sentence.

But another powerful but aging Swedish businessman offers him a way out — if Mikael agrees to look into a seriously cold case involving the disappearance of a teen heiress, his brother’s granddaughter, almost forty years ago. What can a potential jailbird out to clear his name and reputation do but jump at the chance?

With the unexpected help of Lisbeth, the tattooed girl of the title, a troubled young investigator with a photographic memory and more emotional luggage than anyone should have to carry, Mikael begins to dig into the case, and soon unearths a wriggling mass of deep dark and disturbing family secrets that wouldn’t be out of place in a Ross Macdonald novel.

But that’s just part of this book’s charms. At times it also reads like a something right out of the Silence of the Lambs school, and at other times it seems like we’ve wandered into an almost Ludlumesque paranoid world of omnipotent global and corporate corruption.

But mostly it’s Lisbeth’s very hands-on, Spillane-like approach to vengeance that piqued readers’ interest. She’s the real star of the show here. Such a big, disjointed novel, with its wide range of characters and ever-shifting themes should be one whopping, unholy mess, with no business being as compelling and entertaining as it is, but it’s Lisbeth’s relentless ferocity and mercurial sense of justice that holds this unwieldly mess together, and struck a chord with millions of readers, including me.

Larsson may not have been the greatest stylist, but thanks to his considerable storytelling mojo, this rambling slab of a novel became a global sensation, almost from the moment it was first published in Swedish in 2005, and that buzz soon spread around the globe, country by country and continent by continent, as it was been translated into one foreign language after another. Somehow this unlikely thriller has become one of the most compelling and bestselling crime novels of the decade.

And the second and third novels in the series, The Girl Who Played with Fire (2006) and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest (2007), only upped the ante, as Mikael and Lisbeth — who rarely even have physical contact with each other — plow into the morass of Sweden’s illicit sex industry, its social welfare system, its national security and legal and justice systems from different ends. Again, it’s a scenario that shouldn’t work, and yet…

Part of the series’ success, of course, is the backstory. The author, a graphic designer and the editor-in-chief at the Swedish antiracist magazine Expo, dropped dead of a heart attack in 2004, shortly after delivering the final manuscripts for the first three books.

The three completed books have already been filmed for Swedish television, and the first opened in theatres in Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland in early 2009 to massive acclaim and popularity, setting box office records in Norway and Denmark for a Swedish film.

Needless to say, Hollywood soon came sniffing around, with a big bucks Hollywood version, starring Daniel Craig and Rooney Mara, and directed by hot shot director David Fincher. Although it did great at the box office and was generally well-received, no sequel has been announced yet.

But all four films are worth watching. The Swedish films have this low-level grit and down to earh appeal, and present themslerves as intricate mysteries, whereas the Fincher film is more of a thriller. For instance, some of the revelations slowly built up to in the first Swedish version are quickly dismissed in a quick bit of exposition quite early in the American version. And it should be noted that while both Noomi Rapace and Rooney Mara give strongh and compelling performances as Lisbeth, there’s a world of difference between Michael Nyqvist’s performance as a world-weary, out-of-shape middle-aged Blomkvist and that of Daniel Craig’s. The Swedish version shows Blomkvist as a bit of a schlep; a guy who should really eat better and get to the gym more often. The Hollywood version essentially gives us James Bond. Even Craig’s six packs have six packs.

* * * * *

But it wasn’t just Hollywood that came calling. Of course, all the money generated from the franchise proved irresistable. So far, there have been at least two graphic novel adaptations of the trilogy, and in 2015, it was announced that the Millenium Trilogy would no longer be a trilogy — it would soon be followed by a fourth novel, The Girl in the Spider’s Web, a sequel written by Swedish journalist and biographer David Lagercrantz. It’s worth noting that this book is labelled a “Lisbeth Salander” novel.

And money begets money, so in 2017 another sequel, The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye (also by Lagercrantz) was published. And yet another, The Girl Who Lived Twice in 2019, with many more presumably to come. Adding insult to injury, it was announced in March 2017 that Sony Pictures was moving forward with a sequel to Fincher’s 2011 effort, based not on any of Larrson’s books but on Lagercrantz’s The Girl in the Spider’s Web. And then a third sequel by Lagerkrantz was announced. The Girl Who Lived Twice came out in 2019, followed by The Girl in the Eagle’s Talons (2023) by yet another author, Karin Smirnoff.

Still, the rumours persist that Larsson left most of a fourth novel and the synopses of the fifth and sixth books on a computer owned by his long-time companion who, unfortunately, doesn’t have the legal right to release them. Larsson’s literary estate is instead controlled by his estranged father and brother, due to the fact that Larsson died inestate, and Swedish law does not recognize common law marriages.

So, Larsson did leave behind most of a sequel, but The Girl in the Spider’s Web isn’t it.

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Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith, with a little guidance from Mark Sullivan, who pushed me to take a chance.

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