Larsson’s connection with ordinary readers has been astonishing in its range and passion – but equally remarkable is the response he has engendered in his fellow crime fiction practitioners and critics. Several were happy to talk to me about their Larsson enthusiasms for this book – while others grimaced and said ‘Can I tell you what I really think about him?’
Joan Smith is celebrated as a crime novelist (for such impressive books as A Masculine Ending), but it is perhaps as a journalist and commentator that her work most coincides with that of Stieg Larsson, with a particular concern for male violence against women and the repression of women in Islamic societies – two issues which much exercised the late Swedish writer.
‘I was an early supporter,’ she says. ‘It is Stieg Larsson who most describes an incredibly detailed vision of modern Sweden. He presented it as a modern European country – there isn’t that small-town, gossipy feel we’d had before, the notion that time is passing, but things don’t really change very much. This wasn’t what Stieg Larsson presented in his creation of a city of the modern era, an incredibly recognisable modern world.
‘The other element that intrigued me about the first book was, of course, something that is summed up in the original Swedish title of the novel, Men Who Hate Women. Even if I had not known at the beginning, I would have realised that Larsson was as fascinating and horrified as I am by the whole phenomenon of misogyny and the deep-seated hostility some men have towards women. It’s unusual to find a man who makes that absolutely the central theme of his novels – obviously, a lot of men are aware of it, but to tackle the subject as directly as Larsson does, for a male novelist is unusual.’
In this, of course, he had a parallel with the writer Joan Smith – who as well as being a novelist addressing these themes, was (as a journalist) arguing for the rights of women in repressive religious regimes. ‘Well,’ says Smith, ‘Stieg did have the right credentials! Years ago I worked for the Sunday Times Insight team doing investigative journalism in the days when newspapers believed in it – and could afford it. And I wonder if the same thing happened to him as happened to me – you come to realise that you have insights into the extraordinary things that go on around the world, and being a journalist of this kind is something of a privileged occupation. I was flying around the world, investigating things like where the Shah of Iran had stashed his money, and writing a book about the Iranian embassy siege. You begin to say to yourself “I know how all this works, but I don’t want to be constrained by the facts anymore”. You want to write about the underlying truths which can be revealed in fiction, and I can’t help wondering if this was part of his motivation as well.’
Does Smith think that Larsson could have sustained the energy and focus had he written the ten-novel sequence he had apparently planned?
‘I really think he couldn’t have sustained what he achieved in those first three novels; it’s noticeable that the last of the three is elegiac in tone, and there’s the new personal trajectory he creates for Blomkvist – giving him a new girlfriend, and so forth. The ebb and flow of the relationship between him and Salander had been very convincingly detailed, and I really didn’t believe that she would so readily accept the new relationship without any of the animosity of the second novel. It seemed to me a way of tying up loose ends in a not entirely convincing way. Nevertheless, it felt like a trilogy to me.
‘The other problem is about continuing the dynamic of the relationship between Blomkvist and Salander. To some degree, having established that she is dysfunctional, part of the achievement is the way in which she is “reached” by Blomkvist. And that feat is achieved – several times – but it encapsulates another way in which it is difficult to see the series continuing. At the end of the third book – with so much resolved, with so many of her problems solved, many of the injustices righted – Salander is a free woman. So what does she do now? Does she find herself a boyfriend, or a girlfriend, and settle down? Does she start her own computer company?’
Of course, the Millennium Trilogy crucially addresses gender issues, which is very much the territory that Joan Smith writes about. But despite his impeccable sympathy for women, has Larsson transcended gender in his writings?
‘Oh, he remains very much a male writer, and there is, possibly, a certain male wish-fulfilment element in Blomkvist; he is a shambling figure, but it seems that every woman he meets wants to go to bed with him – and the ones who can’t have him look wistfully at him. But you can forgive Larsson this, as you can forgive him so much else. Apart from anything else, when you read the first book, you know that the author is already dead – these three books are all you will get. And there is no sense of an author developing – you are denied this particular pleasure, something that can usually be counted upon when you discover a new writer. Perhaps he might have grown out of that element of wish-fulfilment in the Blomkvist character, and he never had the chance of a series of consultations with an editor – the usual refining process.’
But what about Lisbeth Salander? Smith has spoken highly of her in her various reviews of the books, but did she have reservations?
‘Well, I feel she is like a character from a computer game,’ she says. ‘That’s not necessarily a huge weakness, and it’s certainly true that a lot of young women identify with her. What I respond to is how intelligent she is, and how ingenious she is – at least, how ingenious Larsson makes her. But my problems, if I have any, are not really with the characters. I’m not entirely happy with the violence of the third book, which is very gruesome indeed. I think that Larsson is feeling that because she was victimised, we are supposed to stand back when this violence is unleashed and not pass judgement on her – and I don’t think I’m quite prepared to do that.
‘As for women readers sympathising with her – well, personally, I know that I never for a moment identified with her. I read her as someone who was completely outside my experience, and the fact that she is so horribly abused – an abuse that can happen to anyone, whether a boy or a girl – such things can have a devastating effect on the personality. But that’s outside my range of experience.
As a journalist, of course, Smith dealt with a lot of the same issues that Larsson tackled. Surely this rendered her a ready-made reader for the Millennium Trilogy?
‘I thought that from the moment I started reading the very first book,’ she replies. ‘The details of falling into a libel trap – and then when Blomkvist goes off to lick his wounds, well because of the kind of journalism I did years ago, I found that very easy to empathise with.
‘I do have this personal response to Stieg, and I wonder if he’d agree that when one is writing journalism, to some degree it is “here today, gone tomorrow”, whereas when you are writing a novel you can address important issues in the guise of entertainment – the issues involved will have more relevance than if they had simply been considered in a journalistic article.’
Karin Alvtegen is comfortably one of the most acclaimed of Nordic crime writers – and is impressed by Stieg’s strong heroine: ‘Perhaps Salander is not an entirely credible character, but together with so many others readers, I find it enjoyable and comforting to read about an underdog who refuses to be a victim and instead takes command. I’m convinced that one of the explanations of the great success is Stieg’s portrayals of strong women. He turns the traditional gender roles upside down. Lisbeth is the “hero” who has to save Mikael Blomkvist. Since the books are equally popular with both men and women, perhaps all of us feel refreshed by Stieg’s obvious crusade against social injustice, xenophobia and preconceived ideas regarding gender roles.
‘The sad thing about this unique success is the dispute about the inheritance it resulted in. Perhaps we all can use it as a reminder that we never know what waits ahead – and that we should be more careful when it comes to writing our last will and testament.’
One of the most enthusiastic proselytisers for Scandinavian crime fiction is the UK’s Ann Cleeves, author of such atmospheric mysteries as Blue Lightning – books which have a rather Nordic attitude to landscape and locale. She has an ambiguous attitude to Larsson: ‘I love Scandinavian crime novels,’ she says. ‘It’s something about the bleakness of landscape, the fact that the writers dare to tackle serious social and domestic issues. I read books in translation for the flavour of the place, the petty preoccupations of the people, the smells, the food. Larsson is an unashamedly political writer and his themes are broader and less personal. A caveat: the island featured in the first book isn’t a real island. I have no sense of what it would be like to live there, as I do, for example, when I read of Johan Theorin’s Oland. Larsson’s is a metaphor and a playful gesture towards Golden Age enclosed community mysteries. As a reader I revel in the intimate and the specific and I need to get lost in the story.
The American writer Dan Fesperman produces very different fiction from Larsson, but is intrigued by the Swedish writer: ‘I was introduced to Larsson’s work by my American editor, Sonny Mehta, who gave me a galley of Dragon Tattoo back when Knopf was still trying to decide what cover to put on the US edition. I think he mentioned that it was already something of a sensation in Britain, and he seemed to think I’d like it. That night I cracked it open on the train ride back from New York (a perfect place to start reading that kind of a novel, I might add – the nightscapes of cities and marshes rolling past outside, the sway and clack of the train car, the intimate pool of light from the overhead beam). By the time we reached Baltimore a few hours later I knew I’d be reading all three.
‘It’s not easy to pin down Larsson’s appeal. It’s not his style or the cadence of his language – it seldom is when you’re talking about a work in translation. It’s more a question of the strange mood he creates – both welcoming and forbidding, comfortable and uneasy. Opening one of his books is sort of like inviting an engaging but mildly unsettling guest to dinner. The company and conversation are stimulating, charming even. But there is also a sense of shared menace in the interplay, which of course draws you closer to the table. With every word you realise this is someone who has been places, who knows things, and who may eventually let you in on some secrets, no matter how dark and unsavoury. Halfway through the main course you’ve decided to extend the evening as long as possible, so you break out the espresso, the cigars, the port – whatever it takes to make it last, well past the hour when the streets have gone quiet and the neighbours’ noisy party downstairs has packed it in. These books are a state of mind.’
Marcel Berlins is as adroit at characterising the virtues, or otherwise, of a crime novel for The Times as he is at unpacking the complexities of Britain’s legal system for the Guardian. As a crime critic, he has pointed out that he has a limited amount of space, and sometimes reviews novels by omission – and he is careful not to be destructive when it comes to first-time novelists. But when Berlins shows approbation for a crime novel, attention is paid. Stieg Larsson has long been the recipient of the Berlins seal of approval – but with reservations.
‘I’ve been thinking about my reaction to Stieg Larsson,’ he said, ‘and it’s probably a truism to remark that – had he not died – an editor would have said to him, “Come on, let’s get it into manageable shape.” I was using this argument whenever I was asked about him, but apparently it’s not quite the case – the first book was subjected to a correct editing process, but to me it is still in need of tightening up, whatever its virtues – and they are many.
‘But it’s intriguing to speculate on such matters as: who is reading these books? What is it that makes him so successful? I found myself asking around – speaking to people who were not just crime fiction aficionados, but lovers of really popular novels such as the trilogy has become.
‘The plots are convoluted, but one sticks with them, and Blomkvist is of course a sympathetic character; Lisbeth doesn’t really come fully into her own until the second and third books. But what really struck me about The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was the fact that the book is rather English in aspect! The unravelling of a mystery which took place 40 years ago is a kind of tip of the hat to the classic English mystery, with a central character a journalist/detective. He’s out of work, under a cloud – actually, rather an English figure in terms of the genre. This was all of a part with my speculating as to why the English have responded so much to the books (I didn’t get round to the Americans and Europeans in my considerations). I think it’s true that – as Henning Mankell and others have proved – Sweden as a country is close in atmosphere and feeling to England (and, indeed, Scotland). It struck me forcibly when reading the early Henning Mankells – and it’s a feeling that persisted with Stieg Larsson – that one is really reading about a version of Norfolk; the slate-grey skies, and the attitude of the people. Scandinavian crime fiction is both similar and dissimilar to English crime fiction. This might explain why the hot-blooded Mediterranean writers – Andrea Camilleri, for instance – are less popular; the English are not temperamentally suited to those books in the way that they are to writers from the Nordic countries. I’ve enthused endlessly to people about how good the Italians are, but the response is often less than enthusiastic – and publishers such as Bitter Lemon who specialise in (among other things) Italian crime in translation have to make something of an effort to sell their books to English readers.
‘Blomkvist one can see appealing to the English reader,’ continues Berlins, ‘But Salander is a very different kettle of fish, and my search within myself as to the reason for her popularity produced some interesting results. For a start, she is very different from anything that English readers are accustomed to. As a rule of thumb, it might be said that English crime readers – at least the readers of such novelists as P D James and Ruth Rendell – are conservative in their tastes (that is, of course, conservative with a small ‘c’). ‘With writers such as James and Rendell, the books are essentially about the status quo – or, at least, about re-establishing the status quo. Bitter endings are not particularly popular with English readers. So it is possible to say that it is the old-fashioned style which still sells best – so why have English readers taken to Lisbeth with such enthusiasm? She’s not what we’re used to…
‘But as to listing the demerits of Stieg Larsson – well, what about the villains? They are, largely speaking, one-dimensional – look at the Russian heavies. In fact, this leads to what I consider to be the real reason for the success: the books have a certain comic strip element – Lisbeth, for instance, is not a real figure if you look at her objectively – but it is this energy which is obviously immensely appealing to readers. It’s a clever move by Larsson to make Blomkvist a believable figure by contrast, which he certainly does – that has the effect of anchoring the narrative in a kind of reality, so that readers are prepared to take on board the more outlandish elements. So my feeling was that English readers, rather than wanting to be convinced of the reality of the character – or, for that matter, pacified by her or the narrative, as much crime fiction does – were happy to embrace Lisbeth on this non-naturalistic, larger-than-life stage.
‘Having said that, most of the women I have spoken to about Salander don’t actually like her, but perhaps, to some degree she acts out female readers’ fantasies on some level.
‘In the final analysis, whatever flaws critics like myself might identify in a writer, it’s really an academic exercise, when readers decide to vote with their wallets and embrace books the way they have done with Larsson. English readers were not, for instance, put off by the socialist hero at the heart of the Millennium Trilogy.
‘Larsson is, of course, critic-proof – rather like Dan Brown. I’m not saying that Brown is the same kind of writer as Larsson – the latter is, of course, infinitely better. But the general disapproval of Dan Brown in critical circles hasn’t dented his sales one iota. Larsson, for a complicated series of almost unexplainable reasons, has touched a nerve with crime fiction readers. That is why he has broken (and is continuing to break) sales records in the genre.’
The English Lake District is the stamping ground for Martin Edwards, who wrote such Ullswater-set mysteries as The Serpent Pool, and he told me that he regarded the first Larsson book as ‘an extraordinary achievement by any standards – all the more impressive because it was Larsson’s first published novel’. ‘As with any debut, there are flaws,’ he went on, ‘but there is an abundance of riches to compensate. And one of the pleasures of the books that await detective story fans is Larsson’s occasional appreciative nods to the genre. He draws on its variety in composing his story line, and setting the tone of the narrative.
‘The first book boasts a family tree of the Vangers, and I agree with Larsson’s translator, Reg Keeland, that it’s a pity that maps of Hedeby Island which make it easier to follow details of the plot were not included. Family trees and maps were a staple of Golden Age detective fiction between the wars, and it’s fascinating to see a thoroughly modern writer such as Larsson using traditional devices to add texture to his story. More than that, the central mystery of the disappearance of Harriet Vanger is presented as an example of a classic form of detective puzzle:
“I assume that something happened to Harriet here on the island,” Blomkvist said, “and that the list of suspects consists of the finite number of people trapped here. A sort of locked-room mystery in island format?” Vanger smiled ironically.”
‘In fact, the setup of the story is really that of a “closed circle” mystery, rather than a type of “locked-room” or “impossible crime”; John Dickson Carr was a notable exponent of the latter form. But this is a quibble; what is so intriguing is that a ground-breaking book so consciously draws upon past fictions, whilst portraying the failings of modern society with unflinching realism.
‘The ironic exchange between Blomkvist and Vanger is playful, but subtler than, say, the passage in Carr’s classic mystery The Hollow Man, in which Dr Gideon Fell remarks in The Locked-Room Lecture: “We’re in a detective story, and we don’t fool the reader by pretending we’re not. Let’s not invent elaborate excuses to drag in a discussion of detective stories. Let’s candidly glory in the noblest pursuits possible to characters in a book.”
‘As the story of Harriet Vanger’s fate darkens, so do the fictional references. At risk of going “stir-crazy” in Hedeby, Blomkvist borrows two whodunits by Elizabeth George from the library. Looking around in Gottfried’s cabin, he finds more murder mysteries, some by Mickey Spillane. Later, on Midsummer Eve, he tries to unwind by embarking on Val McDermid’s The Mermaids Singing. When, a few days later, he reaches the denouement, we are told: “It was grisly.”
‘So, economically, the mood is set. Larsson’s reference to McDermid’s story of serial murder is not pointless padding. The shocking crimes that he is about to uncover are very grisly indeed.’
After ten crime novels, Russell James wrote Great British Fictional Detectives and its companion Great British Fictional Villains. He takes a characteristically dispassionate view of Larsson: ‘After an author shoots to fame it can be that people talk more about who the author is and why they are famous than about the books they wrote. So far it hasn’t been that way with Larsson – perhaps because he wrote just three books, and we can get a handle on three books; there isn’t a lifetime of writing for us to plough through.
‘Larsson’s dead, of course, so critics and fellow writers can treat him generously, since there’s nothing to fear from him. There are no more blockbusters in the pipeline to be dreaded, as any intelligent reader will dread the next Dan Brown. It seems that there is only this finite, completed trilogy – and what a perfect legacy that is. A trilogy is the perfect product, a publisher’s dream, for when a writer writes a mere three books, any one of us can go out and buy the complete oeuvre; any one of us can become an expert on the collected works.
‘The man himself, it can’t be denied, is a phenomenon: four years after he died he became the second highest selling author in the world. And yet, back in 2004, who would have guessed that he and his creation, a modernised Modesty Blaise, would achieve such heights? Not the modest and hard-working journalist, Stieg Larsson. Certainly not Mikael Blomkvist nor the far-from-modest Lisbeth Salander. Internationally famous as she is, she follows in a long but thinly populated line of sparky heroines of crime fiction. Before her came Modesty Blaise, as I say, and we remember the tough-girl heroines of McDermid, Reichs, Sharp, Duffy and Paretsky, but I suggest that these particular women, created by women, don’t carry the same sexual charge as those created by men. [Modesty was created by Peter O’Donnell.]
‘In one of the earliest forays into crime fiction, The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins gave us a tough, un-beautiful, un-retiring investigator, Marian Halcombe, to tackle the dastardly Count Fosco. Later, in the turbulent turn-of-the-century years, crime writers introduced us to the “new woman” – who rode bicycles, smoked, and talked back at men! But in the Golden Age these women retreated: Miss Marple and Lord Peter’s girlfriends were a lesser breed, and it wasn’t until Modesty that she lived again. Modesty was tough, her toughness learnt, like Ms Salander’s, in an abusive past and, like Ms Salander again, she wasn’t afraid to flaunt her sexuality or to ignore gender and tackle her target, man to man. What a frisson that was for Evening Standard readers – the same frisson that today’s readers find in Lisbeth Salander. And it really is a frisson, a wonderfully liberating thrill for avid readers of either gender, to come across a panther-like woman who prowls onstage to snarl and tense before she springs. Many of us found her, of course, too late, after Stieg was dead. But we did find her. We’ll read the trilogy, we’ll watch Lisbeth and Mikael on screen – knowing that we only have to stay with them through the trilogy. That’s just enough. They won’t stick around so long that we grow tired, nor are they here for such a short time that we don’t get hooked. They’re a duo and a trilogy. They’re perfect.
‘What would Larsson have thought, I wonder, if he’d been told – by one of those fictional clairvoyants that used to crop up in a story – that he, a successful journalist and moderately unsuccessful author, would achieve worldwide fame after he was dead? How would he have reacted if the devil himself had offered to exchange his corporeal life and soul for eternal fame? Larsson might have believed, as some religious people do, that we can all live on, and that we do not die as long as someone somewhere remembers our name. “Stieg Larsson,” the devil might have said, “many people will read you, they will hear your voice after you are dead.” Might he have settled for that? How might any writer respond to Mephistopheles? It’s enough to tempt anyone to kick the hornets’ nest.’
Christopher Fowler’s eccentric investigators Bryant & May couldn’t be more different from Larsson’s duo, but he has examined the Millennium phenomenon in some depth: ‘For me the character of Lisbeth is not the most interesting thing about Larsson’s trilogy. From the mid-1980s onward, the spiky punk hacker-heroine, tattooed, damaged and afraid to commit, has been a staple ingredient of American comics, although Larsson takes the cliché and fleshes it out beautifully. The film version of Dragon Tattoo is forced to turn Salander into a living actress, but succeeds by carefully following Larsson’s blueprint. What I most admire is the extraordinary way in which Larsson opens the narrative to include an immense cast, and we can sense that all of them have their own lives, which only intersect at the crossing-point of Blomkvist and Salander. The crime writer’s curse is coincidence – one is often driven to coincide characters and situations for the sake of plot, but Larsson avoids this by a system of not-quite-overlapping events. It’s how real life works, of course, and makes the account more believable. The result is that when he tells you what a minor character had for breakfast it doesn’t feel like a digression. Instead, it’s a way of rounding out his world-view into a complex, tangled whole. Writers who have the rare ability to do this often seem to produce trilogies, as if they can see a vast interconnected planet of stories going on behind the main plot. It’s a talent that links Elmore Leonard’s crime books to Susanna Clarke’s fantasies, and for me is the sign of a master storyteller.’
Frank Tallis writes historical crime fiction reflecting his experience as a clinical psychologist (the latest is Deadly Communion), so shows acuity in analysing the resonances that exist between psychotherapy and detection: ‘For Larsson, crimes are like symptoms and the process of detection is very similar to psychotherapy. We have to dig deep, to find the perpetrator or the traumatic memory. Larsson exploits these relationships in an inspired way. We are presented with a mystery – but embedded within it is another, and perhaps more compelling mystery: that of a violent, antisocial young woman who has been labelled psychotic and appears to have obsessive and autistic personality characteristics. At one point she is described as looking like a half-witted 15-year-old anarchist. As her resourcefulness and impressive talents are revealed, we want to know – more than anything else – the answers to questions that a psychotherapist would ask. Why is she the way she is? What motivates her? What makes her tick? We are as interested in Salander’s personal psychology as we are in the overarching plot.
‘Although Salander is given various psychiatric labels, an accurate diagnosis seems impossible. In this respect, Larsson demonstrates his liberal credentials, because, in actual fact, there is nothing “wrong” with her at all. She is not medically ill. One is reminded of stalwarts of the anti-psychiatry movement, renegades like Thomas Szasz and R D Laing, who suggested that a mind can only be sick in a metaphorical sense, and that “madness” is the only sane response to an insane world. It is unusual for a work of genre fiction to address such profound issues. They are at the very heart of the Millennium Trilogy, and provide a satisfying philosophical underpinning to a fast-paced, dramatic narrative. Few people have been able to pull this off, but Larsson succeeds with a light touch and without the usual tub-thumping piety.’
P D James and Ruth Rendell were for many years the joint holders of the title ‘Britain’s Queen of Crime’ – but for quite some time, Minette Walters has been co-opted into this august company with her remarkable series of psychologically penetrating novels. She takes the view that the principal reason Stieg Larsson has been such a global phenomenon is because he’s such an extremely accomplished writer: ‘It’s one thing to have a good idea, quite another to transpose it to the page in such a way that the setting, the characters and the plot come alive for the reader. All the best crime and thriller novels have been written by talented writers and one of the benefits of skilful prose and dialogue is that it’s easier to translate.
‘Regarding Salander… we tend to have stereotypical ideas about Swedish girls – blonde, beautiful and leggy – so Lisbeth is refreshingly unusual! You could say that the appeal of Larsson is that he paints the whole of Sweden as unusual. We’ve become used to the dour Calvinism of Henning Mankell and it was surprising to encounter the eccentric, colourful and more chaotic environment that Larsson inhabits. And his days as a crusading journalist introduced him to the true underbelly of his society, which lends real authority to his fiction.
‘I bet that Stieg’s dependence on nicotine helped him write his books. Smokers concentrate better and stay awake longer than non-smokers. I wish I’d met him. I’d have enjoyed sharing a fag outside in the cold while the clean-knickered brigade sat in their highly-antiseptic environment inside and discussed their asthma symptoms.’
Does his death at 50 explain to some degree the success of the books published posthumously?
‘Not in my opinion,’ Minette Walters says. ‘He was too good a writer. He would have triumphed anyway.’
Is he a feminist writer – or is there an element of exploitation in the books? Walters’ answer to this is less clear cut: ‘I’m not sure what feminism is any more so I can’t answer this. For me it’s always been equality between the sexes and I have no reason to believe that wasn’t Larsson’s view.
‘As for his legacy: if any future crime or thriller writer feels they can only succeed by aping Stieg Larsson then they should put their pen away now and adopt a career that does not require original thinking. The curse of any genre is that 90% of authors piggyback off the originality of the other 10%. It’s the originals like Larsson who continue to evolve and develop the art of novel writing.’
In the newspaper the Guardian, Mark Lawson, one of the UK’s leading critics and broadcasters, pointed out that on a French beach he had visited, almost every sunbather of every nationality was reading one of Larsson’s novels in the numerous translations: ‘This phenomenon is improbable, given the project’s many obstacles,’ he goes on. ‘The author died before the first book even went through the editorial process and, in most such cases, readers are left with a tantalising sense of the polish further drafts might have provided. And while Swedish crime fiction already had a high reputation – through the Wallander novels of Henning Mankell – Larsson has achieved a global level of acclaim and sales which is very unusual for a story that is not originally written in English.’
Lawson has come up with an intriguing analysis of the reasons why the books have done so well: ‘My theory for the phenomenon is that Larsson took a genre which has generally sold to men – thrillers turning on technology and conspiracies – and feminised it through a highly unusual central character: Lisbeth Salander, who combines the brain of Sherlock Holmes with the martial arts skills of Lara Croft. It’s also likely that the history of Sweden – where an experiment in liberal government was compromised by violence and corruption – resonates with readers in other countries. And the author’s sudden death – although family and fans accept that he was killed by smoking rather than a smoking gun – adds to the sense that the novels contain urgent and dangerous truths.
‘And yet perhaps the books’ triumph should not have been so great a surprise. It is an oddity of Swedish culture that a country often easily ignored suddenly throws up an example in a certain field – Abba, Björn Borg, Volvo – which proves to be a world-beater. Larsson is the latest example.
‘The sadness is that the question which always underlies a reader’s relationship with a favoured author – what will they write next? – cannot apply here, although suggestions that Larsson’s laptop may have contained outlines and notes for many more books are one possible reason why his estate has been so bitterly contested.’
Yrsa Sigurdardóttir is the Icelandic author of the Thora series. With her knowledge of both the Nordic countries and the UK, how different does she feel the response has been to the Larsson phenomenon in the two countries? She says: ‘The success was probably more readily achieved in Scandinavia, Sweden particularly, as these countries are Larsson’s home base in the case of Sweden, and his backyard with regards to the others. But it’s a remarkable achievement where the rest of the world is concerned.
‘It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what makes the Millennium Trilogy so mesmerising… but I believe it has a lot to do with the feeling of unfairness evoked, followed by justice being served, in an often colourful manner.
‘Salander is the quintessential heroine, bent but not broken, a unique fictional character that one cannot help but admire despite her socially irresponsible antics. Her background is tragic and in a more “traditional” novel she would spiral downwards, and most likely come to a heartbreaking end. Instead we are introduced to a spirit that must at times repress the urge to lunge out, biding her time to eke out what she considers the wicked deserve. Her unusual “look” is appealing to me – and I can gauge my drinking with the recurring notion that it would be a great idea to have my nose pierced with a ring in the middle like a bull, telling me it is time to stop. It does show that somewhere deep inside me I have a fascination and respect for those who have the guts to go ahead with such things…
‘Larsson was not known at all in Iceland before the Millennium books, and possibly this also applies to the other Nordic countries, aside from Sweden. News of fringe politics does not carry over borders.’
And his death?
‘The idea that he was assassinated is not one that has many followers although there are always those that believe in conspiracies. I am really tempted to join their ranks, being a chain-smoking workaholic.’
There is no question that Håkan Nesser – who lives both in London and his native Sweden – is comfortably one of the most adroit practitioners of the Nordic crime novel. He’s a man of immense good humour – but possesses a firing-on-all-cylinders readiness to tell it exactly as he sees it: ‘People seem to love Stieg’s books everywhere, but the worldwide enthusiasm may have more to do with the monotheism connected with all kinds of hype. Everybody reads the same books these days, unfortunately – and seems to need to follow this herd instinct.
‘Salander is the key to the success of the Stieg Larsson books, of course. Well, you’ve got a super-smart underdog, beaten by society, but invincible… it’s a formula that’s worked before, hasn’t it? There is no such thing as a Swedish way of writing crime fiction; that can be said with certainty. My writing differs totally from Stieg’s; he’s a political action writer with a lot of pathos, and I like his books very much, but the Swedish crime fiction boom is a market phenomenon, not a stylistic confluence.
‘Before the crime novels, Stieg was known only to those with an eye on the stuff Expo worked with, i.e. neo-Nazis etc. As to his death… well, he died from smoking too much and working too much – there’s absolutely no doubt about that. Other theories are just bullshit journalism.
‘The first film of his books was very well received. The second one had a cooler reception – in fact, I’ve only seen the second one, and I’m afraid it was very bad. Everything was reduced and simplified to action and violence. Can anyone fill his shoes? Frankly, I’m simply not interested. I’m responsible for my own writing, and that’s enough. A Swedish publishing house has been trying to hype a pen-name writer, and perhaps they have succeeded; he was bought by a number of countries at a book fair last April. The problem is that the book is an unbelievable concoction of speculative shit.’
Henry Sutton, the literary editor of the Daily Mirror, is also an accomplished novelist (his most recent book is Get Me Out of Here), and is working in the area of crime fiction in writing a continuation of R D Wingfield’s Inspector Frost novels. He has a slightly unusual take on the Millennium Trilogy: ‘Actually, it’s in my nature to steer clear of phenomenally popular novels, but one really did have to pay attention in this case. Initially, I have to say, I don’t think the book has been brilliantly published in this country. I don’t think his publishers capitalised on who he was and the fact that the book was already doing supremely well around the world – I think it was a missed trick there. But you can’t argue with the subsequent success of the book. And while we are talking about reservations, I have to say that I did find some of the translations of the books a little clunky – The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest, for instance.
‘There are other problems with any kind of translated fiction, but I would have thought it was more feasible to render a translation of a popular genre – such as crime fiction – so that it is more in tune with the original. The same might be said of literary fiction as well, but crime fiction has certain common denominators, even the more innovative examples, which can be accessed in a good translation.
‘As for the reasons for the success of books, I’m not sure I agree with the received wisdom that the author’s early death is such a major factor in the acclaim. Actually, his death was a tragedy. The books might even have done better had he been alive – he would have been around to promote them, to talk about them – and there would have been a stronger sense of where these books were coming from. In the final analysis, of course, the author really shouldn’t matter. The books themselves should stand up, without the need to know anything about their creator – and that’s certainly the case with Larsson. It’s something of a modern phenomenon, I think, this need to relate the author to his books. This process of scrutinising and examining the author’s life to illuminate the books – well, I’m not convinced that it’s always particularly helpful.
‘Of course in Larsson’s case, he was a journalist – and a very considerable journalist, at that – and the correlation between his work as a journalist and his fiction can’t be ignored; of course, there are parallels and echoes. There are his concerns: the feminist issues, the socialist issues and his writing on the extreme Right. Knowing all that, it’s hard to disassociate it from the character of Blomkvist in the books – of course, anybody who knows the facts will see the parallels. But this desire to examine the life of the writer – whether it’s J K Rowling, Dan Brown or Ian Rankin – well, I understand the impulse, but I’m not really sure that it’s illuminating. When I write my own novels, I am asked who a particular character is based on, and although all my characters are, I suppose, extrapolations of fragments of my personality, in the final analysis that doesn’t matter – they have to work as discrete entities.
‘As for the fact that one of the central characters, Mikael Blomkvist, is clearly a surrogate for Larsson himself – well, I think that’s mainly of academic interest. What interests me about Blomkvist – and what amuses me – is that I find him almost ludicrously Scandinavian! The frosty exterior which conceals a warm interior; that studied detachment which is so much a part of his whole rationale – and the fact that he’s coming from this morally unimpeachable place.’
Thinking laterally, how would Sutton have reacted to the first book had it been put out under its original title Men Who Hate Women, and promoted as a literary title rather than a crime novel? Could the book have functioned with this other identity? After all, much literary fiction has a healthy dose of crime these days.
‘I really don’t think that the first book could have been sold as a literary novel. Stieg Larsson knew exactly what he was doing. He knew how to get narrative functioning, he knew about the form: short, episodic chapters – and he knew how to shift from scene to scene in a kind of cinematic fashion. And the use of P.O.V. – he knew how to do all the classic stuff; it is as if he’d read the manual, and I don’t mean that in any dismissive sense. But it’s not great literary fiction.
‘In the final analysis, it’s Lisbeth who is really the engine of the books. In fact, the aspect of the books that Blomkvist represents is really a little old-fashioned. All the surrounding accoutrements are the new and cutting-edge – and Lisbeth really is a new figure – but there’s nothing particularly new in the narrative in relation to Blomkvist. If Larsson is doing something new, it really does relate to the utilisation of cyberspace for the narrative, which he clearly knew about, and that is all really concerned with his heroine. And that notion that science fiction at some point is indistinguishable from magic – well, to a degree, it’s true of Lisbeth, whose use of cyberspace gives her this astonishing prescience.’
And Larsson’s relationship to his Scandinavian contemporaries and predecessors?
‘Oh, he’s undoubtedly part of that tradition. And I go back to that suggestion of a slightly chilly exterior, but an underlying moral warmth. I suppose you could say that about the English, which might account for the incredible enthusiasm with which the books are being received in this country. But we are different as nations – for a start, the English are much more ready to moan about things – that’s certainly true. Scandinavians just get on with it. Of course, the yardstick by which I judge all Scandinavian crime fiction is the marvellous Martin Beck series by Sjöwall and Wahlöö. There are ten perfect books, with not a wasted word – they are all exactly as long as they need to be. And that was crusading stuff, too, in the form of a socialist conscience – you could say they were progenitors of Stieg Larsson, although he moves much further away from realism.
‘I’m not worried by something which is problematical for some readers – the fact that, despite Larsson’s feminist credentials, the books are almost pornographically violent and extreme in every sense. And it would appear the majority of his women readers are not worried by this fact. This is striking; apart from anything else, Larsson has a massive female readership. But then so does crime fiction in general, doesn’t it? And, of course, pornography is, to some extent, in the eye of the beholder. I’m not sure quite why Larsson wrote the way he did in this area – was it simply commercial imperatives? Or did he think about the effect of this approach – and was fully aware that he would have us musing about exactly where he was coming from in writing about these extremes of sexuality?’
The prize-winning Johan Theorin (whose Echoes from the Dead is another of the seemingly inexhaustible stream of exemplary Nordic crime novels) has reservations about Stieg Larsson – but of a different order from those of Lauren Milne-Henderson. Speaking to him in Göteborg, I found that the Millennium Trilogy is the source of much debate in Sweden.
‘I never knew Stieg Larsson,’ said Theorin, ‘but before his novels were published I had noticed his name for many years, since he was working as a journalist and illustrator for the largest news agency in Sweden, called TT, which sent out news articles to the newspapers were I was working. Larsson is a very common name in Sweden, but when his name appeared as a by-line I noticed it because his first name was spelt just like a mystery writer called Stieg Trenter, who wrote stories about Stockholm in the 1950s and 1960s. [Usually, the Swedish name Stig is spelled without an ‘e’, as was Larsson’s when he was born, but he changed it to Stieg to avoid confusion with another author called Stig Larsson.]
‘The early death of Larsson was of course very tragic, and his friends and family have my deep sympathies. He was an admirable and brave journalist who worked for Expo and Searchlight and wrote a ground-breaking book about Swedish neo-Nazi groups, and his commitment would certainly be needed today when these groups have changed their party name, put on a suit and a tie and are ready to get into the Swedish parliament.
‘When it comes to the novels of Stieg Larsson, my Swedish friends and I have had big debates about whether they are recommendable or not. I think they are gripping and entertaining as thrillers, but I do have issues with them. They are a bit too long and detailed and preoccupied with computers, for my taste. More importantly, I think their world view is grim and callous, which is a problem I have with many modern thrillers. The world is portrayed as a battleground where there are evil enemies who have to be attacked and destroyed without mercy. I think we have had too many extremists and world leaders preaching that gospel to us lately – we don’t need it in our books as well.
‘And as for the routine promiscuity which Blomkvist and the women around him practise, please spare me. I’ve heard that the sex is something Stieg Larsson added to the plot to make it more commercial, but I wish he hadn’t. For the last 40 years, after a Swedish film called I Am Curious (Yellow) became an unexpected hit in the US, we Swedes have had to live with a wanton reputation. We have tried to persuade Americans that Swedes don’t have casual sex any more than anyone else in the world, and just as I think they were starting to believe us, along comes Mikael Blomkvist who routinely beds female colleagues in his stride…’
In some ways, she could be said to be ‘The Woman Behind the Man Behind the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’. Val McDermid, one of the UK’s most accomplished crime writers, is one of the authors name-checked in Larsson’s first novel, and several of the elements that characterise her best-selling crime fiction may be found in the Swedish writer’s work – notably in the beleaguered-but-capable female protagonist obliged to confront the darkest extremes of human behaviour, and graphically described scenes of sexuality and violence. Ironically, McDermid has been on the receiving end of some flak for this element of her work herself, unlike many a male practitioner. There is, of course, the element of political commitment which both writers share, and which is the motivating force in the books. To her pleasure and surprise, McDermid says that when reading Dragon Tattoo she noticed that Blomkvist’s reading progress in the book is from Sue Grafton through Sara Paretsky to McDermid’s own work – reflecting, in some way, the darkening tone of the book – as might be seen in the progression of the work of these three best-selling women crime novelists.
‘I know it’s been said that I was an inspiration for Stieg Larsson,’ says McDermid, ‘in fact several people have pointed that out to me. It’s a flattering idea, but I don’t really want to take credit for it. After all, there are only so many ideas out there, and all crime writers are going to end up dealing in that lingua franca of the genre, with all its overlappings. He may have read my books, but then he undoubtedly read a lot of other authors, too. After all, he had an encyclopaedic knowledge of the genre (and not just the crime genre – he knew as much about science fiction as about crime fiction).
‘My book A Place of Execution, the book that people routinely compare to Larsson, for instance, has been described as having been inspired by Murder on the Orient Express, but familiar as I am with that and with the entire Christie canon, I think I can safely say that that was not the case. As I said, there are only so many ideas, and the fact that there is a congruence between A Place of Execution and Dragon Tattoo doesn’t mean that he ripped me off – we’re just moving in the same territory, as writers often do.
‘It’s interesting to me that women like myself have been writing edgy, conflicted, complex and strong female characters for quite some time – often with a feminist slant. But generally speaking, and I know there are exceptions, men do not read crime fiction written by women. So it’s salutary that it took a male writer – Stieg Larsson – to move this concept onto a whole new level, in terms of book sales and popularity. I’m not saying I resent it – the fact that he is read by both men and women accounts for the phenomenal popularity – but it is instructive. When a man like Larsson writes a book dealing with misogyny (it’s interesting that the original Swedish title of Dragon Tattoo was Men Who Hate Women) everybody suddenly exclaims “Bloody hell! There’s misogyny out there!”
‘One of the reasons for his popularity – and it’s definitely part of his achievement – is the fact that in several ways, he broke the rules. Certainly in terms of the creation of a totally original protagonist in Lisbeth. Those of us who toil in the crime fiction field usually don’t set out to break the rules – my agenda is simply to tell the story which is in my head and if it sometimes breaks the rules, well, that’s fine, isn’t it? When The Wire in the Blood came out, people said you can’t have a serial killer whose identity is announced on page 2, and now everybody is doing it! Similarly, Stieg will no doubt be the progenitor of a whole legion of socially challenged (but brilliant) young women heroines.’
Val McDermid, of course, is not the only author who might be said to have influenced Stieg Larsson. There is the American writer Sara Paretsky, also name-checked alongside McDermid in the first book. And as well as being an influence on Larsson, Paretsky certainly had a powerful effect on the author of A Place of Exclusion.
‘There is no question that Sara Paretsky was an important ground-breaker for many writers such as myself,’ said McDermid, ‘Although we ended up in different places. Paretsky’s protagonist, V I Warshawski, was a strong and capable woman, but was out in the world living out certain feminist values, not living in some little feminist ghetto. She had intelligence, independence and bravery – and a certain foolhardiness (obviously characteristics that also belong to Lisbeth Salander).’
Of course, it could be argued that Larsson is able to deal with some very tricky subject material for a male writer because of his impeccably established feminist credentials – though there are those who have accused him of being somewhat gloating in his treatment of sexual violence.
‘I’ve been accused of being gloating in such matters,’ said McDermid, ‘And I’ve been called a misogynist too! But frankly, even a cursory reading of both Stieg’s books and mine will show that is hardly a justified accusation.’
While McDermid is clearly an admirer, does she regard the three books as a complete unified achievement?
‘I think the first one is really interesting – a really striking book. He’s drawn widely upon elements from right across the genre, and synthesised those elements beautifully. He understands the elements of the genre totally, but he is drawn into those elements and interesting positions on feminism and obviously a political position which is left-of-centre and anti-corporatism, as well as, of course, men who hate women. In this regard, I would draw in Sara Paretsky’s whole oeuvre, where those elements are crucial plot mechanisms. But it’s particularly intriguing to have a male perspective on misogyny – after all, with the best will in the world, a woman will have a certain take on this which will be different from a man, and he is able to articulate this position with great clarity and feeling. As I said, I think that first book is beautifully achieved, but I must admit to having more reservations regarding the second book, The Girl Who Played with Fire, which I do feel rather sags in the middle and really is in need of a good edit. For instance, when the superhuman half-brother comes in, alarm bells start ringing. For me, this is similar to the point at which Patricia Cornwell started to go off the rails, introducing a werewolf. A guy suffering from hirsutism! You can’t allow the reader to suddenly feel “Come on, this is silly!” It does hurt the book. Larsson never loses the narrative grasp, but for me it’s problematical.
‘And then we get to the third book, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest, and he is firmly back on track. This one has a really strong and interesting idea about the individual against the state, and it’s particularly interesting for those of us in Britain who had always regarded Sweden as a bastion of liberalism in the best possible sense – it’s accordingly more shocking for us to think that the conspiracy like the one described in the book could be possible in Sweden. To be honest, though, I do feel that there are elements in this book – as with its predecessor – which are not really plausible: for instance, the notion that Salander could be controlling events from her hospital bed; for all that we are prepared to accept about her, that really strains credulity.
‘She almost becomes a kind of Moriarty figure, although admittedly you don’t think such things at the time of reading. I know for a fact that much that she does in the technological sense is actually within the realms of possibility, but Larsson doesn’t really quite get us to buy it. When we are enjoying a writer, as here, we don’t need much persuasion to take on board a lot of very fairly outrageous premises, but we do have to be given the basic building blocks. In Ian Rankin’s novel The Complaints, for instance, there is a great deal about surveillance, but Ian allows us to accept everything in the book that he talks about. He gives us enough information and detail to allow us to buy everything we read about. I’m not saying that Stieg Larsson doesn’t do that – he’s a very persuasive writer – but we are obliged to go some distance with him to take on board premises that he throws at us.
‘Frankly, I’m damned sure that if he had lived he would have done some pretty judicious editing himself on the books – after all, he was a respected journalist who knew precisely how to get a point across with concision in his articles.’
But does the author always know what’s best for his own work? After all, if Larsson had lived he might, for instance, have insisted that his original Swedish title, Men who Hate Women, would have to be used in translated editions (had he had the power to insist on such a thing). And surely the three English language titles beginning with the words ‘The Girl…’ are one of the things that so grasped the public imagination? Larsson’s original title is surely redolent of something like a Marilyn French book of the 1970s, when feminism was in its most combative and male-hostile period?
‘Yes, it’s a point worth considering,’ Val McDermid continued. ‘There is no question that the renaming of the books was a masterstroke. But then there was another masterstroke in Larsson’s recipe for success, and it’s a rather macabre one: Stieg Larsson dying at 50, before any of his books were published. It is unquestionably true that this sad waste of a life is something that caught the consciousness of readers. And it’s one of the first things that people talk about when recommending the books to others – sometimes at the same time as extolling their virtues. It’s not a career move that I can say has appealed to me, but it undeniably adds to people’s legends. From Mozart to James Dean and Marilyn Monroe – those who died relatively young will always have us speculating what else they might have achieved had they lived. By all accounts, Larsson planned a ten-book sequence – and it’s intriguing to think how he might have developed the characters. Having said that, the trilogy – which is what it ended up being – works very well as a trilogy, and who’s to say that he might not have lost the elements that make the first three books work so well?
‘I suppose I’m luckier than Stieg; what forced me to start looking at my mortality was being diagnosed with osteoarthritis in my knees at the age of 38. I realised I was not invincible, and that unless I changed the way I was living, I was not going to make old bones. By all accounts, Stieg never had that reckoning with himself. Having been a journalist myself, I know that as a profession we’re inclined to be careless of our health. That’s not to say that novelists can’t behave in a similar fashion – Michael Dibdin, who wrote such wonderful crime novels, clearly didn’t look after himself, and died at a relatively young age. It’s hard not to be annoyed at talented people who are spendthrift of their health – Dibdin, like Larsson, probably had a lot of good books in him which he was never to write.
‘There is, of course, another element that one cannot forget where Larsson was concerned: the political. It’s something else that we have in common, apart from the kind of books we’ve both written – I was and am very much a political animal, though perhaps I was more a political pragmatist than Stieg was.
‘Like him I was on the fringes of politics for quite a long time – at university I was part of the student and trade union movements. But as I said, I was always on the pragmatist side rather than the theoretical side. My overriding impulse was always: what can we achieve? What practical thing can we do to actually make people’s lives better? I’m not sure that this was true of the circles Stieg moved in, but I’ve always found the trouble with the radical Left was that the women were still expected to make the tea. That’s not to say that everyone would not have espoused feminist values, it was just lower down on the agenda: “We’ll get to doing things for women when the important things are done…”
‘On the other hand, Stieg was very much concerned with attitudes to women in his magazine articles; he’d talk about how (for instance) the far Right would say “feminism was destroying Christianity” – to which I’d say, “Bring it on! What’s the problem?” But seriously, it was perfectly obvious that improving the treatment of women in society was an absolutely crucial tenet for him.
‘One could say that his change of career from a journalist to novelist – although he didn’t live to see the second career flourish – was in some ways a very apposite move. Fiction possibly changes lives more than journalism because of the way it sucks you in emotionally. After all, people who read right-wing newspapers in the UK such as the Daily Mail are having their prejudices and attitudes confirmed – that’s the raison d’être of a paper like that (as it is, I suppose, of left-wing papers such as the Guardian). The opinions of readers are confirmed and justified on a day-to-day basis – what they already believe. Whatever our viewpoint may be, I think many of us read novels in a more open state, with political decision-making kept somewhat at bay. And if a good novelist can spring a provocative idea on the reader – within the context of a gripping narrative – it is just possible that attitudes can be changed, or at least confronted. Look, for instance, at how many crime readers – myself included – avidly read the novels of P D James and Ruth Rendell, whose social politics are totally different (in Parliament, they sit on opposite sides of the House).
‘And if Stieg and I are political writers, that doesn’t necessarily mean that we would alienate readers of other, different political persuasions – at least not in the way that political writing in a newspaper would. If you’re about to draw readers into a novel, and you say something nice about something they disapprove of, it doesn’t mean that they will stop reading. When I wrote A Darker Domain, which dealt with the very divisive miners’ strike in Britain in the 1970s, there were people coming up to me in the south of England who were saying “I had no idea things were so bad in the mining communities”. And I didn’t create a sentimental vision of the miners, I think I painted a warts-and-all picture. For instance, I was very critical of the miners’ leaders – you could paraphrase the famous observation about “lions being led by donkeys”.
‘Important issues can be discussed in the context of the novel – and the novelist can give you all sides of an argument, along with key insights. And to some degree, I think that is one of the things that Stieg Larsson does in his books – he grants us an insight into a society that we think we know – but really have an incomplete view of.
‘What really intrigues me is: where was he coming from? I would have loved to talk to him about so many things – something, of course, I can’t do now. Often when you find writers who feel almost obsessively about certain issues, there is something about childhood which has provoked or formed that attitude. Stieg lived with his grandparents as a child, for instance, until he was nine years old – that would have affected me, and I would love to talk to him about what he took from that – what his response was as a child, then as an adult. And feminism, of course – I know that there was a lot of suspicion in the women’s movement about men who were sympathetic, and who hung around with women. Rather than being applauded, the response sometimes was “Is this the only way you can get laid?”
‘Regarding the moment in Stieg Larsson’s life when he became the passionate feminist he was, I’m reminded of something involving one of the great crime writers of the past, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. There was an incident that changed the way he looked at the world. When he was a war correspondent during the First World War, he went with Rebecca West to a factory in the west of Scotland where they made cordite – in fact the factory was nine miles long, the biggest factory of its kind in the world. Most of the factory workers were of necessity women, as so many of the men were at the front. And seeing women working under often hazardous conditions, and being such a key part of the war effort, he said decisively “Women should get the vote. They have a perfect right to say what’s what when peace comes.” In fact, that is the precise point at which Conan Doyle became a feminist.
‘Of course, however radical you think yourself (and I’m sure that Stieg Larsson, like me, would like to think that he would always be an anti-establishment figure) the danger is actually about becoming just the opposite – something, of course, that he never had time to do.’