Swedish author Stieg Larsson's crime thrillers have built an enthusiastic worldwide audience, selling more than 35 billion copies to date. The anticipation leading up to the recent release of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, the third in his Millennium Trilogy, is impressive. In fact, only the readers of Charles Dickens and J. K. Rowling pass him in clamoring for sequels.
Many readers credit the chemistry between Larsson's protagonists for propelling his narratives. Larsson's two main characters are a womanizing journalist, Mikael Blomkvist, and his tattooed, computer hacker sidekick, Lisbeth Salander. In Larsson's first best-seller The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, published in Sweden in 2005, we meet Blomkvist, a divorced thirty-something with an estranged teenage daughter. He works for a Swedish magazine called Millennium and faces jail time for libeling a corporate executive. While this smart and articulate journalist will do his time, he will not give up on his quest to clear his good name. Salander, on the other hand, is harder to figure out. Clearly, she has serious emotional baggage. She rarely speaks and sulks around like a skittish feline.
The plot is set in motion when Hendrik Vanger, a corporate executive, hires Blomkvist to write a biography of his family and their business. He hooks Blomkvist by telling him he has the goods on Hans-Erik Wennerstrom, the corrupt billionaire who brought the journalist to trial. However, the family biography is only the pretext for a more important assignment. Vanger wants Blomkvist to investigate the forty-year-old missing person case of his favorite niece. The uncle comments clumsily, "Harriet was the apple of my eye….She had both morals and backbone."
Enter Salander, the Goth freelance hacker, who won't let legalities stand in the way of a good computer find. Trouble is, she can barely grunt a full sentence–even during a job interview. Through a memorable introduction, however, Blomkvist realizes she's perfect for the Vanger assignment. And Larsson's "Nordic noir" plot is off and running.
Together, the dynamic duo travel to city and countryside attempting to break open the case. And the plot has many thematic threads–corporate greed, serious family dysfunction, sexual perversity, and murder are just a few of the themes/sins explored. Larsson keeps his reader turning the pages well into the night with his plot hooks and foreshadowing. For instance, he writes at the close of one chapter: "People always have secrets. It's just a matter of finding out what they are."
But why has this series captured the imagination of so many readers? Frankly, I'm still scratching my head. Certainly, Larsson deserves credit for mapping out complicated plots. He also offers a wealth of details on themes ranging from the inner workings of a major corporation, to the beauty of small town Swedish life. He also builds suspense by sketching a variety of colorful secondary characters and suspects.
And, in one sense, he delivers in the end, bringing all the threads together. (I would love to see the outline for his first book.) More impressive, Larsson wrote all three manuscripts of the Millennium Trilogy before submitting anything to a publisher. Yet, this reader is more than ambivalent about his first novel, and I don't plan to finish the trilogy. Life is too short. Just do the math. An average reader can comprehend fifty pages an hour. That means I have spent more than twelve hours in Larsson's world already finishing his six-hundred-plus-page first novel. And that fictional world lacked a great deal. The novel was almost entirely plot driven. His characters are not sufficiently developed. They don't grow or change much. And I didn't feel I understood what motivated them.
Then there is Larsson's literary style–or lack of it. The writing is uninspired and at times downright clunky. Devotees of these works blame the translation from Swedish to English. I'm not so sure. Some sentences were so bad, I couldn't resist underlining them and adding exclamation points in the margins. For example, "You didn't have to be a rocket scientist to see that these events were somehow related." Even if this cliché was overlooked in Larsson's revising, where was his editor?
Most importantly, I did not feel I trusted the author. Larsson introduces provocative subjects but fails to give them the weight they deserve. For instance, each major section begins with a shocking statistic about how badly women are treated in Sweden. "Forty-six percent of the women in Sweden have been subjected to violence by a man," or "Thirteen percent of women in Sweden have been subjected to aggravated sexual assault outside of a sexual relationship." Yet these alarming statistics seem to be exploited to create several darkly kinky episodes that shock or repulse without explaining or educating.
Reading about the author makes me expect better. By day, Larsson worked as the editor of Expo, a leading anti-right-wing extremist publication in Sweden. His convictions ran deep and enraged certain political groups to the point that he received death threats. For this reason, you might imagine his novels to offer political profundity. You would be wrong. Even the references to Nazism give little context or illumination.
Stieg Larsson reportedly bragged to a friend, while drinking too much whiskey, that he would write a couple of books and become a millionaire. His novels consequently include all the bells and whistles of a commercial success–though not a literary one. Tragically, Larsson died of a heart attack in 2005 at age fifty. He will not have the opportunity to set his sights higher or enjoy his millions.
