The Afterlife of Stieg Larsson

Above - Stieg Larsson’s brother, Joakim, left, and their father, Erland, in their office in Umea, Sweden. Photo Lars Tunbjork for The New York Times

Story by Charles McGrath
Published: May 17, 2010, New York Times


The third volume in Stieg Larsson’s immensely successful Millennium trilogy, “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest,” finally goes on sale here this month. Except for “Harry Potter,” Americans haven’t been so eager for a book since the early 1840s, when they thronged the docks in New York, hailing incoming ships for news of Little Nell in Charles Dickens’s “Old Curiosity Shop.” That was before Amazon. This time, particularly impatient readers simply paid a premium and ordered the new book from England, where it came out months ago (though with the apostrophe in a different place, making the “Hornet” plural).
   
Knopf, Larsson’s American publisher, has already printed 750,000 copies of “Hornet’s Nest.” It will almost certainly soar to the top of the best-seller lists, where the previous volumes, best sellers in hardback, recently occupied the top two paperback slots. What’s unusual is that unlike some other recent publishing juggernauts — the Dan Brown books, say, or Khaled Hosseini’s “Kite Runner” — the Millennium novels are not American in origin and were huge best sellers in Europe before most Americans got wind of them. Sonny Mehta, the publisher and editor in chief of Knopf, who bought the books for what he says now seems like a “very modest sum,” even worried that they might not catch on here. “I had nightmares that we would be the only country where the books didn’t work,” he says.

The novels come from Sweden, of all places, where the first one was published in 2005 and the next two over the following couple of years. They’re crime thrillers about a journalist named Mikael Blomkvist, who works for the magazine Millennium, and his sometime partner Lisbeth Salander, a startling and strangely appealing character who is a tattooed and pierced, bisexual computer hacker. Together this improbable pair solve mysteries involving spectacularly corrupt businessmen and politicians, sex traffickers, bent cops, spineless journalists, biker gangs and meth heads. In fact, not the least of the attractions of the books for American readers is that they introduce us to a Sweden that is vastly different from the bleak, repressed, guilt-ridden images we see in Ingmar Bergman movies and from the design-loving Socialist paradise we imagine whenever we visit Ikea. It’s a country that turns out to be a lot like our own.

The plot of “Hornet’s Nest,” which involves a rogue, top-secret organization within the Swedish government, has elements of a John le Carré spy thriller. Like the other two Millennium books, it also has an outspoken feminist subtext, hardly a typical feature of crime novels. (In Swedish, the first volume, the one we know as “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” has the grim, nonfiction-sounding title “Man Som Hatar Kvinnor,” or “Men Who Hate Women.” In France, for some reason, it’s “Les Hommes Qui n’Aimaient pas les Femmes,” or “Men Who Didn’t Love Women,” which sounds like a very different book altogether.) But in Sweden the books and their author — who died in an untimely fashion that some conspiracy theorists persist in calling an assassination — have lately become the center of another sort of story, the kind of thing August Strindberg might have written, full of intense, opinionated Swedish characters entwined in a saga involving envy, resentment, a contested legacy and a mysterious manuscript. At least one skeptic has even questioned how Larsson, a middle-aged man with no history of writing crime fiction, and seemingly no flair for it, could have written the Millennium books in the first place.

Larsson (right) died in November 2004 — at age 50 — before any of the novels were published and with little clue to just how successful they would be. Like Blomkvist, he was a journalist, well known in certain circles for his campaign against right-wing extremism in Sweden, but hardly a household name. “To introduce a brand-new crime novelist like this, someone who is unknown, our goal was to sell 20,000 copies, but we thought 10,000 would be marvelous,” Eva Gedin, Larsson’s editor at the Swedish publishing house Norstedts, told me recently. “You could never imagine that the books would do so well.”

Larsson began “Dragon Tattoo” while on vacation in the summer of 2002, thinking of it as a kind of pension fund for himself and Eva Gabrielsson, the woman he lived with. He actually had a series of 10 books in mind, she says. The money from the first three would go to them, they figured, and the rest they would give to charity. Remarkably, he displayed none of the anxiety and impatience typical of first-time novelists and finished two entire books and most of a third before he submitted any of them to a publisher. He considered all three novels a single text and at one point wanted to number the chapters of the second and third volumes consecutively. Gedin says that Larsson never seemed in any doubt about their worth.

His was not a view widely shared. Mikael Ekman, a friend and protégé of Larsson’s who collaborated with him on a nonfiction book, recalls sitting with Larsson one night in 2001. “We were drinking a little too much whiskey,” he told me, “and Stieg started talking about what he’d do when he was too old to work anymore. He said, ‘I will write a couple of books and become a millionaire.’ I laughed at him. I thought he was crazy.”
Charles McGrath's full  fascinating story at NYT.

And a review of the title also from the NYT.