A Scandinavian Hit Sets Publishers Seeking More
By Julie Bosman
New York Times : June 15, 2010

Powell’s Books in Portland, Ore., groups other Scandinavian mysteries with the Stieg Larsson
Photo -Mike Davis for The New York Times

Camilla Lackberg has written seven blockbuster novels in her native Swedish but, until now, no one bothered to translate and publish any of them in the United States.
And she has a tattooed, secretive, bisexual computer hacker named Lisbeth Salander to thank for it.

Publishers and booksellers are in a rush to find more Nordic noir to follow Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy, known for the indelible characters of Ms. Salander and the investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist. The books have become a publishing phenomenon, selling 6 million copies in the United States and 35 million copies worldwide — nearly four times the population of Sweden. The third and final book in the series, “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest,” was published last month in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf and instantly became the must-read book of the summer.

But Mr. Larsson died in 2004 at the age of 50; the series is seemingly at an end just at the moment when the public’s appetite for Mr. Larsson’s brand of Scandinavian mayhem is at its peak. (An unfinished fourth manuscript may extend the series.)

“The question is, after everybody reads ‘Hornet’s Nest,’ what are they going to do?” said Stan Hynds, a book buyer at Northshire Bookstore in Manchester Center, Vt. “I’ve got this funny feeling that every publisher is going to come out with the next Stieg Larsson.”

Well, maybe not every publisher — but a lot of them.
Scandinavian crime fiction has been popular among serious mystery readers for decades, but even best-selling novelists like Henning Mankell (pic left - Bertil Ericson) are not yet widely known in the United States.
Julie Bosman's full piece at NYT.