Stockholm confidential

• Last Updated: October 22. 2009 2:58PM UAE / October 22. 2009 10:58AM GMT

Larsson’s characters solve murders among rustic summer houses on Stockholm’s archipelago.

Stieg Larsson’s smash hit crime novels – all published after his death – seed familiar mystery conventions in distinctly Swedish soil. Willing Davidson reads the gruesome final installment of his Millennium Trilogy.

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest
Stieg Larsson
MacLehose Press
Dh114

The Swedish title of the first book of Stieg Larsson’s blindingly successful posthumous crime trilogy translates as “Men Who Hate Women”. English language publishers chose the anodyne The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, which may have been wise. Why give away the series’ guiding principle in the title? The books are situated in different facets of the Swedish welfare state’s institutions – its industry, its security forces, its immigration bureaucracy – but as the crusading journalist Mikael Blomkvist, one of the novels’ two protagonists, earnestly states: “This story is not primarily about spies and secret government agencies; it’s about violence against women, and the men who enable it.” It’s also about reading about violence against women, an ambiguous act that seems, given the tendency of Swedes to revel in the depredations of others, appropriate to the trilogy’s setting.

The outlines of Larsson’s biography are now quite familiar: a journalist and editor who founded an anti-racist investigative magazine, Expo, he wrote what we now know as the Millennium Trilogy in his free time, hoping the books might pay for his retirement. At his death in 2004 of myocardial infarction, Larsson left three completed novels, an unfinished fourth, and synopses for two more. He is now the most widely read novelist in Europe; in 2008 only Khaled Hosseini (of Kite Runner fame) sold more novels worldwide. Stockholm’s English-language newspaper, The Local, reports that, had he lived, Larsson would now be $13.3 million (Dh48.8m) richer. He left no valid will (one has been exhumed, from 1977, that leaves everything to the Communist party, but it was never witnessed) and so everything has gone to his father and brother. This is the source of an unfortunate irony: in Sweden, marriage is often viewed as a formality – domestic partners, or sambor, partake in all the privileges of marriage, except, it seems, that of inheritance. Larsson had a long-time partner, Eva Gabrielsson, who now shares the Communists’ fate.

Readers inherit the novels, which are mostly sufficient reward, though the newest, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest, is not the equal of the first two. While The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played with Fire read like discrete stories whose characters evolved and surprised, Larsson’s latest feels constrained by what has been previously set in motion. The players whom we already know have no freedom to change, and new ones are portrayed with only a few identifying details.

Blomkvist, we can safely say, is Larsson’s alter ego – an editor and writer whose mission is to expose bad people, whether their turpitude takes the form of racism, corruption or an excessive embrace of free trade. He enjoys a long-standing free-form relationship with a beautiful, married colleague, but is mostly at leisure to pursue whatever dalliances come his way. One of his affairs is with 24-year-old Lisbeth Salander, a teenage-looking computer hacker and security consultant with a photographic memory and an accompanying touch of Asperger’s syndrome. The duo has a combination of radical inquisitiveness and stubbornness that lays the groundwork for a succession of wide-ranging escapades

In The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest, however, the two operate mostly apart. Salander wakes up in a hospital with a bullet in her skull, and is immediately and unjustly charged with a variety of crimes. Freeing her will require that Blomkvist expose the machinations of a secret unit within Sweden’s Security Police before that unit kills him and Salander. Salander will help from her hospital bed – as long as she has internet access. As in the previous instalments in the series, when the criminal conspiracy is vanquished, Blomkvist writes about it for his magazine, Millennium, a publication where advertisers are never placated, freelancers are never stiffed, and important stories are run at the author’s suggested length.

Though Blomkvist has his encounters with hired gunmen, the majority of the violence in these often-bloody books is inflicted on Salander. And here we run into an inherent difficulty of sequels: the protagonist must appear in every book. We spend most of the series knowing that Salander can’t be killed – not yet. This knowledge transforms her into something of a superhuman, and the reader into a bit of a sadist. These are bloody books, bloodier as the series proceeds, and we read on knowing that whatever bullets Salander takes, whatever sexual tortures are devised for her, she’ll outlast them. Unfortunately, the sexual indignities visited on her are beyond a reasonable count; gradually our squirming dies down, and we read on, dully waiting for the next blow.

Consumption of these scenes isn’t an example, necessarily, of readerly hypocrisy – the eager ingestion of that which we say we abhor – but it’s a complicated balance. Swedes devour crime and murder accounts, the bloodier the better. And while Swedes are, per capita, probably the most generous donors of foreign aid in the world, it’s sometimes hard not to suspect that their social conscience is linked to a prurient interest in the depravity they seek to ameliorate. The bad people in Larsson are sexually bad – a couple of child pornographers, a few rapists – but we good people still read and write about them for pleasure.

Of course, Larsson’s more brutal scenes run counter to his very Swedish humanist social attitudes. Elsewhere in the trilogy, sex is something like a hearty embrace, a game between friends who admire each other, free of guilt and, though the characters often insist otherwise, free of real passion. A typical formulation comes when a minor character talks of her recent sexual interest: he “had been her training partner off and on for three years. In recent months they had also had sex as friends.” Seduction is not considered an art in Sweden, and Blomkvist approaches his own frequent bouts with a steadfast good-naturedness that leads one to wonder, of him and of Swedes in general, whether these people have any emotions at all.

Larsson approaches materialism in a similarly conflicted way, condemning acquisitiveness, but then having it sneak into his heroes’ lives for our entertainment. Larsson was a committed socialist, and believed that privatisation and market liberalism were gravely detrimental to Sweden. Throughout his books, investment in markets is treated as pure speculation, and those who invest as nothing more than pirates. As Blomkvist tells a rapt TV interviewer: “The Stock Exchange is something very different. There is no economy and no production of goods and services. There are only fantasies in which people from one hour to the next decide that this or that company is worth so many bullions, more or less. It doesn’t have a thing to do with reality or with the Swedish economy.”

But it’s nice to have a few billion kroner, as Salander does by the end of the first book, and even nicer when those kroner are appropriated from a crooked businessman. The primary beneficiary of her Robin Hood act is herself, of course, with a few contributions to various protectors of battered women, but Larsson treats her theft as a moral victory. Blomkvist also gets rich, albeit on a more modest scale, when his exposé of the disgraceful financier becomes a best-selling book.

Even right-thinking people enjoy the finer things, and so Larsson treats us to a stilted catalogue of Blomkvist’s and Salander’s increasing pile of possessions. There’s the “Apple PowerBook (G4 Titanium with a 17-inch screen)” that goes with Salander’s Ikea furniture, meticulously identified by model and all arranged in her new pad, “the pied-à-terre that had belonged to Percy Barnevik, a captain of industry. The apartment was about 3,800 square feet and worth 25 million kronor.” It’s “one of Stockholm’s most exclusive addresses”, which makes sense, because the real problem with money, as Larsson knew, is that it belongs to the wealthy. His redress is fantasy, and not exactly a rebuke to capitalism, but it’s fun.

In fact, almost everything in these books is fun – wild, gripping fun. The purpose of a thriller is to thrill, and these do so admirably. The guilty party is never obvious until all the players collide, and each book works up to a feverish conclusion. Though The Girl who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest runs along at a slower pace than its predecessors – mostly because Salander is stuck in her hospital room, isolated from Blomkvist’s adventures – there are still moments when going to bed without reading the next chapter is highly difficult. Sex and money are Larsson’s preoccupations, but plotting is his talent.

Another pleasure of the genre is what one might call the run-out. Like a cold drink after the game, sometimes the best part of a detective novel is the coda, where life returns to normal, and the characters reflect on the madness that now lies behind them. Larsson is particularly good at this, probably because his protagonists always seem to accumulate wealth and love interests along the way. It’s a peculiar moral accounting, but it’s certainly satisfying.

Thrillers shouldn’t have to encapsulate a nation, but that hasn’t stopped anyone from trying to make them carry that weight. Sherlock Holmes represented England until he was replaced by Miss Marple, who reigned until Inspector Morse came along. Before Blomkvist and Salander, Martin Beck was the fictional Swede whose gloom typified a dark nation, in Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö’s The Story of a Crime series. More recently, that post has been held by Henning Mankell’s Inspector Wallender, whose disillusionment and anger can be read as a reaction to Sweden’s current conflict between its supposedly stable past and its immigrant future.

In Larsson’s work, many features of the detective genre appear in their familiar forms – and many are particularly Swedish. Reclusive people always have something to hide, coffee is always being made and drunk – this is actually both typically detective and typisk Svensk – but our sympathy for those who fall foul of the law is tempered by the fact that they get holiday leave from prison.

Still, as Swedish as Larsson’s characters are, as Swedish as all Swedish detective writers’ Swedish characters are, Larsson’s novels ultimately have more in common with Agatha Christie’s than with Astrid Lindgren’s. As Nathaniel Rich pointed recently out in Slate, all good stories of murder, that ultimate rupture, rely on a contrast between violence and tranquility. Miss Marple solved her crimes from the hamlet of St Mary Meade; Salander and Blomkvist solve theirs among rustic summer houses on Stockholm’s Archipelago, or in the liberal capital itself. In each case it’s the serenity of the backdrop that highlights the magnitude of the crime. While the local flavour of a detective novel may pique our interest, we read them to get sucked into the eternal question: whodunnit? The immense success of Stieg Larsson’s novels is an excellent excuse to think about social democracy in its northern forms, but the books themselves subscribe to a different system of government.

Willing Davidson lives in Stockholm.