| Elite Fan
Joined: Jul 2007
Posts: 31,769
| Stieg Larsson #1: The Girl - "With The Dragon Tattoo", "Who Played With Fire", "Who Kicked The Hornets Nest".
Stieg Larsson Author Appreciation Thread
Biography: Quote: Karl Stig-Erland Larsson (15 August 1954 – 9 November 2004) was a Swedish journalist and writer, born in Skelleftehamn outside Skellefteå. He is best known for his authorship of the Millennium Trilogy of crime novels which were published posthumously.
By March 2010 his Millennium trilogy had sold 27 million copies in more than 40 countries.
| The Novels: Quote: At his death, Larsson left behind manuscripts of three completed but unpublished novels in a series. He wrote them for his own pleasure after returning home from his job in the evening, making no attempt to get them published until shortly before his death. The first was published in Sweden in 2005 as Män som hatar kvinnor ("Men who hate women"), published in English as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. It was awarded the prestigious Glass Key award as the best Nordic crime novel in 2005. His second novel, Flickan som lekte med elden (The Girl Who Played with Fire), received the Best Swedish Crime Novel Award in 2006.
The third novel in the so-called Millennium trilogy, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest, was published in the United States in May 2010.
Larsson left about three quarters of a fourth novel on a notebook computer in Gabrielsson's possession; synopses or manuscripts of the fifth and sixth in the series, which was intended to contain an eventual total of ten books, may also exist.
The Swedish film production company Yellow Bird has produced film versions of the Millennium Trilogy, co-produced with The Danish film production company Nordisk Film and TV company, which were released in Scandinavia in 2009. | The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, original title Män som hatar kvinnor. 2005. Plot Summary: Quote:
A middle-aged journalist, Mikael Blomkvist, publishes the magazine Millennium in Stockholm. In the opening courtroom drama, Blomkvist loses a libel case, having offered no defense for his publication of damaging allegations about a billionaire Swedish industrialist Hans-Erik Wennerström. He is sentenced to three months in prison. The court case and verdict brings the journalistic competence of Millennium into question.
This, combined with the enmity of the powerful Wennerström exerting influence on corporate allies, quickly leads to losses in advertising revenue and reduced circulation. Facing jail time and professional disgrace, Blomkvist steps down from his position on the Board of Millennium in order to protect what reputation remains to the magazine. This occurs despite the strong objections of Erika Berger, Blomkvist's long time friend, 'occasional lover', and business partner. While Blomkvist considers the bleak prospect of jail-time and time away from the Magazine he helped to create, he is offered an unlikely freelance assignment by Henrik Vanger, the elderly former CEO of Vanger Enterprises. What Blomkvist is unaware of is that, before contacting him, Vanger commissioned a comprehensive investigation into Blomkvist's personal and professional history.
The investigation is carried out by Lisbeth Salander, the title figure of the book and a curious creature. Twenty-five years of age, she is highly talented and earns a good income as a private investigator. Yet she is asocial to the extreme, emotionally closed, untrusting, and damaged to the extent that as a child she was removed from the care of her parents, declared emotionally incompetent and is a ward of the state. However, she is extraordinarily resourceful and acts with little hesitation. When faced with a guardian who has abused and raped her, she takes revenge swiftly and violently.
Blomkvist visits Vanger on his estate on the tiny island of Hedeby, several hours from Stockholm. The old man draws Blomkvist in by promising not only financial reward for the assignment, but also promises that at the end of the contracted year, he will furnish Blomkvist with solid evidence that Wennerström is truly the scoundrel Blomkvist suspects him to be. On this basis, Blomkvist agrees to spend a year writing the Vanger family history as a cover for the real assignment which is to solve a "cold case"—the disappearance of Vanger's great niece Harriet some 40 years earlier, when she was sixteen. Vanger, a shrewd character, admits he is obsessed with finding out the truth of what happened to Harriet, and expresses his suspicion that Harriet was murdered by a member of the vast Vanger family, many of whom were present in Hedeby on the day of her disappearance. Each year on his birthday Harriet would make Henrik a present of pressed flowers. On his birthday every year since Harriet's murder, Vanger explains, the murderer torments him with a present of pressed flowers.
Blomkvist uproots himself from his life in Stockholm, moving to Hedeby in the middle of one of the coldest winters on record. Cold, depressed, and lonely, he begins the process of analysing the more than 40 years worth of information Henrik Vanger has obsessively compiled around the circumstances of the day Harriet disappeared. Hedeby is home to several generations of Vangers, all part owners in Vanger Enterprises. Under the pretext of researching the family history, and due to the small size of the island, Blomkvist soon becomes acquainted with the members of the extended Vanger family who are variously mad, uninterested, concerned, hostile, or aloof. Several are worried that Blomkvist is taking advantage of the obsession of a weak old man. The investigation of Harriet's disappearance approximates "the old Miss Marple closed-room scenario" with all the rich suspects marooned on the family estate on an island, "a village we grow familiar with, full of hostile locals peering out from behind their curtains".[1] The locked-room scenario is apt because on the day that Harriet disappeared, the island was isolated from the mainland due to a road-tanker crash on the only bridge.
Blomkvist is resigned to being unlikely to solve the riddle of Harriet's murder given that the police were unable to do so, but he fulfills his contractual obligations by immersing himself in the case. Despite following endless dead leads, eventually a series of serendipitous new lines of evidence arise.
| The Girl Who Played with Fire, original title Flickan som lekte med elden. 2006. Plot Summary: Quote:
Mikael Blomkvist, publisher of Millennium magazine, has made his living exposing the crooked and corrupt practices of establishment Swedish figures. So when a young journalist approaches him with a meticulously researched thesis about sex trafficking in Sweden and those in high office who abuse underage girls, Blomkvist immediately throws himself into the investigation.
He’s had no contact with tattooed wild-child and computer hacker extraordinaire Lisbeth Salander since they risked their lives on a terrifying hunt for a serial killer a year earlier (see The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo). But unknown to Blomkvist, Salander has had contact with him–or at least, with his computer hard drive, which she has cloned and is monitoring from the vast new apartment she has bought with her fraudulently obtained fortune.
Repeatedly abused while young, Salander is a traumatized survivor of a deranged psychotherapist who treated her as a child. A punk avenging angel with boxing skills, a photographic memory and pathologically focused on seeking out and punishing violent misogynists, Salander is drawn to the investigation on Blomkvist’s computer. So while Blomkvist and his fellow Millennium idealists research the sex industry according to the rules of good journalism, Salander–spurred on by the appalling case studies of teenage prostitution she finds on Blomkvist's computer–takes matters into her own hands. She plots punishment for the traffickers, but before she can carry out her own brand of justice, she is accused of three murders, all connected to the sex trafficking exposé about to be published in Millennium.
To avoid capture by the police, Salander vanishes. While the tabloids go wild at the idea of a “psychotic lesbian S&M Satanist” on the run, Blomkvist tries despairingly to clear her name, though he can’t find her anywhere. When he does eventually make contact, it is to discover that Salander is more embroiled in his investigation than he could have thought possible. It turns out that for Salander, the trail of guilt leads shockingly close to home.
| The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest, original title Luftslottet som sprängdes. 2007. Plot Summary: Quote:
Lisbeth Salander is flown to Sahlgrenska Hospital with bullets in her brain, hip, and shoulder (after being shot by her father, Alexander Zalachenko, at the end of The Girl Who Played With Fire). After surgery by Dr. Jonasson, she is moved to an intensive care ward under guard, able to be visited only by police, doctors, nurses, and her lawyer, Annika Giannini (who is also Mikael Blomkvist's sister). During her convalescence, Salander uses a Palm Tungsten T3 smuggled in by Dr. Jonasson to access the internet and to compose an autobiographical document to aid in her defense at trial. The three murder charges against Salander are dropped, but she is charged with assault on the two biker gang members at Bjurman's summer cabin.
Evert Gullberg, former chief of "the Section", a secret division of Säpo (the Security Police) visits Section headquarters to find out how they will be handling the unfolding Zalachenko affair. The Section had been responsible for the handling of Zalachenko affair from the very beginning (including having Salander committed when she was 12), and Gullberg is concerned that either Zalachenko or former Section associate Gunnar Björck will talk to the police about the Section's activities. Gullberg independently visits former Section associate Frederik Clinton to ask him to be acting head of the Section during the crisis; Clinton, who is on dialysis, reluctantly accepts.
Section operatives approach Prosecutor Ekström, who is in charge of the Salander case, and give him falsified evidence. After Gullberg determines that Zalachenko is not willing to "play ball" with them, he visits Zalachenko in the hospital and shoots him in the head before turning the gun on himself. Section operatives bug the phones of Giannini, Blomkvist, and Millennium's staff, and put Blomkvist under surveillance. They then steal the copies of a classified report Blomkvist and Giannini had obtained. After Blomkvist realizes he is being watched, he uses disinformation to confuse his watchers and also has Milton Security install cameras to figure out who is following him. He begins working and sleeping at Salander's secret apartment on Fiskargatan and has the Millennium offices manned 24 hours a day to ensure they aren't bugged.
Erika Berger leaves Millennium to be editor-in-chief at Svenska Morgon-Posten, Sweden's largest daily paper. Almost immediately, she begins receiving poison pen letters calling her "whore". After the letters escalate to the point where Berger's house is vandalized, Berger calls in Milton Security, who eventually discover the individual is Berger's assistant. After firing the individual, and although shaken, Berger goes back to work at the paper, although she later resigns after learning that the paper's CEO has been also running a manufacturing company that knowingly used child labor from Southeast Asia. She then returns to her former post at Millennium.
After Dragan Armansky tips him off to the reality of Salander's situation and to the existence of the Section, Säpo Constitutional Protection Director Torsten Edklinth decides to begin a secret formal inquiry into the matter. He asks his associate, Monica Figuerola, to assist him. They contact Inspector Bublanski to bring him and his team into the investigation. Figuerola also contacts Blomkvist to ask him to begin coordinating information between their two investigations. He agrees, and the two of them later begin a relationship.
Just before the start of Salander's trial, the Section realizes Blomkvist has been playing them and attempts to sabotage the special issue of Millennium being printed. When that doesn't work, they try to destroy Blomkvist's credibility and put a hit out on him. Neither tactic proves successful.
During Salander's trial, Giannini, with the help of Holger Palmgren, successfully discredits Teleborian's testimony about Salander's mental state and gets her released. Edklinth's unit arrests the entire roster of the Section. After a few months spent in Gibraltar checking up on her investments, Salander returns to Sweden and checks out an abandoned factory which came into her possession upon the death of her father only to find the fugitive Ronald Niedermann, her half-brother, who escaped from the police at the beginning of the book. After a brief struggle, Salander is able to subdue Niedermann, who is insensate to pain, by nailing his feet to the ground with a nail gun. After escaping she lures members of a motorcycle club Neidermann stole money from to the site, then anonymously tips police off as to Neidermann's location; the police raid results in the death of her half-brother and the capture of members of the outlaw gang.
Back at her upscale apartment in Stockholm, Lisbeth is visited by Blomkvist, who wishes to re-start their friendship. In a moment of reflection she realizes she fully trusts him and values his presence, but no longer feels any romantic attraction to him. Salander opens the door and invites Mikael in, accepting his offer.
| |
