Millennium man and his women

Among my reading favorites, I love well-written, well-plotted mystery novels.   Many of my favorite mystery authors are women, from classic doyennes of the genre such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers, with their various sleuths, to the wit and flair of Josephine Tey, whose early to mid-20th-century novels were regrettably too few - every one a stand-alone classic - to more modern writers such as Ruth Rendell, Elizabeth George and Minette Walters, where character and psychological studies, together with treatments of contemporary social issues, are interwoven so seamlessly that one hardly notices.  They are an integral part of the suspense.  While there are many authors whose latest novels I literally rush to read, it is more often those who have been writing for some time and whose work I already know to some extent.  When I do find a new author whose work resonates with me, it is sheer and utter joy.

This happened to me last summer.  I was browsing through the mystery fiction book section at a Maryland Borders bookstore when a helpful salesclerk asked whether I was looking for anything in particular.  I wasn't, but was willing to listen to what she had to say ... and I am so happy that I did.  She told me that, if I hadn't already read the work of Stieg Larsson, I should.  She proceeded to direct me to a copy of "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" and then informed me of the very regrettable fact that Larsson had died in 2004, so that his fiction work is necessarily limited.

In fact, "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" is the first novel of three referred to as "The Millennium Trilogy."   The "Millennium" referred to has nothing to do with the ten-century benchmark and everything to do with "Millennium," a fictional magazine with in-depth stories covering various social, political and economic topics.

I don't know what parallel universe I had been living in because I had totally missed the fact that Larsson's book sales had earned him the rank of second-best-selling author in international markets for 2008.  One reason perhaps is because it was only in 2009 that his works, originally written in Swedish, were published in English.  The titles in Swedish are also quite different from their English iterations.  I have read the first two novels already and am impatiently awaiting the third.  It will be distributed in the US this summer.  Film versions of all three novels have been released in Sweden.  "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" has been released in the UK, to critical acclaim.  It has also been released in the US, but with English subtitles.  It appears that a US version will eventually be made.  But I can't help thinking that the details in Larsson's book are so intrinsically Swedish that films set in the US will have difficulty creating anywhere near the same effect.

Larsson's own life story is quite similar to that of his primary male character, Mikael Blomqvist, an investigative journalist.  In fact, it was Larsson's career as a crusading investigative journalist that made him personally the target of numerous death threats, to the extent that his sudden death in 2004 caused suspicion that a death threat had actually been successful.  One sad effect of these threats was that he did not marry his partner, Eva Gabrielsson, who had collaborated with him for 32 years.  Because he died without leaving a valid will, his estate, including all rights to royalties, reverted under Swedish law to his father and brother, his only surviving family members.  Many have found this to be quite unfair in the circumstances, particularly because Larsson had not had much direct contact with either family member for years and Eva had co-written the novels in many ways.  Eva would have been completely left in the cold except that she holds the manuscript to the fourth "Millennium" novel, which gives her some leverage.  She describes the situation in her own words here and here.

"The Girl" referred to in the titles is an amazing new type of heroine named Lisbeth Salander.  Salander, as she is most often referred to, sets an international standard for strong women, although she herself has been shamefully brutalized.  According to Blomqvist, Salander is the "most moral person" that he knows.  To others, she might appear "amoral," even frightening, especially in her punk appearance.  But Salander certainly has a strict ethical code, lives by it fiercely, and has little to no tolerance for the hypocrisy and abuse that are rampant in the institutions surrounding her.  In many ways, she creates her own reality.

Larsson is someone whose work I admire.  We lost him too soon.  Thankfully, his writing will live on forever.