By Patricia H. Kushlis
I don’t normally review and rarely ever read murder mysteries because most tend to follow all too predictable formulas and be populated by larger than life stick figures. Besides, for the most part too many are about equal in heft and interest to the feather weight stories promoted on MSN Hotmail’s front page.
But Stieg Larsson’s Millennium series is different. Moreover, it’s addictive, intensely political and a story – or series of stories - within stories that span Swedish history from 1946 onward. Larsson was not your everyday garden variety reporter with an everyday, garden variety middle class Swedish upbringing. In fact, he spent his journalistic career as a graphics designer for the Swedish news agency (TT) from 1977-99 and then as editor-in-chief of a small investigative quarterly journal called Expo which, no surprises features prominently in the series under the name Millennium.
Hated by Left and Right
Politically, Larsson was a man of the left as a result of his grandfather’s tangles with Sweden’s neo-Nazis. He specialized in researching that movement throughout his life. In his youth he belonged to the Kommunistiska Arbetarförbundet, a Trotskyite organization, and had also been editor of a Trotskyite publication. What his specific political affiliations were – if any – when he died have not been revealed but the neo-Nazis clearly hated him and reportedly had threatened the safety of his long time partner Eva Gabrielsson and himself to the extent that they never married and kept their identities secret. Since his leftist affiliations were with the Trotskyites, the Soviets and the mainstream Communists would have likely hated him as much as the neo-Nazis did and his antipathy towards the Soviets also features in his writings especially in the second and third volumes of the trilogy.
What Larsson did in the three books published before his untimely death of a heart attack in 2004 was to explore and expose the sordid relationships between Swedish extremist politics, various mafia thugs and the Swedish establishment through the lives and heroic actions of an investigative reporter named Mikael Blomqvist and a far from perfect Pippi Longstockings-type gamine called Lisbeth Salandar who was both the real victim – and the real heroine of the series.
How did Lisbeth Salandar see herself?
At least that’s how reviews I’ve read describe her. True, Mikael (Kalle) Blomqvist, saw her as a grown-up Pippi Longstockings but that’s not exactly how she saw herself. She viewed herself very differently – in fact, she seems to have seen herself as Wasp. Wasp was her nom-de-guerre among the elite computer hackers group she belonged to, it was the entry code to her apartment, it was the name of the company (Wasp Enterprises) she set up to handle the considerable assets she managed to surreptitiously abscond with from a run-amok Swedish businessman at the end of the first book (The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo) as a result of her formidable hacking abilities. It had also featured as a prominent tattoo on her neck until she had it removed to make her less easily identifiable.
Essentially, Lisbeth Salander protected herself because state and society had let her down and if she had to sting to do so – she did. She was slow to make friends, slow to trust people and it has been suggested she suffered from Asperger’s syndrome. That, however, was simply a suggestion – not a diagnosis. And given the personal horrors she was subjected to during much of her life, it’s amazing that she trusted anyone at all. But she did – men as well as women who had proven their loyalty to her.
Throughout the Millenium series, fact and fiction intertwine and where they diverge is hard to tell. All but two locations are real: in fact, Stieg Larsson tours are available – and popular with visitors to Stockholm. Many of the names of the characters are also names of real people. The character Mikael Kalle Blomqvist is likely fairly autobiographical. Lisbeth, however, is far more complicated. She’s likely an amalgam of a young adult Pippi with a waspish temperament, and perhaps even a young relative of Larsson’s who was uncommonly good with computers.
Not for the faint-hearted
This series is not for the faint-hearted. It’s replete with violence, sadomasicism and crimes against women. It shows the Swedish state and society for what it is: both good and bad. Yet there is also redemption – and in each of the three books good, in the end, triumphs over evil.
How a rogue unit in Swedish Security (Säpo) could have continued to operate for years to run, and mop up after, a single Soviet GRU defector well after the Cold War was over – if it did - sends chills down the spine. Yet it’s not surprising that the defector himself, a man named Alexander Zalachenko, developed connections with the Russian/Estonian underworld that trafficked in drugs, weapons and women once the borders opened. After the veneer of Communism was eliminated in 1991, the criminal sickness that lurked just below the surface but kept Soviet society functioning under impossible rules burst into the open. Inevitably, the neighbors suffered and still do. That, in essence, made Larsson’s second (The Girl Who Played With Fire) and third (The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest) books as compelling as his first which focused on his life’s work on the neo-Nazis.
What Next?
Larsson reportedly had finished about three-quarters of the fourth book in what he had planned as a ten volume series before he died. Sadly it is entangled in a nasty legal dispute between Gabrielsson who inherited nothing because she and Larsson never married and his brother and father who inherited everything. Meanwhile, the media has moved on to attempting to divine the identity of the next Stieg Larsson and promoting their annointed while the motion picture industry has begun to produce the films based on the Millennium series.
That’s all well and good, but I for one would just like to read volume four about this unlikely detective pair – if and when it sees the light of day.