What is it about Stieg Larsson?

Stieg Larsson was a rather unsuccessful left-wing Swedish journalist who lived off coffee, cigarettes, junk food and booze, and died aged 50 after climbing seven flights of stairs, having recently sold to a publisher the series of crime novels now called The Millennium Trilogy. It was originally called The Men Who Hate Women, and in Sweden the first of the series was published under that prize-winningly awful title. The Millennium Trilogy is an improvement, but hardly has the ring of a hit. Nonetheless, it has sold millions of copies and inspired a global cult.

The sales are due entirely, I should think, to the infinitely sexier titles Larsson’s publisher came up with: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest, with their echoes of Pippi Longstocking. Having now read the first, and Kindle samples of the others, I must say that The Men Who Hate Women does at least have the merit of honesty. Each section is prefaced with statistics about sexual crimes against women in Sweden, and the plots feature elaborate combinations of rape, torture and murder.

And I thought it a swizz that the stories are less about the Girl than they are about ‘Kalle’ Blomkvist, a left-wing journalist who lives off coffee etc, solves all the crimes, exacts revenge on the corporate fascists, earns huge sums of money, and has matter-of-fact sex with every attractive woman he meets, in that peculiarly Nordic, ‘Hello, shall we?’ kind of way, which sits rather queasily amid all the ambient sex crimes. From swamps of heavy exposition and research, the exhausted reader trudges through reeking tides of indignation, disgust and horror, with nary a joke in sight. Apart from the Girl — who is quite fun, in a BDSM kind of way — I found it inept, foul and boring.