The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
by Stieg Larsson




Swedish author and journalist Stieg Larsson uses the tropes of both Scandinavian and British crime fiction but he is a one-off or, rather, was a one-off - tragically, he died of a heart attack, aged 50, in 2004.


The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is the first of his Millennium Trilogy to be published in the UK. It is a violent thriller that focuses on a complex financial fraud and a powerful family's sinister secret. It starts slowly, with details of how a Swedish company is ripping off government funding to set up a fake business in Russia. The novel picks up speed when it gets into the complexities of the wealthy Vanger family's past.


Forty years earlier, Harriet Vanger disappeared off the family's private island. Nobody saw her leave, there was no sign of her disappearance and no corpse. Her uncle, however, is convinced that a family member murdered her.

A journalist, Blomqvist, in disgrace after losing a libel case arising from his reporting of the financial scandal, takes on the investigation of the woman's disappearance. Almost immediately, he sees a link with a number of other murders taking place around the same time. The family only pretends to help and Blomqvist doesn't know where to go next.

Then he hooks up with the titular tattooed girl - a very angry punk hacker. The journalist and the hacker are ingenious, believable creations, in conflict with themselves and each other. They form an incongruous but credible bond as everyone they meet is against them. In the end, the novel becomes, among many other things, something of a tender love story.

Larsson's trilogy was published in Scandinavia and continental Europe to great acclaim between 2005 and 2007, after his death. Tattoo (Original title: Men Who Hate Women) won the prestigious Glass Key for the best Nordic crime novel of 2005. The Girl Who Played With Fire (2006) won a Swedish Academy for Detective Novels award. The third, Castles in the Sky, came out early last year.

Larsson, a leading expert on right-wing extremists and neo-Nazi organisations, was editor of Expo, the magazine for a project he had set up to combat racism. He began writing the trilogy after work each evening in 2001. He claimed he enjoyed it so much that he was partway through the third before he even considered sending anything to a publisher.

This is a striking novel, full of passion, an evocative sense of place and subtle insights into venal, corrupt minds. It's sad that a potentially great crime-writing career was ended almost before it began, but at least UK readers can enjoy this and look forward to the succeeding two novels in the trilogy.