Breaking the heroic mould

IN THE BOOK trade, October 1st was "Super Thursday", the day it blitzed the bookshop shelves with 800 new hardback titles all vying for top place on Christmas wish lists. For Stieg Larsson fans, there was only one book on that list, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest, the final part in the Millenniumtrilogy. It was so desperately anticipated that advance sales on Amazon made the English translation of the Swedish crime thriller an instant bestseller, and its release was shrouded in the sort of secrecy usually associated with the latest books from JK Rowling or Dan Brown.

The publishers, Quercus, were so concerned that a copy of Hornets' Nestwould be offered for sale on eBay before the official release date by some cash-hungry reviewer, that it held back on sending out even review copies until less than two weeks before publication – an almost unheard of lead-in time for any book, never mind a 602-page doorstopper.

Word of mouth created the Stieg Larsson phenomenon. In 2003, Larsson, a well-known and highly respected political journalist, brought the manuscripts of the three crime novels he had written in his spare time to a publisher. Tragically, the 50-year-old writer was dead before the first one, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoomade into print in 2005. Since then, more than 2.6 million copies of the Millenniumtrilogy have been sold in his native Sweden (a country with a population of around nine million), and when the first book was translated from the original, it caught on beyond Swedish borders through reader power and not through any great official marketing push – a prematurely dead author might inject a frisson of intrigue, but it means no author interviews or personal publicity blasts.

Before last Thursday’s release in English of the third book, more than eight million copies of the trilogy had already been sold in Europe, and worldwide Steig Larsson was the number-two best-selling author in 2008 (with Khaled Hosseini at number one, with Stephenie Meyer at four and JK Rowling at nine).

The Girl who Kicked the Hornets' Nestis very much the third in a trilogy. It can't be fully enjoyed unless the reader has acclimatised to the magnetic lead characters and the layered plotlines of the first two: T he Girl with the Green Tattooand The Girl who Played with Fire. Curiously though, either of those books could be happily enjoyed as stand-alone thrillers.

Once again, in Hornets' Nestits lead characters are Mikael Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander. Blomkvist is a fearless investigative journalist and co-owner of Millennium, a magazine set on uncovering corruption in high places and showing the dark side of Sweden's super-clean image. He's urbane, smart, feted by the public and the media, and devastatingly attractive to women. (That last character trait is one of the few, not quite credible and definitely irritating flaws common to the three books.) It's not beyond the bounds of speculation to imagine Blomkvist as a sort of super-Larsson, who himself was famous in Sweden for his work countering the growth of the extreme right through his influential campaigning Expo Magazine.

But it’s the character of Lisbeth Salander that’s the key to the huge success of the series. She’s “the girl” of the unwieldy titles and a unique character – a rare find in a genre that tends to be built on stereotype.

In her early 20s, she’s a scrawny bisexual Goth version of Pippi Longstocking, a loner, with few interpersonal skills and a vicious streak, a photographic memory and an ability to hack into any computer anywhere. Committed to the care of the State in her teens due to alleged psychiatric problems, she has been betrayed and abused by nearly every man she has come in contact with, except Blomqvist, but starting with her father.

Book two ends on a cliffhanger, with Salander fighting for her life after a violent struggle (the books contain scenes of extreme violence, including graphic sexual violence), and it’s not too much of a spoiler to say that book three centres on Salander and Blomqvist’s fight to clear her name and to uncover the real motives for her teenage incarceration. Through that investigation, the crime-fighting pair reveal the endemic corruption in the secret police whose activities threaten the democratic ideals that Sweden is built on.

Abuse against women and girls is a theme running thoughout the tightly worked-out plots. Män som hatar kvinnor("Men who hate women") was the original title of the first book, and in it, the unlikely pair uncover a woman-hating murderer whose crimes had gone unpunished for decades. A key plot theme in the second novel is the sex trade that enslaves women but makes fortunes through people trafficking for men.

Throughout the novels, it’s Larsson’s background as an investigative journalist with an knowledge of political systems and the corruption that goes hand in hand with power that drives the storylines, giving them an urgency and a relevance that keep the reader turning the page.

A subplot in the Larsson phenomenon is the wrangle over the many millions of euro in royalties that his books have earned. Conspiracy theorists (or maybe just crime readers with overactive imaginations), aware of the many death threats he received from neo-Nazi and other right-wing nutters, were quick to wonder about his sudden death. But the committed smoker – reportedly more than 50 roll ups a day – died from a heart attack after climbing several flights of stairs up to his office.

Larsson had been with his partner Eva Gabrielsson for 30 years, but as he never made a valid will and the pair were not married, all the royalties go to his father and brother. It’s a bitter irony that a man who wore his liberal feminist credentials on his sleeve in both his day job as a journalist and in his “hobby” as a crime writer should have left his life partner so financially unprotected.

One of the reasons Gabrielsson says they didn't get married was to protect themselves from ultra-nationalist extremists who threatened them. In Sweden, a couple's home address must be published for a marriage licence and so marrying would, she has said, have put them in certain jeopardy. Laying claim to a portion of the royalty rights, she says that quite apart from the 30 years they spent together, she was there when he delivered his three manuscripts to Norstedts Publishing in Stockholm; that they planned together to publish 10 books in the Millenniumseries, and that she was a significant contributor to Larsson's work on the series.

Her plight has become something of a cause in Sweden, with a website SupportEva.com pleading her case and raising donations for her campaign to change the country’s inheritance law. (“If you’ve read one book, donate $3; If you’ve read all three books, donate $9”)

That Larsson planned a series of 10 crime novels is not beyond the bounds of possibility. It’s a genre with a proven record of multiple novels featuring the same central characters. Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, the husband-and-wife journalists turned crime novelists who are credited with being the originators of the modern Swedish crime genre, famously wrote 10 books between 1965-75 featuring their gloomy detective Martin Beck.

It is rumoured that before his sudden death, Larsson had already begun work on a fourth Blomkqist/Salander adventure and that the part-finished manuscript is still in his laptop.

Whether the work ever finished or published will provide yet another intriguing real life subplot.

• The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets' Nest, by Stieg Larsson, Quercus, £12.99

Other Swedish crime fiction for your Billy bookcase

The combination of bleak lonely landscapes and often dour troubled heroes shouldn’t make for such page-turners but crime writers are Sweden’s biggest entertainment export since Abba.

Henning Mankell

Second to Steig Larsson in terms of international recognition for his chilly crime novels featuring the monosyllabic Inspector Kurt Wallander (given a wider audience through the

BBC’s adaptation starring Kenneth Branagh).

Håkan Nesser

Has moved on from his original character, Van Veeteren, a retired detective-cum-antique shop owner, to the more upbeat Inspector Gunnar Barbarotti, a Swedish police inspector of Italian descent.

Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö

The mother and father of modern Swedish crime fiction with their 10-volume series featuring their maverick policeman Martin Beck.

Åsa Larsson

A former tax lawyer breaking the mould by giving her hero Rebecka Martinsson the same profession.

Camilla Läckberg

A new young writer setting her crime novels in a small community on the west coast of Sweden. The Preacher is her latest to make it into translation.