The line-up for the International Dagger Award is quite interesting from a Scandinavian perspective: Among the six shortlisted authors are three from the Scandinavian countries. They are all, of course, excellent authors and great books:

1. Tonino Benacquista: Badfellas
2. Andrea Camilleri: August Heat
3. Arnaldur Indridason: Hypothermia
4. Stieg Larsson: The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest
5. Deon Meyer: Thirteen Hours
6. Johan Theorin: The Darkest Room

Indridason, Larsson and Theorin are all wonderful and write excellent crime fiction. Even so, this time I have to say that I hope Stieg Larsson wins. Not only because The Girl Who Kicket the Hornets’ Nest is superb, but also because this is Larsson’s last chance to win this prize. Stieg Larsson will, sadly, not be competing any more.

PS: Johan Theorin actually won the CWA International Dagger with The Darkest Room. I had hoped for Stieg Larsson, partly for sentimental reasons, but The Darkest Room is an excellent novel too. Our congratulations to Johan Theorin and Sweden!

NPR today reports that Stieg Larsson’s The Girl Who Played with Fire is number 2 on the hardcover bestseller list for the week ending February 7th. At the same time, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is no. 1 on the paperback list!

The weekly surveys of close to 500 independent bookstores nationwide in collaboration with the American Booksellers Association. Number 1 on the hardcover list is The Help , by Kathryn Stockett.

According to Swedish Newspaper Dagens Nyheter, these were the bestselling authors in Europe in 2009:

1. Stieg Larsson
2. Stephenie Meyer
3. Dan Brown
4. Paolo Giordano
5. Carlos Ruiz Zafón
6. Camilla Läckberg
7. Herman Koch
8. Tatiana de Rosnay
9. Henning Mankell
10. John Grisham

It is not very surprising that Stieg Larsson is on the top of the list. More surprising, to me at least, is that two other Swedes – Camilla Läckberg and Henning Mankell are also on the list. Quite a success for Swedish crime fiction!

Who wrote The Girl With the Dragoon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest? The publication of a Swedish biograhpy about Stieg Larsson has sparked a new debate in Scandinavia over this. As Stieg Larsson was the bestselling author in Europe in 2009, this is somewhat interesting.

It started with a comment in a Swedish newspaper – Dagens Nyheter – by a former colleague of Stieg Larsson, Anders Hellberg, who said that at the time when he worked with him, Stieg Larsson could not write a single coherent sentence. That he was a bad writer. And Hellberg speculated that perhaps someone else had written the books in the Millennium-series. Today Danish newspaper BT has a headline saying “Stieg Larsson was not alone in writing the Millennium series”.

The debate over this has been back and forth for a while in a number of Scandinavian newspapers. Now, in an email exchange with Danish newspaper Politiken (a very reliable newspaper), published today, Eva Gabrielsson – Stieg Larsson’s partner for 32 years – says that “I did not only correct language”, and goes on to say that her involvement in the writing process extended far beyond commenting on the language.

“It is difficult for me to identify what is Stieg and what is me in the Millennium language, content, and so on, ” says Eva Gabrielsson

The only thing I am sure of, is that this is not the end of it – now that the lid has been opened, many will want to see the inside of this case.

Before his death from a sudden heart attack in 2004, Stieg Larsson was known for his workaholic lifestyle. He ran the anti-racist magazine Expo and wrote freelance articles aimed at exposing Swedish neo-Nazis by night, and worked at the TT news agency as a graphic artist and journalist by day. The biography is written by a colleague of Stieg Larsson at the TT news agency. According to the Swedish newspaper The Local:

In the book, entitled ‘Min vän Stieg Larsson’ (My Friend Stieg Larsson), journalist Kurdo Baksi alleges that the famed author of the Millennium series of novels, who also worked at the Swedish news agency Tidningarnas Telegrambyrå (TT), wrote biased articles and even invented material.

Eva Gabrielsson, the long-time partner of best-selling author Stieg Larsson, has slammed the new book.

”Kurdo is trying to do a character assassination of Stieg as a journalist. This is pure slander,” Gabrielsson told the Swedish television channel SVT. Gabrielsson says that Stieg Larsson only cooperated with Baksi for a short period on an anti-racist magazine and a few political articles in the 1990s and that Baksi did not actually know the author that well.

Other prominent people, among them Åsa Linderborg in Aftonbladet and  Stieg Larsson’s former boss at TT, Kenneth Ahlborn, supports Eva Gabrielsson. Ahlborn says the claims are false and an attempt to grab the media spotlight.

”I was Stieg’s boss. We worked in the same room every day. If anyone should speak about his relationship to TT it should be me. The assertion that he could make up biased, objectionable articles is so bizarre. We don’t work like that at TT and Stieg was not like that,” he said. In an article in Dagens Nyheter newspaper on Tuesday, Ahlborn wrote that Baksi’s publishers should withdraw the book unless the allegations can be proven.

There has been a lot of controversy in Sweden following Stieg Larsson’s untimely death and spectacular success. And I am sure there is more ahead.

I recently read a sad article in the Wall Street Journal: “The Strange Case of the Nordic Detectives” by Laura Miller (see also the Scandinaviancrimefiction blog). The reason why it is sad, is that it seeks to explain away the qualities of Scandinavian crime fiction. I don’t know why it was written, maybe as a kind of defense for American crime fiction.

Laura Miller has noticed (how perceptive) that “Stieg Larsson’s hugely popular Millennium Trilogy (beginning with “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo”) is the most visible example of the global mania for Scandinavian crime fiction.” So far so good. But she also writes:

It’s a truth universally acknowledged—in literary circles, at least—that gloomy novels don’t sell. Inform a reader that the book in his or her hands tells a grim story about depressed characters in a bleak setting, and you’ll see it dropped instantly in favor of some breathless thriller about secret messages implanted in famous paintings or a sentimental yarn about love that transcends time. There’s one big exception, though: Take that wintery landscape and add a dead body, then take that mopey main character and make him a sleuth trying to figure out who’s responsible for the corpse. Double check to make sure we’re not far from the Arctic Circle, and suddenly you have the recipe for an international best seller.

So, in essence – readers like these books because they are set in Scandinavia (sic)? Well. Hmm. If this is true, why did it take so long for Scandinavian crime fiction to achieve this status in the US then? Is this love for the Arctic cold a newly acquired taste by Americans? She goes on to say that

The American procedural requires at least one car chase, a dollop of gunplay and a few showdowns with the rules-bound, overly political department brass, so that our hero can demonstrate that his commitment to justice is purer and more passionate than his bosses’. And while the policemen in American crime novels often have messy personal lives, they remain the noble, two-fisted, larger-than-life crusaders you’d expect from a nation of hopeful individualists. Mr. Mankell’s Wallander, by contrast, is decidedly life-size.

So, maybe that’s just it. People are bored by those larger than life heroes. Most Americans don’t live larger than life lives, even not, I venture to guess, those working in the Wall Street Journal. And perhaps they enjoy reading about pretty real, ordinary people doing their jobs and solving crimes more by blood, sweat and tears than by muscles, high speed car chases and uppercuts.

Laura Miller prefers to think people prefer Scandinavian crime fiction because it is set in Scandinavia. She prefers not to ponder whether it is a style of crime fiction that challenges mainstream American crime fiction. But I tend instead to think that it does. I think people love Stieg Larsson’s books because his heroes are real, ordinary and modern. They love, make love, make mistakes, communicate by SMS and email, hack computers and use surveilance systems. They plot smart responses. They use as means the things the ordinary American surrounds herself or himself with. And they live in an age where agility and brains matter more than muscle and speed. They certainly are not “two-fisted”. “Two-fisted” is no longer a competitive advantage, neither in real life nor in literature. Fortunately.

The reason I write this, is that I have noticed that Miller’s flawed, superficial arguments have been repeated all across the US in newspapers and blogs, even though they are not plausible, and most often even more clumsily stated than in Miller’s original and somewhat funny article. So, to me, Miller’s article is bad because it fuels the literary xenophobia of the US and sad because it is badly reasoned.

For those seriously interested in the topic of Stieg Larsson’s success, I can instead recommend a column written by Elizabeth Farrelly in The Sydney Morning Herald which is much better reasoned and lists a set of plausible factors behind the success.

First two exceptional books – The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played with Fire.

US Edition

UK Edition

Both books full of excitement, with multiple stories running parallel to one another. Each with a great ending, but each also with loose ends. And both ending in cliffhangers, making readers want to run – not walk – to the bookstore to get the next in the series immediately. Then a third novel – a firecracker of a book, and one which ties it all up. Properly. And more than properly.

It took less than a year for the Stieg Larsson flu to spread all over Scandinavia. It was much, much more contagious than the swine flu! The books were virtually hot from the presses when people bought them – since JC nobody has sold books like Stieg Larsson to the peoples of the North, the gloomy descendants of the Vikings, and the presses could hardly keep up. And it is not that those folks aren’t used to ok crime fiction – after all, Sjöwall and Wahlöö, Mankell, Fossum, Nesbo, and a bunch of other pretty ok crime writers are from the same neck of the woods. It is because this series, the Millennium trilogy, was something more than they were used to, something very remarkable – an engaging story with engaging side-stories within the stories, with extraordinarily fascinating and thoroughly modern heroes – perhaps especially the heroine, Lisbeth Salander. And – the icing on the cake – a series of books actually dealing with a set of issues considered important and real, and doing it in a compassionate and reasoned way, with the Davids – the outsiders, people almost like you and me – giving the Goliaths, or the powers that be, visible or not, some mighty knacks on their heads.

And now, several years later, the Millennium fever hits the English speaking world as well – as the last of the major languages. Last year Mr. Larsson from Sweden (who had heard of him in 2004?) was the second best selling author in the world! It started slowly, but now With The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest it’s taking off. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest is an incredibly worthy successor to the previous two books in the trilogy, excellently conveyed to English readers by the translator, Reg Keeland. It is the book that ends the story as well as the stories within the stories. It brings them to a conclusion so gratifying that it made me ponder and experience a kind of grief and sadness in me, for the writer, the maker of these wonders, who will write no more.

When The Girl Who Played with Fire ended, the fiery Lisbeth Salander was suspended between life and death. It is probably not exactly a spoiler to revel that she survived. Both the tattooed hacker and the Russian gangster who tried to end her life are in the same hospital, Sahlgrenska hospital, just a few rooms apart.

So Lisbeth survived. But the stakes are still impossibly high. Now she is likely to be charged with three murders. Unless her father manages to kill her first, that is. The tension is as electrifying as in the first two books – it takes perhaps a hundred or so pages to really kick in, but be warned: when you’ve finished those pages you will have sunk it all – hook, line and sinker – and you will not want to get up from your chair for quite a while. The concluding volume of the Millennium trilogy is as unpredictable and magnificent as the previous two volumes!

In this third book in the Millennium series Lisbeth – the ultra-intelligent, slim, emotionally damaged Goth-like little lady, so lacking in social graces – seems to be completely cornered. She may die. If not, her father wants to kill her, and seems to be in position to pull it off. If she survives, she is likely to be charged for several murders. Unless, that is, that dark government associated and very powerful force that once placed her in an institution manages to have her declared as insane and sent back to a secure institution first.

Siding with Lisbeth is once again Mikael Blomkvist, an editor at Millennium magazine. His situation is even worse than in the previous book, as Lisbeth is now isolated, and unless something can be done he can’t even communicate with her.

Even so, facing strong opponents and impossible odds, Lisbeth Salander plans her ultimate revenge – against those who have harmed her as well as against those people who in order to hide their own dark secrets nearly destroyed her. Lisbeth Salander has been a victim, but now she is a huntress. Excellent planning, ingenious solutions and flawless execution will be called for if she is to succeed this time!

Praise:

“the completion of the trilogy confirms Larsson as one of the great talents of contemporary crime fiction” — Joan Smith, The Sunday Times

“Fans will not be disappointed: this is another roller-coaster ride that keeps you reading far too late into the night. Intricate but flawlessly plotted, it has complex characters as well as a satisfying, clear moral thrust.”

—Evening Standard

“Salander is a magnificent creation: a feminist avenging angel . . . Larsson’s hatred of injustice will drive readers across the world through a three-volume novel and leave them regretting the final page; and regretting, even more, the early death of a mastery storyteller just as he was entering his prime.”

—Observer

“Larsson has produced a coup de foudre, a novel that is complex, satisfying, clever, moral . . . This is a grown-up novel for grown-up readers, who want something more than a quick fix and a car chase. And it’s why the Millennium trilogy is rightly a publishing phenomenon all over the world.”

—Guardian

“[The trilogy] is intricately plotted, lavishly detailed but written with a breakneck pace and verve . . [Hornet's Nest] is a tantalizing double finale—first idyllic, then frenetic . . . Larsson has made the literary moods of saga and soap opera converge—with suspense as the adhesive. And, behind the quickfire action, those great chords of moral and political witness continue to resonate.”

—Independent

“[These are] extraordinary novels [with] astonishing impact . . . breakneck plotting, sympathetic characterization and the kind of startling denouements that occur more frequently than is conventionally considered possible. .. Be warned: the trilogy .. is seriously addictive.”

—Guardian (editorial)

Links to Stieg Larsson’s books at Amazon US, Amazon UK, Amazon CAN, and Barnes & Noble.

New York Times mentions three Scandinavian crime fiction books in it’s recent feature on Notable crime books of 2009:

The criminal motivation in Arnaldur Indridason’s ARCTIC CHILL (Minotaur, $24.99) can be traced to murderous racial prejudice against Asian immigrants in Iceland. Sex trafficking is the common theme of two high-impact Swedish thrillers: BOX 21 (Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26), by Anders Roslund and Borge Hellstrom, and THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE (Knopf, $25.95), by Stieg Larsson.

It’s great, of course, that Scandinavian books are mentioned on this list. And the books mentioned are good books. But I am actually disappointed that there was only 3 Scandinavian out of the 16 books mentioned. Whatever happened to the 2009 books by Karin Fossum, Camilla Läckberg, Hakan Nesser, Johan Theorin, Jo Nesbo, and the rest? And to other European writers?

To my mind, a far too American-centered list by New York Times. Too much xenofobia among the good folks in the Big Apple?

It was only a question of when the Millenium series by Stieg Larsson would go to Hollywood. The award-winning and best-selling Millennium trilogy has become a global sensation. It has now sold over 25 million copies in over 40 countries. Stieg Larsson was the world’s second-best selling author of 2008. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
was the best selling book in the EU in 2008.

According to The Wrap,

Sony Pictures is in final discussions to option the English-language film rights to Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Series.

And according to Hollywood Insider:

It was only a matter of time before Hollywood scooped up the rights to Stieg Larsson’s best-selling trio of crime thrillers, including The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire; and the yet-to-be-released The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest.

Slashfilm gives quite a spin to this piece of news. They are running a headline that says:

The Millennium Series To Become American Movies: Brad Pitt and George Clooney in the Rumors

They also speculate on

Ellen Page, Kristen Stewart or Natalie Portman playing Lisbeth Salander. Obviously, that’s going to be quite an interesting role to play!

It’s going to be interesting to follow this. Somebody has already established an internet site for the movies. I am sure it’s going to be a lot of hype, and that the sales of Stieg Larsson’s books will skyrocket.

The American publishing house Knopf – the publisher of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium series in the United States – is currently being publicly punished for gross incompetence by book stores and readers in the US. An interesting spectacle, if you ask me.

New York Times reports that book stores are importing Stieg Larsson’s latest,The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest (link to same at Amazon UK), from England, where it has already been published. The price in England is about $ 15, and it is selling in the US for up to $ 45. So this is pretty good business. As will notice if you click on the image of the book, Amazon only sells preorders, and not the real thing because they are loyal to silly Knopf!

So wherein lies the folly and incompetence of Knopf? In behaving as if we live in 1909 and not 2009! In 1909 few people would have known that the book had already been published in England (or, indeed, that English printing presses managed to churn out The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played With Fire much quicker as well). But in 2009, in the Age of Internet, the Age of the informed consumer, virtually everybody know. Including, of course, small independent book sellers throughout the land.

So people do the smart thing – some readers order from Amazon UK, some from other online booksellers in England, some bookstores import from England. People buy several copies of the book in England whilst traveling and bring it back. There are many possibilities! And in the Age of Internet people are smart – they find them!

Only Knopf still lives in the pre-internet age. They could have coordinated the US publication dates with those in England. Indeed, perhaps they could even have beaten England to the mill? But like GM, the market insensitive giant whose market shares have steadily dwindled since World War II, they chose to do it the way they preferred, ignoring the nuisance of consumers preferences. It is hard to see any other reason why the US is the last country in the civilized world to get The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest?