Hello Avid Readers! Yesterday a dear friend of mine popped into the shop as I was importantly and busily immersed in “bookwork” (I had my accounts spread all over the counter but I was on a comfy chair reading a novel!). She inquired as to what I had my head buried in, and realised that she had already finished this crime/murder mystery, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. On being asked how I liked the book, I replied that, at a hundred pages short of its ending, I was starting to feel disappointed because I thought I had figured out who the murderer was already. I shared my suspicions and her response was simply “hmmm”. Well, by the time I got home I was forgoing my usual afternoon garden watering and walk with the dogs – this book had me captured. I was intrigued and pleased at the same time, as crime fiction is outside of the genre I usually read in.
"Män som hatar kvinnor" (Swedish for "Men who hate women," renamed in the English translation as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) is an award-winning novel by the late Swedish author and journalist Stieg Larsson, the first in his "Millennium Trilogy". At his death in November 2004 he left three unpublished novels that made up the trilogy - it became a posthumous best-seller in Europe.
And so it goes: A middle-aged journalist, Mikael Blomkvist, publishes the magazine Millennium in Stockholm. He is hired one day by Henrik Vanger, the aged former CEO of a group of companies owned by a wealthy dynasty, in order to chronicle the family history. His real mission, however, is to solve a cold case - the disappearance, some forty years previously, of Vanger's great-niece when she was sixteen. Blomkvist encounters "the old Miss Marple closed-room scenario with all the wealthy suspects marooned on the family estate on an island; a village we grow familiar with, full of hostile locals peering out from behind their curtains. The real main character of the story is Lisbeth Salander, an asocial punk who has been victimized by authorities throughout her whole life. By accident she meets Blomkvist and the unlikely couple become another classic detective pair where the hunters become the hunted.
An epic tale of serial murder and corporate trickery spanning several continents, the novel takes in complicated international financial fraud and the buried evil past of a wealthy Swedish industrial family. Through its main character, it also references classic forbears of the crime thriller genre - Astrid Lindgren, Enid Blyton, Agatha Christie and several other key figures in the history of the detective novel. As a journalist and magazine editor in Stockholm until his death, Larsson reveals a knowledge and enjoyment of both English and American crime fiction. He declared that he wrote his opus in the evening after work for his own pleasure.
A fantastic and gripping whodunnit. And did I guess the murderer correctly? Nope. All was revealed at 2.30am this morning at which time I was sick of not sleeping and had to find out what happened in the ending. Hopeless. The second in the trilogy is now sitting on the shop book shelf ready to be sold. My accounts are still spread across the counter. Hmmmm…. Life is full of tough decisions….
