STIRRING UP THE HORNETS’ NEST
Rather than a new addition to his Millennium Series, Stieg Larsson’s legacy is better served by a non-fiction account of his undaunted nosiness
David Lagercrantz’s sixth instalment of the Millennium trilogy, which has overextended its rationale beyond the ludicrous, investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist and his geeky-freaky sidekick, Lisbeth Salander, take on Russia’s underworld run by Lisbeth’s sister, Camilla, who is her very opposite—a baddie beauty queen. Unfortunately, the convoluted yet banal plot is plodding as the story’s engine mostly idles. Lagercrantz understands nothing of the fundamentals behind thriller-writing that the original creator, Stieg Larsson, who died in 2004, excelled at.
Larsson’s love for pulp crime fiction is obvious from the way he built scenes, tightened dramatic screws and built momentum until the cumulative terror climaxed. His writing was crisp, his dialogue sharp—he was the Hemingway of Nordic noir. In comparison, Lagercrantz’s sequels feature seemingly lobotomised characters mouthing moronic dialogue, with no psychological depth. Things that we would rather read between the lines are spelled out and whenever a situation gets interesting (like the elaborate assassination attempt on Camilla, botched by Salander), this Larsson dissimulator cops out, shifting the focus to more boring scenes. Mostly, Salander sits in hotel rooms playing with her laptop. Her interactions with Blomkvist that electrified the original instalments have been relegated to emails and texts, which, though more realistic in this age of social media, make for unspeakably dull reading. Every book has a sentence at its core that captures its soul and, in this case, it comes on page 144: “Lisbeth saw the e-mail at ten in the evening, but she did not read it.” Or maybe on page 180, when she receives another urgent message from Blomkvist: “She was too tired and out of sorts to want to look at it, and she stared vacantly out of the window.” Even the exotic scenes set in Goa and Nepal turn out to be part of a backstory that is only briefly recapped. But the good news is that these poor sequels don’t sell much and Lagercrantz’s contract has been killed, so with some luck I won’t have to review a seventh instalment of this sleep-inducing yawn… sorry, yarn. It’s more interesting to read The Man Who Played
With Fire, a non-fiction bestseller translated into 50 languages and written like a novel about the real Stieg Larsson poking his nose into the biggest cold case in legal history—the assassination of Swedish prime minister Olof Palme in 1986. The investigation was bungled by the amateurish police force helmed by a cowboyish old-school yahoo with remarkably fuzzy ideas of forensic work. Meanwhile, Larsson cracked the case within 18 months and handed over a memo that identified the coconspirators to the police, who ignored the tip-off and so Larsson never got the €4.6 million reward. He continued his research until his untimely death, by when he had compiled many boxes of evidence, including leaked information from the British MI6 who kept a file on the murderer. Jan Stocklassa has gone through the boxes and put together Larsson’s investigation into a highly entertaining account, including how he wove in clues in his bestselling trilogy— Lisbeth Salander, incidentally, is named after Palme’s wife Lisbeth. An activist-journalist, Larsson remains one of the writerly enigmas of our time. It’s obvious that he modelled the fictional Blomkvist partly on himself, but Stocklassa reveals that he also had something of the geekish Salander in him, with an obsessive urge to collect vast amounts of data and search for patterns in it. Of the hundred-plus books published about the assassination, this certainly is the most readable and its combination of famous novelist, famous victim will go down in history among other pioneering works such as In Cold Blood, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, and My Dark Places. ■
Lagercrantz’s sequels of Stieg Larsson’s works are sleep-inducing yarns