A Friday in November

It happened every year, was almost a ritual. And this was his eighty-second birthday. When, as usual, the flower was delivered, he took off the wrapping paper and then picked up the telephone to call Detective Superintendent Morell who, when he retired, had moved to Lake Siljan in Dalarna. They were not only the same age, they had been born on the same day—which was something of an irony under the circumstances. The old policeman was sitting with his coffee, waiting, expecting the call.

“It arrived.”

“What is it this year?”

“I don’t know what kind it is. I’ll have to get someone to tell me what it is. It’s white.”

“No letter, I suppose.”

“Just the flower. The frame is the same kind as last year. One of those do-it-yourself ones.”

“Postmark?”

“Stockholm.”

“Handwriting?”

“Same as always, all in capitals. Upright, neat lettering.”

With that, the subject was exhausted, and not another word was exchanged for almost a minute. The retired policeman leaned back in his kitchen chair and drew on his pipe. He knew he was no longer expected to come up with a pithy comment or any sharp question which would shed a new light on the case. Those days had long since passed, and the exchange between the two men seemed like a ritual attaching to a mystery which no one else in the whole world had the least interest in unravelling.

***

The Latin name was Leptospermum (Myrtaceae) rubinette. It was a plant about ten centimetres high with small, heather-like foliage and a white flower with five petals about two centimetres across.

The plant was native to the Australian bush and uplands, where it was to be found among tussocks of grass. There it was called Desert Snow. Someone at the botanical gardens in Uppsala would later confirm that it was a plant seldom cultivated in Sweden. The botanist wrote in her report that it was related ... continue reading >

Combine the chilly Swedish backdrop and moody psychodrama of a Bergman movie with the grisly pyrotechnics of a serial-killer thriller, then add an angry punk heroine and a down-on-his-luck investigative journalist, and you have the ingredients of Stieg Larsson’s first novel, “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” a huge best seller in the author’s native Sweden, and a sensation in France, Germany and the Netherlands too.

It’s Mr. Larsson’s two protagonists—Carl Mikael Blomkvist, a reporter filling the role of detective, and his sidekick, Lisbeth Salander, a k a the girl with the dragon tattoo—who make this novel more than your run-of-the-mill mystery: they’re both compelling, conflicted, complicated people, idiosyncratic in the extreme, and interesting enough to compensate for the plot mechanics, which seize up as the book nears its unsatisfying conclusion.

Mr. Larsson—who died in 2004, shortly after turning in this novel and two companion volumes—was himself a journalist and a magazine editor, and his knowledge of this world enables him to do a credible job of recounting Blomkvist’s efforts to investigate the two biggest stories of his career: corruption, embezzlement and money laundering on the part of a big-shot Swedish industrialist, and the disappearance of a 16-year-old girl named Harriet, who seemingly vanished without a trace during a family reunion. ... (Read the full review)

A Swedish industrialist named Henrik Vanger, on his 82nd birthday, receives a pressed flower in the mail, as he has for each of the 36 years since his beloved 16-year-old grand-niece Harriet vanished. This flower, like all the others, comes with no note, no return address and no fingerprints. After decades of futile investigations, Henrik has painfully concluded that Harriet is dead and the flowers are the killer's way of tormenting him. This time, believing he has not long to live, the old man decides to make one last attempt to penetrate the mystery, and he turns for help to a disgraced Stockholm journalist, Mikael Blomkvist.

Thus begins this remarkable first novel by the Swedish journalist Stieg Larsson. "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" has been a huge bestseller in Europe and will be one here if readers are looking for an intelligent, ingeniously plotted, utterly engrossing thriller that is variously a serial-killer saga, a search for a missing person and an informed glimpse into the worlds of journalism and business. ... (Read the full review)

Reading thrillers for a living is a great job: I’d do it for nothing (don’t tell my editors). But after a diet of serial killers, apocalyptic scenarios, burned-out private detectives and the usual crop of honest or bent federal agents and cops, it’s like a blast of cold, fresh air to read “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo”—the latest entry in the booming Swedish crime-fiction business.

Karin Fossum won prizes and big sales in recent years for her “The Indian Bride.” So did Henning Mankell (“Faceless Killers”) and other Swedish writers. But what separates Stieg Larsson’s work from theirs is that it features at its center two unique and fascinating characters: a disgraced financial journalist and the absolutely marvelous 24-year-old Lisbeth Salander—a computer-hacking Pippi Longstocking with pierced eyebrows and a survival instinct that should scare anyone who gets in her way.

We first meet Salander through the eyes of her adoring and protective employer, Dragan Armansky, head of a large private security firm in Stockholm. “He thought for the thousandth time that nobody seemed more out of place in a prestigious security firm,” writes Larsson in Reg Keeland’s elegant translation. “His mistrust was both wise and irrational. In Armansky’s eyes, Salander was beyond doubt the most able investigator he had met in all his years in the business.” ... (Read the full review)