A Will to Thrill Thrills Japan
Jon Thunqvist | 2010-01-22
Larsson died of a heart attack at age 50 in 2004, just a few months before The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the first book in the Millennium trilogy, was to be published. Until then, Larsson who grew up in a small village in Northern Sweden, had worked as a journalist and editor. He founded the anti-racist magazine Expo in 1995, which made him and his partner, Eva Gabrielsson, the targets of the Swedish Nazi movement and other extremist groups on the far right.
Larsson’s rise to fame was by no means voluntary. He rather tried to avoid the limelight and regarded crime writing more than a hobby than anything else.
Hobby or not, the books about his characters, journalist Mikael Blomkvist and his friend, the young computer hacker Lisbeth Salander, have become runaway successes in every country they have been published – so far 41 countries for a combined 20 million copies.
Interestingly enough, in one and maybe the only interview given by Larsson, he claimed to have built the Salander character on another Swedish literary icon, Pippi Longstocking. Larsson’s idea was to recreate Pippi as a 25-year-old; what would she have been like, what would she have been doing. He ended up with a socially handicapped, emotionally challenged, extremely intelligent girl with a photographic memory and a bone to pick with the world.
When the Millennium trilogy was translated into Japanese—although from French!—the publishers decided to make them into six books. The reason for this was that the three books were quite long, each some 400 to 500 pages. On top of that, as many of the characters and places were quite unfamiliar to the Japanese audience, it was necessary to add some explanatory notes to each volume.
All three of the original books have been made into movies, with the first one among the global top-grossers of 2009.
So, what is with Sweden and crime writing ? On a per capita basis, no other country is even close to have as many successful crime writers as Sweden: Larsson, Nesser, Mankell, just to name a few. They do actually have one thing in common. They were or are all avid readers of the Martin Beck novels, written in the late 1960s by the journalists-turned-writers couple Per Wahlöö and Maj Sjöwall. Hugely successful, the ten novels blazed a trail that proved the crime novel to be the perfect format for stories that shine a critical light on the world we live in.
Sjöwall and Wahlöö were children of their time and decidedly left-wing. Yet their novels managed to thread ever so carefully over the mine-infested ground of demagoguery, melodrama and outright propaganda. That the books are still in print bears witness of a clearly successful recipe.
Larsson’s books are longer, and may lack some of the stylistic touches of Sjöwall and Wahlöö. Nonetheless, they are well-paced and character-driven in a way that makes it very difficult to put them down once you have started reading.
According to some sources, Larsson had planned a series of 10 books, and there is actually a fourth unfinished book stored on a computer somewhere. The Larsson estate, mainly his father and brother on one side and Ms. Gabrielsson on the other, are at odds on how to proceed with the fourth book, and how to divide the massive proceeds from the books and movies that have been published so far. It is a drama that is played out in front of the Swedish media—and almost as dramatic as the Millennium adventures themselves.
Books in the Millennium trilogy:
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2008, Japan; 2005, Sweden)
The Girl Who Played with Fire (2009, Japan; 2006, Sweden)
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets´ Nest (2009, Japan; 2007, Sweden)
(This article is drawn from an article appearing in Opportunity Sweden: http://www.isatokyo.org/
