Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy to become very graphic novel

Stieg Larsson's graphic adapter Denise Mina. Photograph: Murdo Macleod

DC Comics signs Glaswegian crime writer Denise Mina to adapt Girl with the Dragon Tattoo novels for comic format.

By Alison Flood

Super-tough bisexual computer hacker Lisbeth Salander, star of Stieg Larsson’s bestselling Millenium trilogy, is set to become even spikier after Glaswegian crime novelist Denise Mina gives her the graphic novel treatment.

Mina has been chosen by Larsson’s literary estate to adapt the late Swedish novelist’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and its sequels The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest into six graphic novels for DC Comics. The author, whose latest novel The End of the Wasp Season was shortlisted for the Gold Dagger award, said she had nearly finished adapting the first book, with the first volume to be out next March. The illustrator is Leonardo Manco, with whom Mina has previously collaborated on the Hellblazer comics.

“The estate has given me free rein and I can change what I want … I think they think that enough people have read the books, and anyway, Larsson really loved comics,” she said. “I’m not changing that much [but] I think for most women there are problematic aspects of the story … Lisbeth Salander is just a brilliant character. She is the main event for me. But she is a survivor of sexual abuse and I think every so often [Larsson] doesn’t realise how frightened she is most of the time. I wanted to put those bits in.”

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H&M launch The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo clothing range

Noomi Rapace as Lisbeth Salander in the original The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo film. Photograph: Knut Koivisto

The Swedish high street store will launch designs by Trish Summerville, costume designer on David Fincher’s version of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. But what would Lisbeth Salander say?

By Rosie Swash

Lisbeth Salander is many things. A heroine, a techno-whizz, a hard nut with a soft centre, and, yes, the fictional character at the centre of Stieg Larsson’s hugely successful Millennium Trilogy. But fashionista? Considering Larsson went out of his way to portray Salander as a goth-punk styled sartorial rebel, we’re surprised to see H&M have produced an entire clothing line in her honour.

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Stieg Larsson’s final novel ’70% complete’, colleague claims

Stieg Larsson. Photograph: Scanpix/PA

Kurdo Baksi says he was shown manuscript for sequel to Millennium Trilogy, which would ‘make the perfect Hollywood film’.

By Charlotte Higgins

The fourth novel by Stieg Larsson, author of the 30m-selling Millennium Trilogy, is 70% complete, strongly features Camilla Salander, the twin of the series’ protaganist Lisbeth, and is set “between Ireland, Sweden and the US”, according to Larsson’s former colleague Kurdo Baksi.

Baksi, who was speaking at the Edinburgh international book festival about his memoir, Stieg Larsson My Friend, claims to have been shown the draft novel by Larsson’s partner of nearly 30 years, Eva Gabrielsson, shortly after the author’s death. Larsson died of a heart attack in 2004, before the novels were published.

However Baksi’s claims about the fourth book are sharply contradicted by Gabrielsson herself, who has said that the novel, at about 200 pages, is only about 30% complete and does not “hang together”. It exists in draft form on his computer, which she has kept.

Baksi said: “It is at 260 pages at the moment – about 70% complete. Eva has said the book is not so complete. She took the book after Stieg died and showed it to me and his father.”

Gabrielsson, who has also written a memoir, has previously hit out at Baksi’s representation of Larsson as a sloppy journalist who was not above rigging the facts, describing Baksi’s book as “pure slander” and calling for it to be withdrawn.

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Dragon Tattoo hits 2m UK sales

| Philip Stone

click to buy

Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Quercus), the first book in the late Swedish journalist’s Millennium thriller trilogy, has become only the sixth adult novel to sell more than two million copies since records began.

Helped by a deep-discount deal at Tesco, 10,870 copies of the book were snapped up at UK booksellers last week, taking its total sales across all print editions to 2,000,345. Since publication in January 2008, £10.9m has been spent on copies of the thriller, which sold just 14,100 copies in its original, hardcover format.

The book joins an elite group of just five other adult-audience novels to have sold more than two million copies:

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2010 saw a frenzy for fiction, led by Stieg Larsson’s ‘Girl’ trilogy

Stieg Larsson's trilogy took the top three spots in the list of best-selling titles in 2010.

By Bob Minzesheimer and Anthony DeBarros, USA TODAY

Call it escapism or merely a fondness for good stories, but in the midst of a recession at home and wars abroad, fiction seized a record-high share of the best sellers of 2010.The year’s most popular author: Stieg Larsson, the late Swedish novelist, whose Millennium trilogy of crime thrillers captured the top three spots on USA TODAY’s Best-Selling Books list for 2010, based on data collected all year….read more

Bestsellers ’10: The Year in Bestsellers

If we had to name the author of the year, it would be Stieg Larsson. With a combined weekly total of 202 weeks on the 2010 bestseller charts and an impressive 59 of those in the #1 spot, his Millennium trilogy—The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest—outpaced all other bestsellers. Larsson’s posthumously published trilogy (he died suddenly in 2004 at 50 shortly after he delivered the manuscripts to his Swedish publisher) was the main factor in Random House Inc.’s 3.2% gain in its bestseller share of paperback slots in 2010….read more
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