Crime’s grand tour: European detective fiction

Andrea Camilleri’s Inspector Montalbano (played by Luca Zingaretti in the TV series) questions what it means to be a good policeman

Crime fiction is a magnifying glass that reveals the fingerprints of history. From Holmes and Poirot to Montalbano and the rise of Scandi-noir, Mark Lawson investigates the long tradition of European super-sleuths and their role in turbulent times.

One of the functions of fiction is to serve as a kind of tourism, either showing us places, situations and people that we might not otherwise reach or scrolling through snapshots of events or sensations that we remember. Crime stories rarely serve the latter purpose – most admirers of homicide novels will, thankfully, never become or even know a murder victim – but are a perfect illustration of the former.

Throughout its history, crime literature has operated as a sort of imaginative travel agency, taking customers across borders and introducing them to unknown cultures. The story commonly considered the birth of the whodunit – Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841) – was written by an American and set in Paris. Since then, the genre has regularly been a ticket for a Grand Tour.

Agatha Christie, an enthusiastic globe-trotter through her wealth and marriage to an archaeologist, sent Hercule Poirot on the Orient Express, Nile cruises and aeroplane journeys, depicting trips that the majority of her audience was unlikely ever to experience for real. Later in the 20th century, readers, listeners and viewers of detective tales learned about France from Simenon’s Maigret and the Netherlands through Nicolas Freeling’s Commissaris Van der Valk, who achieved the rare double of topping both the TV ratings lists (in the ITV series starring Barry Foster) and the pop charts, with the Simon Park Orchestra’s recording of the theme tune, “Eye Level”.

And, these days, Britons have a greater understanding of Scandinavian culture than ever before: not from exports such as Abba, Bjorn Borg, Volvo or Ikea, but through what was – at least until the recent apothesois of sado-masochistic soft porn – the biggest publishing phenomenon of the 21st century: the super-selling mystery stories of writers from Sweden (Stieg Larsson, Henning Mankell) and Norway (Jo Nesbø).

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When a book gets popular, parodies aren’t far behind

By Carol Memmott

Parody may be the sincerest form of flattery, especially when it comes to blockbuster books.

The Hunger Games and A Game of Thrones are just the latest to be spoofed.

•The Hunger Pains from The Harvard Lampoon (Touchstone, $13.99, in stores) is a send-up of Suzanne Collins’ young-adult novel about a dystopian society in which teenagers fight to the death on live TV. The parody arrives as the highly anticipated movie version is set to open Friday. Collins’ heroine is Katniss Everdeen; Hunger Pains renames her Kantkiss Neverclean.

•On sale Tuesday is A Game of Groans: A Sonnet of Slush and Soot (Thomas Dunne, $9.99) by George R.R. Washington (Chicago-based writer Alan Goldsher). It’s a parody of George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones, the first book in the epic A Song of Ice and Fire fantasy series. It’s perfectly timed, too: The second season of HBO’s Game of Thrones miniseries premieres April 1.

•Published last year, The Girl With the Sturgeon Tattoo (St. Martin’s Griffin, $9.99), by the pseudonymous Lars Arffssen, was inspired by The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.Stieg Larsson’s computer hacker heroine, Lisbeth Salander, is called Lizzy Salamander in the parody.

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50 Movies That Are Better Than The Book

By Matt Barone

Passionate bookworms can be a protective bunch. Just behold their furious anger if a paperback-to-film adaptation’s screenwriter changes even the slightest element of a beloved novel. And it’s usually justified, since far too many Hollywood adaptations either abandon all of the source’s subtext or enhance the showier moments while forgetting about character developments. That’s why the staggering amounts of fans dedicated to the late Swedish author Stieg Larsson’s “Millennium Series” are waiting with baited breath and sharpened knives for The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, acclaimed director David Fincher’s much-ballyhooed repackaging of Larsson’s first “Millennium” entry (hitting theaters tomorrow, December 20).

Having sold 15 million copies in the United States alone, Larsson’s The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is a pop culture phenomenon, so thankfully the impeccable Fincher (Fight Club, The Social Network) tackled the project with his signature, superlative talents. His first master-stroke was casting the relatively unknown Rooney Mara as the series’ iconic female badass, Lisbeth Salander, a troubled computer whiz who dresses like a Hot Topic regular and helps solve a 40-year-old murder mystery. In addition, Fincher and screenwriter Steven Zaillian (Schindler’s List, Gangs Of New York) retained the book’s graphically adult nature but also expanded upon characters’ complexities (namely Lisbeth) and sprinkled in sickly clever stylistic touches (the sounds of Enya’s “Orinoco Flow” make a particularly grisly scene all the more disturbing).

Those 15 million owners of Larsson’s Dragon Tattoo can breathe easy: Not only is Fincher’s movie a worthy adaptation, it’s by all means the superior version, even better than the impressive 2009 Swedish film starring Noomi Rapace. Inspired by Fincher’s accomplishment, we’ve taken a look back at cinema’s history to salute The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo’s predecessors, a.k.a. 50 Movies That Are Better Than The Book.

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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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For Stieg Larsson Fans, New Editions to Savor

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

By JULIE BOSMAN

Fans of Stieg Larsson’s blockbuster “Millennium” trilogy can count on a few more editions to collect.

“The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest,” the final book in Mr. Larsson’s series, will be issued in paperback in February, his publisher said on Monday, after spending 70 weeks on the New York Times hardcover fiction best-seller list.

A movie tie-in edition of the first book, “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” will be released on Tuesday, ahead of the film’s release in the United States on Dec. 21. Russell Perreault, a spokesman for Vintage Books, part of Random House, said the publisher is planning to ship more than 1.3 million paperback copies of the newest edition of “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” in November.

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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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Charlaine Harris; Stieg Larsson Estate Ink Graphic Novel Deals

Charlaine Harris.

By Calvin Reid

In what has turned into a big day for comics, in separate announcements Charlaine Harris, author of the bestselling Sookie Stackhouse prose novels, signed a deal with Penguin’s Ace Books imprint to publish Cemetery Girl, an original graphic novel trilogy; and DC Entertainment’s Vertigo imprint announced plans to publish graphic novel adaptations of the late Steig Larrson’s bestselling Millenium trilogy prose novels.

The hit TV series True Blood is based on Harris’s popular Sookie Stackhouse novels. Cemetery Girl is a paranormal/fantasy mystery novel about a teenage girl with amnesia living alone in a cemetery. It is Harris’ first effort at creating an original graphic novel series (IDW publishes a graphic novel series based on the True Blood TV show) and she will collaborate on the graphic novels with fantasy writer Christopher Golden and with artist Don Kramer. The first book in the graphic novel series will be released in 2013. All eight of the Sookie Stackhouse novels have appeared on the New York Times bestseller lists.

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Anders Breivik massacre will change crime writing, says author

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Jo Nesbø says his country’s reaction to the killings made him proud to be Norwegian.

By Charlotte Higgins

Jo Nesbø, the Norwegian author whose books about the driven, enigmatic detective Harry Hole have made him a bestseller in Britain, said yesterday it was inevitable that crime writing would change in the wake of the Anders Behring Breivik shootings last month.

The author, speaking at the Edinburgh international book festival, said that the massacre “will definitely affect crime writing. I don’t think it will be something that crime writers will think about consciously, but we are all changed. It’s there in the back our heads, and everything that is in our minds will find its way to paper.

“It will influence the way we think, and write, and communicate.” Nesbø said his country’s reaction to the Breivik shootings has made him “proud of being a Norwegian”.

He said Norway would never and should never forget the events of 22 July, but added: “We have to get back to normal; we have to start laughing again.” He also said that the country, which is moving towards local elections, needs to focus on “real political problems”.

“Things have to get back to normal. The feeling in the country is: let this be something we don’t forget, but let’s not change the way we do things.”

Nesbø came to prominence in Britain with the publication in 2006 of his Harry Hole novel Redbreast. The Snowman, published in Britain in 2010, and The Leopard, which followed this year, have cemented his reputation as one of the greatest of the wave of Scandinavian writers, alongside Swedish authors such as Henning Mankell and Stieg Larsson, and his fellow Norwegian, Karin Fossum.

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BOOK WORLD Bestsellers — August 28, 2011

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By Christopher Schoppa

Along with the smattering of new titles that join the lists this weekend, there’s a veritable rush for books that have been in hardcover for a considerable length of time (several with paperback options) — President Bush’s memoir, which hasn’t been on the general nonfiction list in months and months, but which might make sense in light of the forthcoming 9/11 anniversary.

Over in fiction, Kathryn Stockett’s “The Help” not only remains on the hardcover list, but rockets up to #5; and Stieg Larsson’s “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest,” which may not see a paperback edition before the new year (the first two titles in the trilogy have been near fixtures on the paperback list for well over a year).

As for brand new entries — Jane Fonda’s guide to living the good life in the nonfiction column, while in fiction, we have the new Terry Goodkind fantasy and, most encouragingly, the debut novel from Washington writer Jennifer Close, who chronicles the lives of three friends who juggle their own, often dysfunctional lives while going through what begins to seem like an endless parade of other people’s weddings — as bridesmaids to boot.

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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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