Stieg Larsson’s ‘Girl’ series is but a tip of the iceberg of Scandinavian crime fiction

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ByLaura DeMarco

Nordic noir fiction can be divided into two periods.

Before the girl and after the girl.

The girl being “The Girl.” You know, the one with the dragon tattoo.

Late author Stieg Larsson’s 2008 novel “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” took the publishing world — make that the world — by storm.

The first book in his Millennium series introduced the world not only to punkette heroine hacker Lisbeth Salander and crusading journalist Mikel Blomkvist as they attempt to track down a young girl lost for decades. Larsson also introduced the rising genre of Nordic noir. The titles in his series have sold a phenomenal 53 million copies in more than 50 countries, including more than 1 million e-books.

Suddenly, in Larsson’s wake, dark and bloody books set in the Swedish (or Norwegian, or Icelandic) countryside began hitting best-seller lists worldwide and flying off library shelves. These were not necessarily new author names, but Lisbeth made them popular.

For nearly a decade before this genre-changing character arrived on the scene, writers such as Henning Mankell, Karin Fossum, Hakan Nesser, Jo Nesbo and Peter Hoeg had been delving into the dark side of sunny Scandinavia.

Their gritty, philosophical thrillers merged tenets of hard-boiled American noir, such as the troubled detective, with specific regional concerns, such as anti-immigration and anti-welfare-state sentiment. And lots of snow and ice, of course.

“There was a Scandinavian invasion years before Stieg Larsson. It really all started with Henning Mankell, whose books began appearing here in the late ’90s,” says Bill Ott, editor and publisher of Booklist Publications of the American Library Association, who has written extensively about the trend.

“What Stieg Larsson did was become popular, not just with crime-fiction readers but with everyone.”

Wendy Bartlett, collection development manager for the Cuyahoga County Public Library system, has seen the trend explode locally.

“Interest in Scandinavian writers was building, but Larsson blew it wide open with ‘Tattoo,’ ” she says. “We have as many Larsson books circulating as you normally would for a John Grisham.

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Fourth Stieg Larsson novel rumours dismissed

Claims that Swedish author Stieg Larsson wrote a fourth novel are wide of the mark, his partner has revealed.

Stieg Larsson and Eva Gabrielsson were together for 32 years

The Millennium trilogy writer died before books including The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo were published.

Eva Gabrielsson told BBC Radio 4’s Woman Hour that there was “not much truth” in reports that he left another novel on a laptop.

She said while he had written some new pages, there was not enough to shape another novel.

“There’s the beginning of a fourth novel,” she explained.

“I would estimate it to be about 200 pages, given what I saw in late August during our last vacation, and given what I knew of Stieg’s workload in his last two months.”

The trilogy has sold 27m copies, and reports of a potential fourth book in the series had excited fans.

But Gabrielsson said: “It probably doesn’t hang together. Stieg was a spontaneous writer, he could write scenes and not knit them together until later on – he just liked the scene. You can’t call it a novel.”

Larsson died of a heart attack aged 50 in 2004. Despite being together for 32 years, Gabrielsson was not entitled to anything from his estate under Swedish law, as they were not married and there was no valid will.

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Dragon Tattoo hits 2m UK sales

| Philip Stone

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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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The Boy With The Unsold U.S. Rights: Ideas for Disrupting a Publishing Pain Point

 Paul Carr

On the face of things, I don’t have a huge amount in common with Stieg Larsson. For a start I’m not Swedish; and I’m not dead. Also, in the time it took you to read those last two sentences, Stieg Larsson sold more books than I did in the whole of last year.

And yet, if Larsson were still around, I feel sure there’s at least one area on which we’d agree (two if you count on the importance of training female Eritrean People’s Liberation Front guerrillas in the use of grenade launchers). And that’s the pain and frustration of trying to sell international rights to our books….read more

In new memoir, Larsson partner Eva Gabrielsson says she wants to finish Millenium series

Mark Medley

In a new memoir to be published next week, Eva Gabrielsson says that she wants to finish writing a fourth volume in the massively popular series of thrillers written by her longtime partner, the late author Stieg Larsson.

Almost 50 million copies of series’ three books — The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played With Fire, and The Kick Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest — have been sold around the world. The novels also spawned a film franchise, with the English-language adaptation coming later this year.

There could have been more.
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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

David Fincher Gets The Girl

The darkly obsessive director of Fight Club and The Social Network takes on the biggest franchise since Harry Potter­—The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. An exclusive first look from the set of the year’s most anticipated film.

By Lynn Hirschberg
Photograph by Jean-Baptiste Mondino
Styled by Trish Summerville

On a dark, icy afternoon in late November, director David Fincher was in a photo studio in Stockholm adjusting blood. The blood, which was of course fake, covered the hands of a young actress named Rooney Mara, but to Fincher’s mind, which is prone to reimagining reality in cinematic terms, the bloody hands belonged to Lisbeth Salander, the heroine of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Salander—an androgynous, bisexual computer hacker with multiple piercings and a distinctive tattoo on her back—is the complicated star of Stieg Larsson’s “Millennium” series, a trio of novels that have sold more than 50 million (and counting) copies worldwide. Larsson described Salander in opposites: slender but tough, “spidery” but elegant. Fincher, who is directing the American movie version of the first book in the series, has taken that gamine, biker-chick, downtown-girl template and tweaked it. Now she’s his.

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Pubs See Big Jump in Holiday E-book Sales

Based on figures provided to PW by publishers, a number of familiar names topped e-book bestseller lists over the holidays as consumers hit the Web downloading current bestsellers for their new e-readers. While frontlist titles by expected names—Jodi Picoult, Janet Evanovich, Stieg Larsson—dominated, some readers also opted for weightier material like Siddhartha Mukherjee’s “biography” of cancer, The Emperor of All Maladies. Some backlist books, by such authors as Garth Stein and Tim O’Brien, also found their way onto new devices. The rush on e-books also caused heavy jumps from 2009’s sales figures. Simon & Schuster reported a 150% jump in e-book sales for this holiday over the same period last year. Random House reported an impressive 300% leap, and Kensington said its e-book sales for this holiday season climbed a whopping 400% over 2009. Here is a compilation of publishers’ top five bestselling e-books (in descending order) for December 25 and 26….read more 
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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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Italian crime looks into dark heart of society

European crime fiction, particularly Scandinavian noir, is enjoying a huge boom with novels such as Stieg Larsson’s The Millennium Trilogy and Henning Mankell’s Wallander. But Italian noir is emerging as a force inspired by the dark side of Italian society.

Andrea Camilleri says that crime fiction writers fill a void in society

Faced with the grim reality that many murders go unsolved, Italian writers are drawn to stories that offer no simple resolutions or happy endings.

“We write more noir in Italy than traditional thriller. This is because we are more pessimistic about human nature,” says Giancarlo De Cataldo, who became a crime fiction writer after serving as a judge.

His experience of meeting members of the infamous Rome gang, the Banda Della Magliana, has inspired his novel Romanzo Criminale….read more

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