The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

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The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

A novel  Check it out at Amazon.com

By
Steig Larsson

This pulp detective novel was so engaging I read it in a weekend and did nothing else.  The pocketbook ran 600 pages, so it took a weekend.  Critics called it sleazy, so at first, I wanted to ignore the book. Unfortunately, the Swedish films of the Tattoo Girl/Millenium triology popped up on Netflix and they rocked. Michael Nyquist and Noomi Rapace gave great performances. After watching the American version, I don't believe Daniel Craig seemed as good a Blomkvist as Michael Nyqvist. Noomi Rapace owns Lisbeth, IMHO. Whatever, I could no longer ignore the first book.

The book knocked both film versions out of the park. The author, Steig Larsson preaches that writers should be engaging, and he practices what he preaches.  By engaging, he must mean a writer who presents his characters in a favorable light, enough that you want to read on even after they become monsters, bores, drunks or whatever.

Larsson makes some errors, the most egregious is that he tells his story, he doesn't show it, but he proved so engaging, I didn't take much offense at his style.

Lisbeth Salander, the woman in the title, the story's detective, doesn't really come on the case until the last third of the book, and by that time it's becoming so hard to solve the mystery that her effortless skills become almost magical. The journalist Kalle Blomkvist, who takes a job investigating a murder in a big business family, is Lisbeth's Dr.Watson, a competent enough fellow, but slow and nagged by self-doubt.

Lisbeth is a Sherlock Holmes character in the cyberworld, a computer cracker but much more complex than your garden variety geek.  She's like Holmes because she's eccentric, moody, drugged and haunted by institutional horrors from the past. She's disinterested in material pursuits and is unabashedly pursuing monsters for ulterior reasons, largely revenge.  Lisbeth is so much like Holmes, it's downright fun:). So the book is highly entertaining, but the critics are right; it's a sleazy book.

Larsen's little community of Hedesmith and the island the Vanger families live on is positively intriguing.  This book works because of the setting and atmosphere, the powerful Vanger family, a compelling mystery and Lisbeth solving the grisly mystery just in the nick of time. It will be hard to avoid reading the remaining books in the trilogy..