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The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo: A Lisbeth Salander Novel (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo Series) Paperback – November 22, 2011
Harriet Vanger, a scion of one of Sweden's wealthiest families disappeared over forty years ago. All these years later, her aged uncle continues to seek the truth. He hires Mikael Blomkvist, a crusading journalist recently trapped by a libel conviction, to investigate. He is aided by the pierced and tattooed punk prodigy Lisbeth Salander. Together they tap into a vein of unfathomable iniquity and astonishing corruption.
Look for the latest book in the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series, The Girl in the Eagle's Talons, coming soon!
- Print length672 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherVintage Crime/Black Lizard
- Publication dateNovember 22, 2011
- Dimensions4.17 x 1.49 x 7.47 inches
- ISBN-100307949486
- ISBN-13978-0307949486
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Editorial Reviews
Review
"Combine the chilly Swedish backdrop and moody psychodrama of a Bergman movie with the grisly pyrotechnics of a serial-killer thriller, then add an angry punk heroine and a down-on-his-luck investigative journalist, and you have the ingredients of Stieg Larsson's first novel." —The New York Times
"Unique and fascinating.... It's like a blast of cold, fresh air to read The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo." —Chicago Tribune
"A whip-smart heroine and a hunky guy who needs her help? This sexy, addictive thriller is everything you never knew you could get from a crime novel." —Glamour
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
It happened every year, was almost a ritual. And this was his eighty-second birthday. When, as usual, the flower was delivered, he took off the wrapping paper and then picked up the telephone to call Detective Superintendent Morell who, when he retired, had moved to Lake Siljan in Dalarna. They were not only the same age, they had been born on the same day–which was something of an irony under the circumstances. The old policeman was sitting with his coffee, waiting, expecting the call.
“It arrived.”
“What is it this year?”
“I don’t know what kind it is. I’ll have to get someone to tell me what it is. It’s white.”
“No letter, I suppose.”
“Just the flower. The frame is the same kind as last year. One of those do-it-yourself ones.”
“Postmark?”
“Stockholm.”
“Handwriting?”
“Same as always, all in capitals. Upright, neat lettering.”
With that, the subject was exhausted, and not another word was exchanged for almost a minute. The retired policeman leaned back in his kitchen chair and drew on his pipe. He knew he was no longer expected to come up with a pithy comment or any sharp question which would shed a new light on the case. Those days had long since passed, and the exchange between the two men seemed like a ritual attaching to a mystery which no-one else in the whole world had the least interest in unravelling.
The Latin name was Leptospermum (Myrtaceae) rubinette. It was a plant about ten centimetres high with small, heather-like foliage and a white flower with five petals about two centimetres across.
The plant was native to the Australian bush and uplands, where it was to be found among tussocks of grass. There it was called Desert Snow. Someone at the botanical gardens in Uppsala would later confirm that it was a plant seldom cultivated in Sweden. The botanist wrote in her report that it was related to the tea tree and that it was sometimes confused with its more common cousin Leptospermum scoparium, which grew in abundance in New Zealand. What distinguished them, she pointed out, was that rubinette had a small number of microscopic pink dots at the tips of the petals, giving the flower a faint pinkish tinge.
Rubinette was altogether an unpretentious flower. It had no known medicinal properties, and it could not induce hallucinatory experiences. It was neither edible, nor had a use in the manufacture of plant dyes. On the other hand, the aboriginal people of Australia regarded as sacred the region and the flora around Ayers Rock.
The botanist said that she herself had never seen one before, but after consulting her colleagues she was to report that attempts had been made to introduce the plant at a nursery in Göteborg, and that it might, of course, be cultivated by amateur botanists. It was difficult to grow in Sweden because it thrived in a dry climate and had to remain indoors half of the year. It would not thrive in calcareous soil and it had to be watered from below. It needed pampering.
The fact of its being so rare a flower ought to have made it easier to trace the source of this particular specimen, but in practice it was an impossible task. There was no registry to look it up in, no licences to explore. Anywhere from a handful to a few hundred enthusiasts could have had access to seeds or plants. And those could have changed hands between friends or been bought by mail order from anywhere in Europe, anywhere in the Antipodes.
But it was only one in the series of mystifying flowers that each year arrived by post on the first day of November. They were always beautiful and for the most part rare flowers, always pressed, mounted on watercolour paper in a simple frame measuring six inches by eleven inches.
The strange story of the flowers had never been reported in the press; only a very few people knew of it. Thirty years ago the regular arrival of the flower was the object of much scrutiny–at the National Forensic Laboratory, among fingerprint experts, graphologists, criminal investigators, and one or two relatives and friends of the recipient. Now the actors in the drama were but three: the elderly birthday boy, the retired police detective, and the person who had posted the flower. The first two at least had reached such an age that the group of interested parties would soon be further diminished.
The policeman was a hardened veteran. He would never forget his first case, in which he had had to take into custody a violent and appallingly drunk worker at an electrical substation before he caused others harm. During his career he had brought in poachers, wife beaters, con men, car thieves, and drunk drivers. He had dealt with burglars, drug dealers, rapists, and one deranged bomber. He had been involved in nine murder or manslaughter cases. In five of these the murderer had called the police himself and, full of remorse, confessed to having killed his wife or brother or some other relative. Two others were solved within a few days. Another required the assistance of the National Criminal Police and took two years.
The ninth case was solved to the police’s satisfaction, which is to say that they knew who the murderer was, but because the evidence was so insubstantial the public prosecutor decided not to proceed with the case. To the detective superintendent’s dismay, the statute of limitations eventually put an end to the matter. But all in all he could look back on an impressive career.
He was anything but pleased.
For the detective, the “Case of the Pressed Flowers” had been nagging at him for years–his last, unsolved and frustrating case. The situation was doubly absurd because after spending literally thousands of hours brooding, on duty and off, he could not say beyond doubt that a crime had indeed been committed.
The two men knew that whoever had mounted the flowers would have worn gloves, that there would be no fingerprints on the frame or the glass. The frame could have been bought in camera shops or stationery stores the world over. There was, quite simply, no lead to follow. Most often the parcel was posted in Stockholm, but three times from London, twice from Paris, twice from Copenhagen, once from Madrid, once from Bonn, and once from Pensacola, Florida. The detective superintendent had had to look it up in an atlas.
After putting down the telephone the eighty-two-year-old birthday boy sat for a long time looking at the pretty but meaningless flower whose name he did not yet know. Then he looked up at the wall above his desk. There hung forty-three pressed flowers in their frames. Four rows of ten, and one at the bottom with four. In the top row one was missing from the ninth slot. Desert Snow would be number forty-four.
Without warning he began to weep. He surprised himself with this sudden burst of emotion after almost forty years.
PART 1
Incentive
December 20-January 3
Eighteen percent of the women in Sweden have at one time been threatened by a man.
Chapter 1
Friday, December 20
The trial was irretrievably over; everything that could be said had been said, but he had never doubted that he would lose. The written verdict was handed down at 10:00 on Friday morning, and all that remained was a summing up from the reporters waiting in the corridor outside the district court.
"Carl" Mikael Blomkvist saw them through the doorway and slowed his step. He had no wish to discuss the verdict, but questions were unavoidable, and he—of all people—knew that they had to be asked and answered. This is how it is to be a criminal, he thought. On the other side of the microphone. He straightened up and tried to smile. The reporters gave him friendly, almost embarrassed greetings.
"Let's see . . . Aftonbladet, Expressen, TT wire service, TV4, and . . . where are you from? . . . ah yes, Dagens Nyheter. I must be a celebrity," Blomkvist said.
"Give us a sound bite, Kalle Blomkvist." It was a reporter from one of the evening papers.
Blomkvist, hearing the nickname, forced himself as always not to roll his eyes. Once, when he was twenty-three and had just started his first summer job as a journalist, Blomkvist had chanced upon a gang which had pulled off five bank robberies over the past two years. There was no doubt that it was the same gang in every instance. Their trademark was to hold up two banks at a time with military precision. They wore masks from Disney World, so inevitably police logic dubbed them the Donald Duck Gang. The newspapers renamed them the Bear Gang, which sounded more sinister, more appropriate to the fact that on two occasions they had recklessly fired warning shots and threatened curious passersby.
Their sixth outing was at a bank in Östergötland at the height of the holiday season. A reporter from the local radio station happened to be in the bank at the time. As soon as the robbers were gone he went to a public telephone and dictated his story for live broadcast.
Blomkvist was spending several days with a girlfriend at her parents' summer cabin near Katrineholm. Exactly why he made the connection he could not explain, even to the police, but as he was listening to the news report he remembered a group of four men in a summer cabin a few hundred feet down the road. He had seen them playing badminton out in the yard: four blond, athletic types in shorts with their shirts off. They were obviously bodybuilders, and there had been something about them that had made him look twice—maybe it was because the game was being played in blazing sunshine with what he recognised as intensely focused energy.
There had been no good reason to suspect them of being the bank robbers, but nevertheless he had gone to a hill overlooking their cabin. It seemed empty. It was about forty minutes before a Volvo drove up and parked in the yard. The young men got out, in a hurry, and were each carrying a sports bag, so they might have been doing nothing more than coming back from a swim. But one of them returned to the car and took out from the boot something which he hurriedly covered with his jacket. Even from Blomkvist's relatively distant observation post he could tell that it was a good old AK4, the rifle that had been his constant companion for the year of his military service.
He called the police and that was the start of a three-day siege of the cabin, blanket coverage by the media, with Blomkvist in a front-row seat and collecting a gratifyingly large fee from an evening paper. The police set up their headquarters in a caravan in the garden of the cabin where Blomkvist was staying.
The fall of the Bear Gang gave him the star billing that launched him as a young journalist. The downside of his celebrity was that the other evening newspaper could not resist using the headline "Kalle Blomkvist solves the case." The tongue-in-cheek story was written by an older female columnist and contained references to the young detective in Astrid Lindgren's books for children. To make matters worse, the paper had run the story with a grainy photograph of Blomkvist with his mouth half open even as he raised an index finger to point.
It made no difference that Blomkvist had never in life used the name Carl. From that moment on, to his dismay, he was nicknamed Kalle Blomkvist by his peers—an epithet employed with taunting provocation, not unfriendly but not really friendly either. In spite of his respect for Astrid Lindgren—whose books he loved—he detested the nickname. It took him several years and far weightier journalistic successes before the nickname began to fade, but he still cringed if ever the name was used in his hearing.
Right now he achieved a placid smile and said to the reporter from the evening paper: "Oh come on, think of something yourself. You usually do."
His tone was not unpleasant. They all knew each other, more or less, and Blomkvist's most vicious critics had not come that morning. One of the journalists there had at one time worked with him. And at a party some years ago he had nearly succeeded in picking up one of the reporters—the woman from She on TV4.
"You took a real hit in there today," said the one from Dagens Nyheter, clearly a young part-timer. "How does it feel?"
Despite the seriousness of the situation, neither Blomkvist nor the older journalists could help smiling. He exchanged glances with TV4. How does it feel? The half-witted sports reporter shoves his microphone in the face of the Breathless Athlete on the finishing line. "I can only regret that the court did not come to a different conclusion," he said a bit stuffily.
"Three months in gaol and 150,000 kronor damages. That's pretty severe," said She from TV4.
"I'll survive."
"Are you going to apologise to Wennerström? Shake his hand?"
"I think not."
"So you still would say that he's a crook?" Dagens Nyheter.
The court had just ruled that Blomkvist had libelled and defamed the financier Hans-Erik Wennerström. The trial was over and he had no plans to appeal. So what would happen if he repeated his claim on the courthouse steps? Blomkvist decided that he did not want to find out.
"I thought I had good reason to publish the information that was in my possession. The court has ruled otherwise, and I must accept that the judicial process has taken its course. Those of us on the editorial staff will have to discuss the judgement before we decide what we're going to do. I have no more to add."
"But how did you come to forget that journalists actually have to back up their assertions?" She from TV4. Her expression was neutral, but Blomkvist thought he saw a hint of disappointed repudiation in her eyes.
The reporters on site, apart from the boy from Dagens Nyheter, were all veterans in the business. For them the answer to that question was beyond the conceivable. "I have nothing to add," he repeated, but when the others had accepted this TV4 stood him against the doors to the courthouse and asked her questions in front of the camera. She was kinder than he deserved, and there were enough clear answers to satisfy all the reporters still standing behind her. The story would be in the headlines but he reminded himself that they were not dealing with the media event of the year here. The reporters had what they needed and headed back to their respective newsrooms.
Product details
- Publisher : Vintage Crime/Black Lizard; Reissue edition (November 22, 2011)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 672 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0307949486
- ISBN-13 : 978-0307949486
- Item Weight : 12.2 ounces
- Dimensions : 4.17 x 1.49 x 7.47 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #233,562 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,384 in International Mystery & Crime (Books)
- #15,692 in Suspense Thrillers
- #62,016 in Genre Literature & Fiction
- Customer Reviews:
About the authors
Stieg Larsson, who lived in Sweden, was the editor-in-chief of the magazine Expo and a leading expert on anti-democratic, right-wing extremist, and Nazi organizations. He died in 2004, shortly after delivering the manuscripts for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest.
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THE MILLENNIUM TRILOGY (Part 1 of 3)
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
I heard of this book years ago from my mom. She had read it in Chinese, and I believe it had came out in Chinese before English. Since my mom has recommended me some dubious books in the past, I was wary of reading it. Then I saw "Stieg Larsson" and "Dragon Tattoo" popping up all over the place, and decided to go for it. I'm somewhat glad that I didn't pick this book up till now because that's allowed me to read the trilogy back-to-back. While that isn't necessary, it certainly makes it easier to keep track of things.
DRAGON TATTOO reads like a "whodunit" mystery, and reminded me of the movie "Gosford Park." The protagonist is Mikael Blomvist, the gutsy financial reporter from Millennium magazine, who, in the beginning of the novel, has just lost a libel case against Wennerström, a businessman he had been investigating. As he ponders his fate for the near future, he gets a visit from a lawyer representing Henrik Vanger, a former mogul, who wants him to write a biography of his family. This writing job, however, is really just a pretext to allow Blomvist to do some investigation into a dark history of the family.
Then there's Lisbeth Salander, the girl with the dragon tattoo, who is a freelance researcher for a security firm. She is portrayed as a mysterious, introvert, and strong-willed woman who has her unconventional means of getting information. Salander's and Blomvist's worlds will soon converge and become the key focus of the book.
Here are a few things of note about Larsson's writing:
He keeps the action going without putting in tedious descriptions of unnecessary details. He does enough to give life to the scene, but focuses on the important elements.
He writes with a point of view, which is to say that, this isn't just your regular mystery novel. Larsson, himself a journalist, seems to know the inner workings of many Swedish institutions. Each of his book seems to broaden the focus of these institutions. For example, DRAGON TATTOO focuses mostly on independent journalism and the corporate world; PLAYED WITH FIRE focuses on the media, academia, and law enforcement; and "Hornet's Nest" focuses on secret government agencies (at least as far as I know; I'm still reading it). Larsson also has strong opinions about things going on in Sweden, in it comes through in his writing (most obviously in Blomvist's voice). It's a refreshing take on a traditional genre that I find really powerful.
The cast of characters and the institutions can get overwhelming, especially if you really want to understand the connections between everything. Larsson also has the tendency of referring to his characters by their last name, the first name, and their nick names, so it helps to have it all fresh in your head. I would suggest being patient, because the payoff is well worth it. I was a bit stumped in the beginning of this novel, mostly because I had thought it was "light reading," the type of book that you can read in small bits before you go to bed, or when you're on the subway. It turned out that, for me, it was easier to read it in large chunks, because it helps keep the information intact.
Despite of the cast, the characters were all well-written, including the minor ones. Lesser authors would have reduced them to caricatures, but Larsson doesn't pull that here.
The twists in this book were AWESOME. Several times I would say out-loud "Oooooh" and have to get up and take a breather (and I only do that when I'm excited by a book).
Evidently, coffee is big in Sweden. :)
So far, this is my favorite of the trilogy. It seems more like a standalone novel, and might even be seen as a prologue to the latter two books.
The mystery is (for a long time) well done . . . lots of twists, intrigue (if ever a family compound needed a resident shrink, this is the one), and mystery. Some of the detective work is novel, clever, and well done, too (without giving anything away, there is some fascinating work with photographs here). There are, of course, the all-too-convenient Eureka moments, and by the end, we've wandered into rather unconvincing Silence of the Lambs/Red Dragon territory (for a better take on that, read Silence of the Lambs and Red Dragon). But, somewhat disappointing climax aside, it's a great ride while it lasts.
But that leads us to my main problem with this book: There's too much of it. Perhaps it's because I'm a journalist myself, but I found the entire second plot line -- the attempt to investigate and bring down the aforementioned corporate titan, and all the inside baseball magazine intrigue -- a bore. And fairly laughable in parts, too (for one thing, we journalists are far too chatty and dysfunctional to carry out any kind of secret, coordinated operation to smoke out a mole). Worst of all, it's largely unnecessary. Larsson was a journalist and magazine editor himself, and I can see that it must have been tempting to bring in a little of his own world, but that old adage of write what you know is largely bunk. Indeed, what's exciting to you (because you live it) isn't always exciting to others. This plot thread is a case in point. I think it would have been sufficient to give enough backstory to set up the Disgraced Journalist Looking or Redemption and then move on -- and stick with -- the main story, the mystery of the girl. This secondary plot also makes our hero look a bit too holier-than-though for comfort (he's always railing about failed financial journalism - annoying enough -- yet many of his arguments and conclusions seem oddly naive and misinformed. It just detracts, and has readers (at least this one) take him a bit less seriously). The book would have worked better if this whole sideline was expunged and the mystery built out a bit more.
A couple of lesser gripes: While I can appreciate that Larsson was clearly an Apple fan boy (no problem with that here), his computer talk is at turns superficial and weird. He lists the entire spec sheet of a 2002-era PowerBook laptop one character has her pocketbook set on . . . I have no idea why. And when he talks about encryption and hacking it is clear that he doesn't know that much about either (and no, knowing what PGP is does not qualify you as an expert). On the other hand, I think the only reason this bothered me was that so much else in the book was so well crafted and presented. On a related note, I also thought that the character profile of the private investigator who helps out on the case -- and is the real heroine of the story -- was by turns fascinating and rubbish. At one moment she's borderline autistic; the next she is assuming identities and interacting with bankers on million-dollar transactions. The romance -- all of it -- is a bit too convenient and unconvincing, too. Finally, it was a minor bummer that some of the most fascinating characters in the book -- the head of the security concern, the uncle himself, to name a couple -- get sidelined along the way, only to make cursory appearances thereafter.
I may have had to drag myself through the last fifth of the book, but no regrets. This was clearly one of the better thrillers to come along of late, and I plan to get cracking on Book 2 promptly.
Top reviews from other countries
With fluid and never exhausting writing, Larsson uses various moments throughout the story to openly make comments about the politic and journalistic system of Sweden, approaching themes like misogyny and Swedish nazism accurately (in this point it's important to remember Larsson was a journalist actively engaged on studies about far-right politics movements). This haunting atmosphere, in association with a perfectly developed narrative, makes this a remarkable and realistic thriller.
There're also two movies adaptations of this book, the Swedish and American versions. The American version is particularly more close to the book and well produced than the Swedish one. The ending was slightly changed, though.