Com­ment: In FTR #702, we exam­ined the polit­i­cal career of Tiger Woods’ mother-in-law (for­mer Swedish Immi­gra­tion Min­is­ter Bar­bro Holm­berg, accused of shel­ter­ing war crim­i­nals) and Sweden’s his­tor­i­cal con­nec­tions to fas­cism. In the Decem­ber issue of “Van­ity Fair,” Christo­pher Hitchens asks whether some of those con­nec­tions may have man­i­fested them­selves in the death of noted Swedish author Stieg Larsson.

“The Author Who Played with Fire” by Christo­pher Hitchens; Van­ity Fair; 12/2009.

I sup­pose it’s jus­ti­fi­able to describe “best-selling” in quasi-tsunami terms because when it hap­pens it’s partly a wall and partly a tide: first you see a tow­er­ing, glis­ten­ing ram­part of books in Costco and the nation’s air­ports and then you are hit by a series of suc­ceed­ing waves that deposit indi­vid­ual copies in the hands of peo­ple sit­ting right next to you. I was slightly won­der­ing what might come crash­ing in after Hur­ri­cane Khaled. I didn’t guess that the next great inun­da­tion would orig­i­nate not in the exotic kite-running spaces at the roof of the world but from an epi­cen­ter made almost banal for us by Volvo, Abso­lut, Saab, and ikea.

Yet it is from this soci­ety, of reas­sur­ing brand names and womb-to-tomb national health care, that Stieg Lars­son con­jured a detec­tive dou­ble act so incon­gru­ous that it makes Holmes and Wat­son seem like sib­lings. I say “con­jured” because Mr. Lars­son also drew upon the bloody, haunted old Swe­den of trolls and elves and ogres, and I put it in the past tense because, just as the first book in his “Mil­len­nium” tril­ogy, The Girl with the Dragon Tat­too, was about to make his for­tune, he very sud­denly became a dead per­son. In the Lars­son uni­verse the nasty trolls and hulk­ing ogres are bent Swedish cap­i­tal­ists, cold-faced Baltic sex traf­fick­ers, blue-eyed Viking Aryan Nazis, and other Nordic riffraff who might have had their rea­sons to whack him. But if he now dwells in that Val­halla of the hack writer who posthu­mously beat all the odds, it’s surely because of his elf. Pic­ture a feral waif. All right, pic­ture a four-foot-eleven-inch “doll” with Asperger’s syn­drome and gen­er­ous breast implants. This is not Pippi Long­stock­ing (to whom a few ges­tures are made in the nar­ra­tive). This is Miss Goth, inter­mit­tently dis­guised as la gamine.

For­get Miss Smilla’s sense of the snow and check out Lis­beth Salander’s taste in pussy rings, tat­toos, girls, boys, motor­cy­cles, and, above all, com­puter key­boards. (Once you accept that George Mac­Don­ald Fraser’s Flash­man can pick up any known lan­guage in a few days, you have sus­pended enough dis­be­lief to set­tle down and enjoy his adven­tures.) Miss Salan­der is so well accou­tred with spe­cial fea­tures that she’s almost over-equipped. She is awarded a pho­to­graphic mem­ory, a chess mind to rival Bobby Fischer’s, a math­e­mat­i­cal capac­ity that toys with Fermat’s last the­o­rem as a cat bats a mouse, and the abil­ity to “hack”—I apol­o­gize for the rep­e­ti­tion of that word—into the deep intesti­nal com­put­ers of all banks and police depart­ments. At the end of The Girl Who Played with Fire, she is for good mea­sure granted the abil­ity to return from the grave.

With all these super­heroine advan­tages, one won­ders why she and her on-and-off side­kick, the lum­ber­ing but unstop­pable reporter Mikael Blomkvist, don’t defeat the forces of Swedish Fas­cism and impe­ri­al­ism more effort­lessly. But the other rea­son that Lis­beth Salan­der is such a source of fas­ci­na­tion is this: the pint-size minx­oid with the dragon tat­too is also a trau­ma­tized vic­tim and doesn’t work or play well with oth­ers. She has been raped and tor­tured and oth­er­wise abused ever since she could think, and her pri­vate phrase for her coming-of-age is “All the Evil”: words that go unelu­ci­dated until near the end of The Girl Who Played with Fire. The actress Noomi Rapace has already played Salan­der in a Swedish film of the first novel, which enjoyed a world­wide release. (When Hol­ly­wood gets to the cast­ing stage, I sup­pose Philip Sey­mour Hoff­man will be offered the ursine Blomkvist role, and though the col­or­ing is wrong I keep think­ing of Winona Ryder for Lis­beth.) Accord­ing to Larsson’s father, the sym­pa­thy with which “the girl” is evoked is derived partly from the author’s own beloved niece, Therese, who is tat­tooed and has suf­fered from anorexia and dyslexia but can fix your com­puter problems.

In life, Stieg Lars­son described him­self as, among other things, “a fem­i­nist,” and his char­ac­ter sur­ro­gate, Mikael Blomkvist, takes an osten­ta­tiously severe line against the male dom­i­na­tion of soci­ety and indeed of his own pro­fes­sion. (The orig­i­nal grim and Swedish title of The Girl with the Dragon Tat­too is Men Who Hate Women, while the trilogy’s third book bore the more fairy-tale-like name The Cas­tle in the Air That Blew Up: the clever rebrand­ing of the series with the word “girl” on every cover was obvi­ously crit­i­cal.) Blomkvist’s moral right­eous­ness comes in very use­ful for the action of the nov­els, because it allows the depic­tion of a great deal of cru­elty to women, smug­gled through cus­toms under the dis­guise of a strong dis­ap­proval. Swe­den used to be noto­ri­ous, in the late 1960s, as the home­land of the film I Am Curi­ous (Yel­low), which went all the way to the Supreme Court when dis­trib­uted in the United States and gave Swe­den a world rep­u­ta­tion as a place of smil­ing nudity and guilt-free sex. What a world of nurs­ery inno­cence that was, com­pared with the child slav­ery and exploita­tion that are evoked with per­haps slightly too much rel­ish by the cru­sad­ing Blomkvist.

His best excuse for his own pruri­ence is that these ser­ial killers and tor­ture fanciers are prac­tic­ing a form of cap­i­tal­ism and that their racket is pro­tected by a porno­graphic alliance with a form of Fas­cism, its lower ranks made up of hideous bik­ers and meth run­ners. This is not just sex or crime—it’s pol­i­tics! Most of the time, Lars­son hauls him­self along with writ­ing such as this:

The mur­der inves­ti­ga­tion was like a bro­ken mosaic in which he could make out some pieces while oth­ers were sim­ply miss­ing. Some­where there was a pat­tern. He could sense it, but he could not fig­ure it out. Too many pieces were missing.

No doubt they were, or there would be no book. (The plot of the first story is so heav­ily con­vo­luted that it requires a page repro­duc­ing the Vanger dynasty’s fam­ily tree—the first time I can remem­ber encoun­ter­ing such a drama­tis per­sonae since I read War and Peace.) But when he comes to the vil­lain of The Girl with the Dragon Tat­too, a many-tentacled tycoon named Wen­ner­ström, Larsson’s prose is sud­denly much more spir­ited. Wen­ner­ström had con­se­crated him­self to “fraud that was so exten­sive it was no longer merely criminal—it was busi­ness.” That’s actu­ally one of the best-turned lines in the whole thou­sand pages. If it sounds a bit like Bertolt Brecht on an aver­age day, it’s because Larsson’s own views were old-shoe Communist.

His back­ground involved the unique bond­ing that comes from tough Red fam­i­lies and solid class loy­al­ties. The hard-labor and fac­tory and min­ing sec­tor of Swe­den is in the far and ardu­ous North—this is also the home ter­ri­tory of most of the country’s storytellers—and Grandpa was a pro­le­tar­ian Com­mu­nist up toward the Arc­tic. This dur­ing the Sec­ond World War, when quite a few Swedes were vol­un­teer­ing to serve Hitler’s New Order and join the SS. In a note the 23-year-old Lars­son wrote before set­ting out for Africa, he bequeathed every­thing to the Com­mu­nist party of his home­town, Umeå. The own­er­ship of the immense later for­tune that he never saw went by law to his father and brother, leav­ing his part­ner of 30 years, Eva Gabriels­son, with no legal claim, only a moral one that asserts she alone is fit to man­age Larsson’s very lucra­tive legacy. And this is not the only murk that hangs around his death, at the age of 50, in 2004.

To be exact, Stieg Lars­son died on Novem­ber 9, 2004, which I can’t help notic­ing was the anniver­sary of Kristall­nacht. Is it plau­si­ble that Sweden’s most pub­lic anti-Nazi just chanced to expire from nat­ural causes on such a date? Larsson’s mag­a­zine, Expo, which has a fairly clear fic­tional cous­in­hood with “Mil­len­nium,” was an unceas­ing annoy­ance to the extreme right. He him­self was the pub­lic fig­ure most iden­ti­fied with the unmask­ing of white-supremacist and neo-Nazi orga­ni­za­tions, many of them with a hard-earned rep­u­ta­tion for homi­ci­dal vio­lence. The Swedes are not the pacific her­bi­vores that many peo­ple imag­ine: in the foot­notes to his sec­ond novel Lars­son reminds us that Prime Min­is­ter Olof Palme was gunned down in the street in 1986 and that the for­eign min­is­ter Anna Lindh was stabbed to death (in a Stock­holm depart­ment store) in 2003. The first crime is still unsolved, and the ver­dict in the sec­ond case has by no means sat­is­fied everybody.

A report in the main­stream news­pa­per Afton­bladet describes the find­ings of another anti-Nazi researcher, named Bosse Schön, who unrav­eled a plot to mur­der Stieg Lars­son that included a Swedish SS vet­eran. Another scheme mis­fired because on the night in ques­tion, 20 years ago, he saw skin­heads with bats wait­ing out­side his office and left by the rear exit. Web sites are devoted to fur­ther spec­u­la­tion: one blog is pre­oc­cu­pied with the the­ory that Prime Min­is­ter Palme’s uncaught assas­sin was behind the death of Lars­son too. Larsson’s name and other details were found when the Swedish police searched the apart­ment of a Fas­cist arrested for a polit­i­cal mur­der. Larsson’s address, tele­phone num­ber, and pho­to­graph, along with threats to peo­ple iden­ti­fied as “ene­mies of the white race,” were pub­lished in a neo-Nazi mag­a­zine: the author­i­ties took it seri­ously enough to pros­e­cute the editor.

But Lars­son died of an appar­ent coro­nary throm­bo­sis, not from any may­hem. So he would have had to be poi­soned, say, or some­how med­ically mur­dered. Such a hypoth­e­sis would point to some involve­ment “high up,” and any­one who has read the nov­els will know that in Larsson’s world the forces of law and order in Swe­den are fetidly com­plicit with orga­nized crime. So did he wind up, in effect, a char­ac­ter in one of his own tales? The peo­ple who might have the most inter­est in keep­ing the spec­u­la­tion alive—his pub­lish­ers and publicists—choose not to believe it. “Sixty cig­a­rettes a day, plus tremen­dous amounts of junk food and cof­fee and an enor­mous work­load,” said Christo­pher MacLe­hose, Larsson’s lit­er­ary dis­cov­erer in Eng­lish and by a nice coin­ci­dence a pub­lisher of Flash­man, “would be the cul­prit. I gather he’d even had a warn­ing heart mur­mur. Still, I have attended demon­stra­tions by these Swedish right-wing thugs, and they are truly fright­en­ing. I also know some­one with excel­lent con­tacts in the Swedish police and secu­rity world who assures me that every­thing described in the ‘Mil­len­nium’ nov­els actu­ally took place. And, appar­ently, Lars­son planned to write as many as 10 in all. So you can see how peo­ple could think that he might not have died but been ‘stopped.’”

He left behind him enough man­u­script pages for three books, the last of which—due out in the U.S. next summer—is enti­tled The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, and the out­lines and ini­tial scrib­blings of a fourth. The mar­ket and appetite for them seems to be unap­peasable, as does the demand for Hen­ning Mankell’s “Detec­tive Wal­lan­der” thrillers, the work of Peter (Smilla’s Sense of Snow) Høeg, and the sto­ries of Arnal­dur Indri­da­son. These writ­ers come from coun­tries as diverse as Den­mark and Ice­land, but in Ger­many the genre already has a name: Schwe­denkrimi, or “Swedish crime writ­ing.” Christo­pher MacLe­hose told me that he knows of book­stores that now have spe­cial sec­tions for the Scan­di­na­vian phe­nom­e­non. “When Roger Straus and I first pub­lished Peter Høeg,” he said, “we thought we were doing some­thing of a favor for Dan­ish lit­er­a­ture, and then ‘Miss Smilla’ abruptly sold a mil­lion copies in both Eng­land and Amer­ica. Look, in almost every­one there is a mem­ory of the sagas and the Norse myths. A lot of our sto­ry­telling got started in those long, cold, dark nights.”

Per­haps. But Lars­son is very much of our own time, set­ting him­self to con­front ques­tions such as immi­gra­tion, “gen­der,” white-collar crime, and, above all, the Inter­net. The plot of his first vol­ume does involve a sort of excur­sion into antiquity—into the book of Leviti­cus, to be exact—but this is only for the pur­pose of encrypt­ing a “Bible code.” And he is quite delib­er­ately unro­man­tic, giv­ing us shop­ping lists, street direc­tions, menus, and other details—often with their Swedish names—in full. The vil­lains are evil, all right, but very stu­pid and self-thwartingly prone to spend more time (this always irri­tates me) telling their vic­tims what they will do to them than actu­ally doing it. There is much sex but absolutely no love, a great deal of vio­lence but zero hero­ism. Rec­i­p­ro­cal ges­tures are gen­er­ally indi­cated by cliché: if a Lars­son char­ac­ter wants to show assent he or she will “nod”; if he or she wants to man­i­fest dis­tress, then it will usu­ally be by bit­ing the lower lip. The pas­sion­ate world of the sagas and the myths is a very long way away. Bleak­ness is all. That could even be the secret—the emo­tion­less effi­ciency of Swedish tech­nol­ogy, para­dox­i­cally com­bined with the wicked allure of the piti­less elfin avenger, plus a dash of para­noia sur­round­ing the author’s demise. If Lars­son had died as a brave mar­tyr to a cause, it would have been strangely out of keep­ing; it’s actu­ally more sat­is­fy­ing that he suc­cumbed to the nat­ural causes that are symp­toms of mod­ern life.