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When my copy of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest arrived, I confess to mixed feelings. I was thrilled to get my hands on it because I’d enjoyed Stieg Larsson’s first two novels so much. But I grieved, too, because I knew this was the last time I’d have that thrill. For the story of Stieg Larsson’s whirlwind success will always be tainted by the tragedy of his sudden early death. When any writer dies in the prime of life, we mourn the loss of the books not written. In Larsson’s case, the grief is all the more poignant because he had no inkling that his three Millennium series thrillers would become a worldwide publishing phenomenon, winning awards and finding millions of fans far beyond the borders of his native Sweden.

Nevertheless, in spite of the absence of their creator, the powerful presence of his characters remains. Journalist Mikael Blomkvist and computer hacker Lisbeth Salander are vivid and complex creations who lodge in the hearts and minds of readers and take on a life of their own in our imagination. Their third outing is no less dramatic than the previous two, and it’s clear that Larsson understood how to move characters forward, changing and developing them in the light of their history. 

What is perhaps most surprising is that the end of this third book – in what was planned as part of a ten-book sequence – doesn’t leave any loose ends dangling. There are plenty of future possibilities for Blomkvist and Salander, individually and together, but there’s a lot that’s resolved for readers. It feels more like a completed trilogy than a frustrating cliffhanger.

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest opens with Lisbeth Salander in hospital, a bullet in her brain after the violent confrontation that ended The Girl Who Played With Fire. With most characters, we’d expect this to be fatal. But we’ve learned from the first two books that Lisbeth Salander is no ordinary young woman. She has reserves of willpower and strength astonishing in one so young and slight. The girl with the dragon tattoo is not someone who gives in or gives up.

And she needs all her resilience and resourcefulness to survive the challenges of this novel. Salander is a unique character in crime fiction: she’s a survivor of emotional, physical and sexual abuse, almost autistic in her social responses, as a result of her experiences, but little short of a genius when it comes to working with computers. On the face of it, her past invites pity, but that’s a response she rejects unreservedly. Her relationship with Blomkvist only works because he treats her with the respect she demands.

In many ways, Salander is a fantasy figure. Because of her high-level hacking, after her debut in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, she has ended up with more money than God. She is a mistress of disguises. She can apparently survive any kind of attack. And her anti-establishment politics are an extreme version of the views of her creator. She is a kind of superwoman who wreaks a terrible revenge for the wrongs done to her. In that sense, she’s an emblem of all the bullied, abused, degraded and despised women that Larsson wanted to stand up for.

But Larsson was a clever enough writer to give her vulnerability, too. Just as Superman needed Jimmy Olsen and Lois Lane, so Salander needs Blomkvist. A passionate left-wing investigative journalist with a warm and open-hearted love for women, Blomkvist is Salander’s base camp in normal life. She helps him nail the stories of corruption and betrayal that are the mainstay of his Millennium magazine, and he smooths her path to her very particular goals. When she needs internet access from her hospital bed, it’s Blomkvist’s ingenuity that beats the system.

Like all great writers, Larsson wrote because he couldn’t help himself. But before he turned to fiction, he was, like Blomkvist, a campaigning journalist with powerful political views. He was an activist for the Communist Party in Sweden and edited the Swedish Trotskyist journal Fjärde Internationalen, before founding Expo magazine, a publication dedicated to fighting racism and extreme right-wing organisations in Sweden and abroad. But politics was far from his only passion. He loved reading. He devoured science fiction and crime fiction and had an encyclopaedic knowledge of both genres, reviewing crime novels when he had time. 

But it’s clear from reading his books that he was no humourless anorak. Unlike most Nordic crime fiction, Larsson’s books sparkle with wit and playfulness. His characters read crime fiction – to my amusement, as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo grows more threatening in mood, Blomkvist’s reading shifts from Sue Grafton through Sara Paretsky to my own work, reflecting that mounting darkness. In homage to other writers he admires, he borrows character names. In The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest, for example, we find Frederik Clinton, an eerie echo of Frederick Clinton, Hannibal Lecter’s keeper in The Silence of the Lambs.

Considering the subjects he chose, a sense of humour must have been a vital component of Larsson’s make-up. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo deals with the fall-out from Sweden’s extreme right-wing past and corporate corruption in the present; The Girl Who Played With Fire addresses the issue of sex trafficking; and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest tackles head-on the corruption of the secret state and its sanctioning of the abuse of human rights. It’s a tribute to Larsson’s skill that he never allows his political concerns to dominate his desire to tell a cracking good story packed with dramatic incident and brimming with quirky insights. But without his personal commitment to taking a stand in support of what he believed in, I’m convinced these three novels could never have had so powerful an impact among readers.

Forty years ago, with their Martin Beck novels, the Swedish writers Sjöwall and Wahlöö blazed a trail that proved the crime novel provides the perfect vehicle to write stories that shine a critical light on the society we live in. Stieg Larsson demonstrated that this works just as well for present-day concerns, and his example should give aspiring writers the confidence to put their own beliefs at the heart of their work. Books like The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest remind us all that we ignore the wider world at our peril.

If further proof were needed of the way Stieg Larsson has touched lives far removed from his own, it lies in the very streets he wrote about so atmospherically. Every week, dozens of readers from all over the world join a specially created Millennium Trail, where qualified city guides take them on a tour of the city that includes Mikael Blomkvist’s home, Lisbeth Salander’s apartment and other key sites that feature in the novels. 

Once The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest hits the bookshops, we can be sure there will be a lot more readers signing up to see for themselves the streets that inspired a trio of novels that genuinely justify the hype. I just wish that I had the chance to thank Stieg Larsson for the pleasure he’s given to me and to millions of other readers.

Further reading...

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest
by Stieg Larsson
Maclehose Press
Buy now

Find out the man behind Lisbeth Salander in his own words by reading an extract from Stieg Larsson's correspondence with his publisher. And discover more about Nordic crime fiction with our introduction to the genre, Crime in a Cold Climate