Stieg Larsson Man Myth & Mistress

[JACKET COPY]

André Jute & Andrew McCoy

Stieg Larsson

Man, Myth & Mistress

who created the Millennium Trilogy of

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

The Girl Who Played with Fire

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest

Is Lisbeth Salander a feminist — or a comic book avenger? Is her creator Stieg Larsson a feminist — or a prurient, violent hack? What is the Millennium Trilogy really about? Is it literature or vicarious violence and sex? Should Eva Gabrielsson be in charge of the Girl franchise? Should there be a second Salander Trilogy? Who built the Stieg Larsson myth, and is any of it true?

Best selling authors André Jute and Andrew McCoy wittily investigate the evidence — and arrive at the correct politically incorrect answers. They fix the blame for the Larsson scandal on… surprising people. Some Millennium fans will riot, most will be riotously entertained.

‘Jute is great…a private godsend.’

Ruth Rendell, The Times

The apartheid regime in South Africa twice sent assassins after Andrew McCoy, claiming his novel The Insurrectionist was a ‘blueprint for black revolution’ and a ‘handbook for the ANC’.

Like Larsson, André Jute has been a journalist and graphic designer. His novel Reverse Negative led to the exposure of the spy in the Queen’s household, Anthony Blunt. He is an acclaimed expert on the thriller, his Writing a Thriller going into three ever-expanding editions over 25 years.

André Jute &

Andrew McCoy

Stieg Larsson

Man, Myth & Mistress

who created the Millennium Trilogy of

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

The Girl Who Played with Fire

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest

CoolMain Press

Copyright © André Jute 2010, 2011

Copyright © Andrew McCoy 2010, 2011

The authors have asserted their moral right.

First published by CoolMain Press 2010

This revised edition

published by CoolMain Press 2011

at Smashwords

www.coolmainpress.com

ISBN 978-1-908369-03-1

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced by any means without the written permission of the publisher. This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. It may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy.

CONTENTS

Foreword

The People’s Choice

Larsson the Man

Larsson the Main Man

Made by Eva: Stieg the Feminist

The Millennium Trilogy in Outline

The Chaos of Larsson’s Structure

Mikael Blomkvist: Dissonantly Passive

Viral Didactic

Larsson’s Literary Style — What Style?

Morality, Critics and Feminists

Is Lisbeth Salander a Feminist?

Is there a Single Feminist in a House of 50m People?

Larsson’s Franchise

Why Larsson Thrills

Larsson’s Legacy

Exit Lines

Afterword: A Curious Case of Intimidating Free Speech

Acknowledgements

The Authors/Books/Reviews/Photo

Foreword

When they heard about this book, Norstedts, Larsson’s Swedish publishers, reached for lawyers without waiting to see its content. One has to wonder what Stieg Larsson would have thought of such open intimidation of free speech on his behalf. More about that unsavory episode in the Afterword.

***

As a matter beyond conjecture, if Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy had not arrived with the imprimatur of foreign sales and prizes, the English-language reviews would have been far less laudatory than they were. It is even more certain that, if Larsson had not pursued a recognizable long-term career in left-wing activism, his reception in the halls of high literature would have been highly restrained.

Of course we shall not claim in this full-length literary evaluation that Larsson stands with Dickens, as his faithful fans are apt to do. That would be ridiculous: Larsson just doesn’t write that well. But we shall argue forcefully that he doesn’t need to write that well. He tells a good story as well as any Dickens told, and that is the key. Or, to be shockingly honest, standing in the shoes of readers rather than critics, we can’t be bothered to read Dickens but we read Larsson (largely) with glee. There must be a reason, and, despite the fears of Norstedts that we will take a hatchet to their fat, we’re about to examine all sides of that reason.

Which leads us to the point of, and the need for, yet another book about Stieg Larsson. There are any number of biographies and memoirs about Larsson by his Swedish friends and enemies (and some who’re both); almost all of them are also available in translation, and some may even be reliable, though it is difficult to pick a path through the ego-driven claims and counterclaims. But there is nothing to guide the reader who wants to go deeper into Larsson’s books; perhaps a few moviegoers who still cling to the auteur theory may be satisfied with Freudian projection from brief biographical notes, but what about the vast majority of rational readers? Several years after the eruption of a literary phenomenon there is no straightforward literary evaluation of Larsson’s work.

As a teacher of creative writing I (Jute) long since gave up expostulating in front of unwieldy groups of aspirants and instead instruct through my books for other writers and by working with a handful of protégé. Perhaps out of guilt, every few years the dutiful thought arrives that I should occasionally commit time to a full-length analysis of another writer’s oeuvre, but the lure of my own current project is always too strong. The truth is that by choice I read thrillers, and there are not all that many thriller writers with enough work around a central theme that I find interesting, and those who do offer a corpus both interesting and substantial (Deighton, Condon, McCarry, Reginald Hill, more recently Temple) have generally been treated with the respect they deserve by the literary press; no counterbalance is required.

Enters Stieg Larsson. Despite the appearance to the contrary created by his enormous sales, Larsson is a true outlier. For one thing, given the constrictions of the publishing trade, Larsson shouldn’t have succeeded at all, never mind so spectacularly; the success of his Millennium Trilogy is the true expression and proof of the power of consumer choice. For another, to be brutal, Larsson’s output is limited by his early death, and further books are therefore unlikely to prove us wrong retrospectively in our judgments on his Millennium Trilogy, always a risk with a living author liable to continuous reassessment with retrospective echoes.

Thus we’re writing a literary evaluation of Larsson because we would like to read it and none is available, because it is necessary, because it is worthwhile, and because Larsson’s work uniquely exudes a sense of urgency that makes this commentary personally satisfying. There is, too, a particular if small sense that it is a moral thing to do; not many literary ventures these days have that justification!

That panickers should reach for lawyers on mere rumor of this book is another incentive; an intellectual should count his enemies with pride as the measure of his righteousness, and if he finds none backtrack to when he sold out.

***

Well, that’s the long story. As we shall see, in literature almost no motive is clear and straightforward, and the longer the story the less simple its driving force. So, how about this:

I (Jute) bought a Kindle to read in the bath to save my wrists from heavy reference books and heavier novels. Then I remembered I own the electronic rights to all my books, and decided to publish one or more of them as electronic books on the Kindle. But scanning and copy-editing a long book is a big deal, so I decided on the shortcut of a brand-new monograph written from scratch to test the process. Then I found Larsson so fascinating that the monograph just grew and grew until it assumed the size of a book. Since time was short, I needed help, and anyway an African expert was required to sort out Larsson’s fantasies, which are unquestioningly repeated by his promoters and journalists. Enters Andrew McCoy.

Both origins are true. Both happened at the same time. Literature is like that, very confused in its origination and development.

***

These pages contain more than the literary evaluation promised by the title, which by itself would not amount to more than a long monograph. The interest in literary criticism of the novelist and teacher of writing is often at a tangent to that of your standard literary critic, whose very point — with editorial complaisance — is not about the book she’s reviewing but an attempt to demonstrate how clever she is, and the longer the review, the closer it approaches that most precious of formats, the essay with its punch line in the very last sentence, the truer this becomes. It is for this reason that all my life when I (Jute) perpetrated journalism, I’ve generally avoided literary criticism as an unfair art, instead bringing my critical faculties to bear on the performing arts — not always fairly, unfortunately: criticism is the art of elegant cruelty.

So here we go further than the usual critical overview in that we also analyze the mechanisms by which Larsson achieves his effects. We do this secure in the knowledge that readers of Larsson’s books will find their enjoyment heightened by the insider’s delight in knowing the training tricks by which the author marshals his characters, events, impressions and subtexts, a whole menagerie of oddly interesting animals.

We’ve deliberately made this book as short as we could while still doing a thorough job; it could be three times the length by simply multiplying the examples. It seems to us there’s a fresh audience out there for a critical evaluation of Larsson, and it’s a different audience from the usual audience for literary criticism in that they’re readers, but not professional readers; they’re less likely than your standard literary professional to stand still for iterative ‘in-depth’ bullshit. Larsson’s most committed fans should take a friendly warning: while we’re fans, just like you, this is not an adulatory fanzine but a critical evaluation. Our target reader is the one who read and enjoyed The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo or the whole Millennium Trilogy, and who would like to know how novels with so many obvious faults manage at the same time to please so much. We can help you find the answer.

For the same reason, that we hope to attract a lay audience, there are no impenetrable technical words, no irrational French theories loaded with chameleon-meanings, no academic pretensions, no footnotes, no references. Stieg Larsson was a storyteller and his words were good words — and good enough too for discussing his stories, so that’s what we’ll do.

Enjoy!

André Jute

Co Cork, Eire

September-December 2010

The People’s Choice

On 25 October 2010 Jeremy Paxman, the poster child of elitism in Britain, asked two panels on a television quiz show to identify the author of the Millennium Trilogy. The two panels were from heritage universities, St Andrews and St John College, Cambridge, made up of students confidently expected to be the future leaders of the professions and key institutions in their countries, perhaps of their nations. The quiz was University Challenge, one of the defining presentations of the national broadcaster’s intellectually upmarket outlet, BBC2. The questions are normally so difficult that only students from the best universities are expected to be able to answer them; a compendium of three thousand questions from the show is widely thought to be the perfect gift for masochists who relish frustration. But now and again, probably as a sop to the audience, an easy question is thrown in, usually about popular culture. The author of the Millennium Trilogy, after three years of topping bestseller lists around the world, on this Monday night was the easy question.

When the eight privileged students between them failed to name Stieg Larsson, the nation, indeed several nations because BBC2 is widely available by satellite, groaned in despair at their lack of street cred. Their total lack of credibility was confirmed when they failed in the same line of questioning — posthumous hits — to identify the voices of either John Lennon or Roy Orbison. Paxman’s lip, the most expressive weapon in the armory of a master of disdain, turned devastatingly. So much for the connection of the junior intelligentsia to popular culture.

No one else was as uninformed as those poor students. For the three thrillers by Stieg Larsson are a phenomenon of popular culture, with book sales heading for 50 million copies worldwide arguably at the end of the first decade of the millennium the most popular cultural artifacts available in the incredibly varied spectrum of entertainment on offer.

However, among the thoughtful there are expressions of amazement about Larsson’s popularity fueled by a wide variety of observations, some of which we shall discuss where they touch on literary matters rather than arising from snobbery or — let’s face it — the sour jealousy which success so often inspires. One of these reservations is of immediate interest because it overwhelms all others. It is so important that we’ve already touched on it in the Foreword, as a reason for writing this book: