Month: September 2024

Review: The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest

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I have now read the third book in this amazing trilogy. You can find reviews of the first two books in the Millennium Trilogy two and four weeks ago. Of the three, I think that the first volume, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, is the best. It has a self-contained plot and is probably the clearest example of Stieg Larsson’s amazing talent for writing thrillers, which include: creating distinctive, memorable characters, building and keeping tension high, designing a plot which captures the reader’s interest, and keeping the reader guessing with surprises at critical junctures in the plot.

Stieg Larsson 1954 – 2004

The plot carries over from the second book in the series. Lisbeth Salander (the heroine) is in the hospital with serious injuries caused by her half-brother, Ronald Niedermann, who has a rare congenital condition which makes him insensitive to pain, and who is on the run with the cash of an outlaw motorcycle club which hired him to kill Lisbeth. Two rooms away in the hospital is Zalachenko, Lisbeth’s father, a former Soviet operative who tortured Lisbeth’s mother, and who was injured by Lisbeth with an axe. Zalachenko is shot to death in his hospital bed by Evert Gullberg, the head of a renegade section of Sapo, the Swedish equivalent of MI6, and who is terminally ill. Zalachenko is killed for fear that he will reveal the existence of the section which protected Zala, and instutionalised Lisbeth with the help of the corrupt psychiatrist, Dr. Peter Teleborian. Gullberg tries to kill Lisbeth, also, but is frustrated by her lawyer Annika Giannini, Mikael Blomkvist’s sister. Gullberg commits suicide. Section operatives murder Gunnar Björk, Zalachenko’s former Säpo handler and Blomkvist’s source of information for an upcoming exposé; the operatives falsify the death as a suicide. Other operatives break into Blomkvist’s apartment and mug Giannini, making off with copies of the classified Säpo file that contains Zalachenko’s identity.

Torsten Edklinth, a Sapo official is informed of the renegade section of Sapo, and begins a clandestine investigation with Monica Figuerola. Blomkvist, secretly arranges to have Lisbeth’s hand-held computer returned to her in the hospital and arranges a mobile phone hot spot to keep her in touch with the outside world. Blomkvist plants misinformation about plans to defend Lisbeth at her trial for the attack on Zala. The section swallows the bait, plants cocaine in Blomkvist’s flat and tries to have him killed.

On the third day of the trial, Blomkvist’s expose is published, causing a media frenzy, and leading to the arrest of section people. Giannini destroys Dr. Peter Teleborian’s credibility, and proves that the section conspired to cancel Lisbeth’s rights. The prosecutor realises that the law is on Lisbeth’s side, withdraws all the charges and the court cancels Lisbeth’s declaration of incompetence.

When she is freed, Lisbeth discovers that she and her twin sister are to share Zala’s estate which includes an abandoned factory. She goes to investigate the property and finds Niedermann hiding there from the police. During a struggle with him, she nails his feet to the floor with a nail gun. She informs the motorcycle gang where Niedermann is and then she informs the police of the resulting chaos. Mikael Blomkvist visits her at her apartment and they reconcile as friends.

This novel is 715 pages long, and, as such, the plot is far more complex than the above summary suggests. It is also richly populated with minor bit-part characters, whom I sometimes had difficulty keeping track of, even though each one had an essential role to play in keeping the story advancing, credibly.

All in all, this is a great story!

For Whom Do You Write?

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Jericho Writer’s Harry Bingham makes a good point in his Friday email. He says, “I mean, readers, yes, obviously. But who? Your mum? That old English teacher you loved? Crime fans in general? People who love Patricia Cornwell in particular?

There are two reasons to ask these questions. The first is marketing. If you’re writing people who want a fresh take on the Patricia Cornwell vibe, that would suggest a certain approach to book covers, titles, marketing slogans and so on. You might even refer directly to Cornwell, or her most famous character, Kay Scarpetta, in your marketing yadda.

The second reason has to do with the choices you make as you write the book itself.

As you write, and as you edit, you are faced with 1,000,000 choices: again and again and again. Are you happy with this sentence? What about this one? Does the attacker strike your heroine? Strike her with what? Does he hurt her? Does she hurt him back? Does she escape? How does she escape? Is her breath ‘hoarse and rasping’ afterwards? Or does it come in ‘juddering heaves of relief’? What phrase do you prefer? And what does she do next?

Now, obviously, you’re going to make all those choices on the basis of what seems right to you – you have no other option. But at the back of your mind, there’s always a sense that you’re writing for one set of readers rather than another.

For example, if I were writing forensically-led crime fiction, I’d have to assume that my readers knew Patricia’s Cornwell work and would be wanting me to break new ground. I couldn’t just reprise Cornwell’s tropes and expect success myself.

Indie authors – intelligently analytical as they are – often take this further, and try to conceive of an ‘Ideal Reader’ – a dog-loving, mother-of-two Kansas 40 year old housewife. Someone with plenty of friends and love of hiking, who watches true crime shows on Netflix, reads mostly crime, but will cry at soppy love stories too.

The idea is that if you know your ‘Ideal Reader’, you can craft your book and your marketing material to appeal perfectly to that one person.

And? OK. Very smart writers I know do just that and they say it works for them. In part, it works because book marketing works best when it’s micro-targeted. A good campaign is one that gets excellent conversions happening amongst a very tightly defined group of readers. A bad campaign is one that starts so-so conversions within a much broader group. So: a hyper-detailed picture of your Ideal Reader keeps your marketing focused.

But I have a somewhat different take.

I think you have to turn yourself into your own Ideal Reader.

Partly, that means bringing your own tastes to bear. As I say, when it comes to editing, you don’t really have a choice.

But you also have to ensure that you become your own readership. What books do you expect your readers to have read? What authors do they love?

You need to have read that book and know those authors. If you’ve read Patricia Cornwell as keenly as your readers have, you won’t just repeat that stuff. In the end, your desire for novelty will be the same as theirs.

These things go deep.

I know, for example, that more of my readers are American than British. So I have a particular love of giving my American readers a taste of Wales that’s very Welsh. So, for example, a few miles from where my Mum lives, there’s a village called Newchurch. Easy to say, easy to spell, right? But I’d pretty much never use that placename in one of my Fiona books. Near Newchurch, lie the settlements of Rhosgoch, Glascwm, Llanbadarn-y-garreg, and (where my kids go riding) Bryngwyn. I’d use any of those placenames instead, joyous in the knowledge that Kate from Kansas and Ali from Arkansas will struggle to pronounce any of them.

Or again: I wrote a book that had to do with the archaeology of the British Dark Ages. I know my readers to be literate and intelligent. Plenty of writers might have avoided a ton of ancient history detail, but I knew my guys would like it. (I know I like it. I’ve become them.) So the book is spattered with chunks of Latin, and late Celtic poems, and mournful Romano-British monks, and factoids about Anglo-Saxon vs British burials. (The main difference being that the Anglo-Saxon invaders were pagan, the ancient Britons were Christian, so their burial rites looked different. I am English, but I’m still on the side of the ancient Britons. Twll dîn pob Sais.)

One last example:

How fast or slow do you take a scene? Do you hurtle through? Offer a reaction shot or two, but still move at pace? Or do you allow yourself a paragraph or two of considered reflection?

My writing creates my readers, but my readers also create my writing. I know that my readers relish the Fiona character – they want more of her, not less. So, while I’m hyper-sensitive to anything that feels boring or self-indulgent, I’m happy to allow proper space for reflection. On the whole, my scenes go slow but deep, not fast and shallow. That’s respecting my readers, not ignoring them.

Over time, any difference between you and your readership gets snuffed out. You learn from them what they do and don’t respond to. You learn what books and authors they like. You follow down those trails.

You don’t have to like everything that every one of your readers like. I’ll get book recommendations from readers (either via email, for example, or from names cited in an Amazon review) where I read the book and don’t like it. But that’s fine too. What matters is knowing (roughly) the universe that your readers inhabit, and using that knowledge to shape your tastes and your choices. The process becomes a rolling, laughing, respectful conversation with a multitude.

And if you follow that path, things become easy. Your Ideal Reader? It’s you.

Review: The Girl Who Played with Fire

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So, I’ve finished the second book in the Millennium Series, and, at the moment, I’m two thirds of the way through the final book. As you already know, the series is by Stieg Larsson:

Stieg Larsson (born as Karl Stig-Erland Larsson) was a Swedish journalist and writer who passed away in 2004.

As a journalist and editor of the magazine Expo, Larsson was active in documenting and exposing Swedish extreme right and racist organisations. When he died at the age of 50, Larsson left three unpublished thrillers and unfinished manuscripts for more. The first three books (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest) have since been printed as the Millennium series. These books are all bestsellers in Sweden and in several other countries, including the United States and Canada.

Larsson witnessed a rape when he was 15, and was helpless to stop it. This event haunted him for the rest of his life. The girl being raped was named Lisbeth, which he later used as the name of the heroine on his Millenium trilogy. Sexual violence against women is also a recurring theme in his work.

Stieg Larsson

This book begins with Lisbeth Salander in a long trip to tropical resorts. She returns to Stockholm and buys a luxury apartment with money she siphoned off the accounts of a financial criminal. Nils Bjurman, who had previously raped Lisbeth Salander, focuses his attention on capturing her and destroying the film she made of his crime. He hires a motorcycle gang to capture her, but the attempt is foiled by Mikael Blomkvist, the publisher of Millennium magazine.

Millennium is approached by Dag Svensson and Mia Johansson, who have put together a report concerning sex trafficking in Sweden and the abuse of underage girls by high-ranking figures. Everyone is intrigued by recurring mentions of “Zala”, a mysterious figure heavily involved in the sex-trafficking industry. Salander, hacking Blomkvist’s computer, is taken aback by the mention of Zala, and visits Svensson and Johansson to ask questions. Later that same night, Blomkvist finds the couple shot dead in their apartment. With Salander’s fingerprints on the murder weapon, and her formal record establishing a history of violent instability, she is implicated in the double murder. Bjurman is also found dead, shot by the same weapon; Salander is the prime suspect.

Blomkvist confronts Gunnar Björck, a policeman on sick leave and one of the high-ranking abusers identified by Svensson and Johansson, who agrees to disclose information about Zala if Blomkvist leaves him out of Millennium‘s exposé. Visiting Bjurman’s summer cabin, Salander finds a classified Sapo (Swedish Secret Police) file and begins to make the connection between Bjurman and Zala, whose real name is Alexander Zalachenko. With information from Björck and Palmgren, Lisbeth’s earlier guardian, Blomkvist pieces together the history of Zalachenko: he is a former Soviet defector whose very existence is kept classified by Säpo. Initially an intelligence source, Zalachenko began to traffic in sex slaves on the side. He became the partner of a 17-year-old girl who became pregnant with twins, Lisbeth and Camilla. Zalachenko was an absent father who repeatedly abused his partner; Lisbeth, angered at her mother’s abuse, threw a petrol bomb into Zala’s car while he was in it, causing him near fatal burns. The authorities imprisoned Salander and declared her insane, since acknowledging Zalachenko’s crimes would require them to divulge his existence. Niedermann had killed Svensson and Johansson on Zalachenko’s orders; Bjurman, who was involved with Zalachenko, played a role in the murders and was killed to ensure his silence.

Separately, Salander and Blomkvist find Niederman’s address. Salander is captured there, and shot by Zalachenko, who is hiding out with Niederman. Niederman buries her alive, but she escapes, and attacks Zalachenko with an ax, seriously injuring him. Blomkvist arrives on the scene and calls the emergency services. He captures Niederman and ties him to a lamp post. The book ends at this point.

This second volume is nearly as good as the first: very difficult to put down. I have just two comments. The beginning of the book deals with Lisbeth’s time at resort hotels in the tropics and her purchase of a luxury apartment. Neither of these activities – while interesting – contributes to the plot. In fact the plot continues into the third volume, so that the second volume is not a complete story in itself

Do You Believe in a Muse?

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There is an interesting article on the Writers Digest website by William Kenower dated November 16, 2018. William Kenower is the editor-in-chief of Author magazine, a sought-after speaker and teacher, and the author of Fearless Writing (Writer’s Digest Books). He’s been published in The New York Times and Edible Seattle, and was a featured blogger on HuffPost. His video interviews with hundreds of writers, from Nora Ephron to Amy Tan to William Gibson, are widely considered the best of their kind on the Internet. He also hosts the online radio program Author2Author, where every week he and a different guest discuss the books we write and the lives we lead.

William Kenower

He says, “I was at a writer’s conference recently listening to a panel of authors discuss their writing process. They were asked if they believed in The Muse. One by one each author leaned into their microphones and gave an emphatic, “Yes!” or an equally emphatic, “No!” By the time the last author had answered I counted and saw that the panel was perfectly divided. It’s like they were asked if they believe in God, I thought.

I don’t believe in what we call The Muse; belief is too weak a word. I couldn’t write without her. I’ve certainly tried. When I did it was as if I’d forgotten how to write, yet there I was acting exactly like a writer, feeling more and more fraudulent with every lousy sentence. I was like a gardener who was planting Lego pieces instead of seeds. I was on my hands and knees digging and planting and watering all the while knowing nothing would grow.

Having said that, I know why half the writers on the panel explained that they believed in, “working hard” or, “putting their butt in the chair,” or, “mastering their craft,” rather than The Muse. I can control whether I decide to work hard or put my butt in the chair or master my craft. There’s a lot in a writer’s life that is out of our control. Agents and editors and readers, for instance, are out of my control. No matter how hard I work on something, I have zero say over what anyone will think of it, and what people think of it is often the measure of a story’s success. Best to keep my head down and my attention on what I actually can control. I’ve never seen or held or touched this Muse, after all. On dark days she can seem as unreal as all my fantasies of glory and praise—the adulation of all those other people who seem to hold my writing life in their inscrutable hands.

Believe in that. I don’t care what you call it—but you better believe in it. You better not call it luck, but you better not take full credit for it either. You were along for the ride. This may be the trickiest part of all in the relationship between the writer and The Muse. When you publish something you’ll be given full credit for it, but in your mind may linger the memory of how it was written. It was like a dream, wasn’t it? How many times did a character do what they wanted and not what you wanted? How many plot turns surprised you? You probably can’t remember what you labored over and what came easily, but you can remember how much you loved the writing of it, how glad you were for it. That stays with you long after the story has been told, long after the money has been spent, it stays with you and calls you back to the page because there’s another story that needs telling.”

I believe he has this point exactly right!

Review: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

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I have another confession to make: I didn’t bother to read this book (also) when it was first published, because I was put off by the title and the hype. But when I was preparing my summer reading list, I decided to add it. In fact, I actually ended up buying the first three books in the original Millennium Trilogy, because they weren’t listed individually on Amazon.co.uk. But before I got there I bought a series of three Millennium books on Amazon.it. When they arrived, I saw that they were books 4-6 by a different author, who was ‘carrying on’ Stieg Larsson’s (the original author’s) ‘footsteps’. I read the first 100 pages of book no. 4, thought ‘this is rubbish’, and put books 4-6 in the bin. (For those of you who don’t know, Stieg Larsson, the original author took the complete manuscripts of book 1-3 to the publisher, and died of a heart attack before he could see them in print.) My view, having read 100 pages of book 4, is that the publisher made a hasty decision to satisfy a demand for more Millennium without qualifying the author and with inadequate editing.

Stieg Larsson

Wikipedia says: “Karl Stig-Erland “Stieg” Larsson, Swedish: 15 August 1954 – 9 November 2004) was a Swedish writer, journalist, and activist. He is best known for writing the Millennium trilogy of crime novels, which were published posthumously, starting in 2005, after he died of a sudden heart attack. The trilogy was adapted as three motion pictures in Sweden, and one in the U.S. (for the first book only). The publisher commissioned David Lagercrantz to expand the trilogy into a longer series, which has six novels as of September 2019. For much of his life, Larsson lived and worked in Stockholm. His journalistic work covered socialist politics and he acted as an independent researcher of right-wing extremism.

There are two principal and quite unique characters in this novel: Lisbeth Salander, tiny, mid-twenties, brilliant computer geek, anti-social, severely abused as a child, and Mikael Blomkvist, mid forties, bright, moralistic, attractive publisher of the journal Millennium, in Stockholm. Both are dedicated and very competent investigators in their respective fields: Lisbeth: personal and corporate security; Mikael: business. At the outset, Mikael has been convicted of libeling the billionaire industrialist Wennerström; he serves a three-month prison term. He is offered a one-year freelance job to write the history of the Vanger industrial family, but he knows that his real assignment is to discover who murdered the grand-niece of the patriarch, Henrik Vanger forty years ago. Impressed with her work investigating him for Henrik Vanger, Mikael hires Lisbeth to use her computer skills in investigating the Vanger family. They discover that Michael Vanger, the current CEO of Vanger Industries, and the brother of Harriet Vanger, the girl who disappeared, can be linked to several violent murders of women, but not to his sister disappearance. Lisbeth saves Mikael from death at the hands of Michael, whom he has confronted. Michael escapes, but pursued by Lisbeth and he commits suicide by driving head-on into a truck. Knowing that Michael did not kill Harriet, Lisbeth and Mikael trace Harriet to a sheep farm in Australia where she is the owner/manager. Lisbeth unearths some terrible dirt which destroys the Wennerström empire, and, incidentally, she siphons off several billion krona into her own account.

This book is very hard to put down. In fact, I kept it close at hand so that I could read a page or two when I had a chance. Larsson drew his characters clearly and persuasively, so that they stand out in your mind. He also went to the trouble of setting each scene so that the reader feels s/he is there. But above all, he was a master at creating and maintaining tension about what will happen next to these characters about whom the reader really cares. He also skillfully leads the reader into anticipating X, when a surprising Z actually occurs. Great creativity!