Lisbeth Salander returns in the seventh book of the Millennium series with Karin Smirnoff’s The Girl in the Eagle’s Talons. Lisbeth, the brilliant, bisexual, tattooed and troubled computer hacker made her debut in journalist Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo in 2005. While there are different theories to her genesis, with Larsson being quite the unreliable narrator, apart from introducing a bunch of novels with “The Girl” in the title into the world, Lisbeth was also responsible for the latest wave of fascination for “Nordic noir”.
Though the term “Nordic noir” gained currency in the 2010s, being coined by the Scandinavian Department at the University College of London, the beginnings of the genre could be found in Swedish journalists Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö’s stories of Stockholm police detective, Martin Beck, through 10 novels from Roseanna (1965) to Terroristerna (The Terrorists/1975).
Wallander’s stories
Henning Mankell’s books, featuring inspector Kurt Wallander solving horrific crimes in Ystad in Sweden in the 1990s, brought the genre into the mainstream. There have been other writers who have made their presence felt including Norwegian Jo Nesbo with Inspector Harry Hole, siblings from Denmark Lotte and Søren Hammer with their deeply disturbing books featuring Detective Konrad Simonsen and Håkan Nesser with Inspector Gunnar Barbarotti.
Nordic or Scandinavian noir are mainly police procedurals where bleakly beautiful snowscapes hide brutal crimes. Like all police procedurals, there is routine police work including going to give evidence in court, multiple cases etc. — it is not like everything is dropped to follow up on this one case. It is also teamwork that cracks the case, not a flash of inspiration from a little egg headed foreigner with magnificent moustaches. The detective leading the investigation, while blessed with insight and a way of making obscure connections, is no superhuman. Wallander struggles with diabetes, a failed marriage and poignantly dementia in the 12th Wallander novel, The Troubled Man.
Like Peter James’ Roy Grace novels, set in Brighton, which have a running mystery in the disappearance of Grace’s wife, Sandy, there are Nordic noir novels with a continuing mystery around members of the team alongside the main mystery in the book. Mathematician and IT consultant turned author Carin Gerhardsen’s The Hammarby Series, while telling of Detective Inspector Conny Sjöberg and his team solving crimes in Stockholm, also features mysteries of one of the officers’ past and another’s date rape.
The fact that only three of the eight novels are translated from Swedish into English is a mighty sore point as one has no way of knowing the resolution to those particular mysteries.
Amateur sleuth
Though Larsson’s Millennium series provided another mighty push for Nordic noir, it differs from the others by putting the amateur sleuth in the driving seat. Despite all the horrors of human trafficking, animal harm, mutilation, unbridled savagery and neo-Nazis, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is, at its heart, a tribute to Agatha Christie. We have the amateur sleuths in Salander and disgraced journalist Mikael Blomkvist; the rich industrialist, Vanger who is haunted by the mysterious disappearance of his favourite great niece, Harriet, from the remote island of Hedeby 40 years ago and the large dysfunctional family all hiding horrid secrets. It is a classic mystery with a closed circle of suspects and clues hidden in the Bible, old newspaper photographs, and puzzling pressed flowers.
Dragon Tattoo was followed by The Girl Who Played with Fire (2006), and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest (2007). After Larsson passed away, the series was kept alive by David Lagercrantz’s The Girl in the Spider’s Web (2015), The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye (2017), and The Girl Who Lived Twice (2019).
The Girl in the Eagle’s Talons marks the beginning of a new trilogy by Smirnoff, and finds Lisbeth and Blomkvist in the nowhere town of the Swedish far north, Gasskas. Salander has come to reluctantly take charge of her gifted 13-year-old niece, Svala, after her mother disappears. Svala is the daughter of Salander’s step-brother, Niedermann, and like her father, Svala feels no pain. Blomkvist, now a grandfather, travels to Gasskas for his daughter’s wedding to a probably shady councilman. Blomkvist is not in a very good place considering it is the last print issue of the magazine Millennium — it is going to be a podcast henceforth.
There is the bizarre baddie with the mandatory weird sidekick making one think of Dr Evil and Random Task. All are present and correct for a thrill ride through the frozen wasteland of Gasskas with slices of pizza and coke, sex, sadism and social injustice.
While the original trilogy was propulsive, with no time to pause and acknowledge the faintly clunky writing, with Lagercrantz’s trilogy built on the same template, Eagle’s Talons is more meditative. Blomkvist as a grandfather is not as self absorbed and his version for getting the truth out there is not all fire and brimstone, but more nuanced. His mentoring of a new batch of journalists is heartening. Lisbeth at 35 is not very different from her younger self, and she should not be either, despite the perceptive, code-breaker niece.
Smirnoff, apart from being the first woman to write the Millennium series, has given the series a forward momentum (Eagle’s Talons was about green-washing, book 8 is about mining) that ensures its currency on the high table of Nordic noir.
Published - October 18, 2023 10:30 pm IST
