The Larsson Phenomenon: Sales Figures and Sexual Abuse

Abstract

Stieg Larsson was comfortably the most commercially successful writer of the first decade of the twenty-first century, albeit posthumously. His phenomenal success has been rivalled only by the American Dan Brown.¹ But the late Swedish writer’s achievement is shot through with knotty paradoxes. Was he (as his admirers would have it) a gifted novelist who forged a radical reinvention of the strategies of popular fiction, possessed of a non-pareil gift for narrative? Or was he (as per his detractors) a prolix, inelegant wordsmith, undeserving of the acclaim that came his way after death? Larsson has achieved a position of literary respectability of the sort that has so far evaded his American counterpart. To make sense of the arguments for and against this acclaim, the Larsson phenomenon merits sustained inquiry on a level with Blomkvist and Salander’s own sleuthing.