The Girl With The Midas Touch

I recently finished reading The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo by Swedish author Stieg Larsson, (2005, first translated into English in 2008).  It's the first book of the best-selling Millenium Trilogy, but the series was originally planned as a series of 10 books featuring the financial journalist Mikhael Blomkvist and his unlikely aide Lisbeth Salander, the be-inked character that gives the book its title.  The novel has been everywhere recently and the Hollywood adaptation has just been released.  So it's fair to say this novel has been on my radar for a while.



I'm pleased to say that The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo completely lives up to the hype.  On paper, it  shouldn't work: a thriller about a disgraced journalist on a sabbatical who attempts to solve a 30-year old family mystery sounds dull and dreary.  But Larsson is a master of drawing the reader into the story and it doesn't take long to get hooked.  In Lisbeth Salander, Larsson has created an instantly classic character.  Surprisingly, Salander doesn't play a huge part in this first book (although I think it's safe to guess that she steps into centre-stage later on, as the next two books are also named after her).

Another reason I've finally gotten around to reading this one is that Vertigo comics have just announced their adaptation of the book coming out in November.  If you can't wait that long, then a special preview is going to be published in time for Free Comic Book Day 2012 (May 5th this year, put in your diary now, fellow nerds!).  Vertigo have had mixed success recently with their line of stand-alone crime graphic novels, so it should be interesting to see how this one works out.  It's a major coup for them to get the rights to the novel.  Denise Mina is an interesting choice for a writer (a successful crime novellist, but a less-than-successful comics writer) but I'm more excited about Leonardo Manco's artwork.  Manco's pairing with Mike Carey on Hellblazer is probably one of my favourite comicbooks of all time.

Leonardo Manco's John Constantine, Hellblazer

Here's the cover to Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, coming this Winter:

And - quelle surprise! - they've gone for the sex angle.  In fact if you view the covers of the novels, you can almost see the progression from the original Swedish covers to the slightly sex-ed up but still demure British ones - culminating in the above monstrosity.  Lee Bermejo is one of my favourite cover artists and the above image is great: I just don't feel like it's right for this book.  The original title of the book roughly translates as "Men who hate women" and the book deals unflinchingly with sexual violence.  So, to me at least, it's wrong to play on the sex-angle too much to attract attention to the books.  Interestingly enough, the movie promo images are quite subdued - I expected the American screens to turn Salander into a blonde bomb-shell.  Salander is portrayed by Larsson as a severely damaged individual: not conventionally attractive and it appears the film has stayed true to the character.



The more eagle-eyed among you may have noticed that I've been making an effort to update this here blog more regularly.  I'm doing my best at the moment and I'm never short of stuff to ramble on about so, if you're still reading, thank you.  I'm doing my best to redesign this site too (with precious little proper techie knowledge) and make it a bit more attractive and accessible.  To this end, I've also listed this page with Technorati, the techno blog. As part of this, I'm obliged to published the following token code to register this blog: Y27T625J3PQ8.  There we go, all done.

I've also realised that this is a bit of a one-way conversation at the moment, so I thought I'd ask what are you reading right now?  I've altered my blog settings so that anyone can add comments and you no longer have to sign up for a Google or a Blogger profile, so feel free to leave a message.  I might have to revise that when the Viagra adverts start rolling in...

Oh and I nearly forgot to mention:  happy birthday Charles!  You'd have to have been living under a rock for the past year not to have noticed that this year is a special one for Charles Dickens: he was born 200 years ago today.  The BBC have been making sure no-one forgets, with their Dickens series of programmes and today Google have jumped on board.