READING: Larsson, Millenium trilogy

Stieg Larrson
Millenium Trilogy:
The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo
The Girl Who Played With Fire
The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets' Nest
2005-07

I bought The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo trilogy on DVD in anticipation of the forthcoming Daniel Craig/David Fincher adaptation.

While the new extended editions offer more scope to explore Stieg Larrson's themes than the theatrical releases, much of what I liked about the books is still sadly but necessarily missing.

Larsson's Millennium trilogy was a masterclass in investigative reporting, with lots of trawling through secret documents, peering behind locked doors and firewalls, and exposing hidden injustices.

Unfortunately, this doesn't make for good telly but hidden in Millennium's pages is a wealth of innovative investigative tactics for journalists looking to expand their arsenal. However, some of the tactics employed by journalist Mikael Blomkvist and secretive hacker Lisbeth Salander are questionable.

With Fincher's film approaching at the end of a year that has seen one of the world's biggest newspapers collapse under the weight of hacking allegations and an infamous computer hacker facing untested allegations of sex crime in Sweden, one wonders how a fictional tale about an imprisoned Swedish journalist and a morally ambiguous promiscuous computer hacker will be received.

The moral dilemma that new Fans of the Dragon Tattoo will have to grapple with is whether they believe Salander and Blomkvist's legally questionable means were justified. Most of the trilogy's injustices could not have been exposed without data hacking.

One wonders how Murdoch's hacks may have been received if they had turned up something useful that the police missed. Larsson would have known this wasn't beyond the realms of possibility:

"Are policemen more talented than ordinary people?", wonders Blomkvist in The Girl Who Played With Fire. "Sometimes a private investigator is better at working things out than a real detective."

While Larsson knew journalists who "make a living writing drivel", such as his own creation Tony Scala, he knew that there were just as many Blomkvists out there.

The need for Scottish Blomkvists to complement real detectives has rarely been more acute. The most recent statistics available (2008/09) show a massive spike in the number of experienced policemen retiring. It is not inconceivable that some of Scotland's seasoned hacks have a few more investigative tricks up their sleeves than the new batch of detective constables.

The same could be said about the security services. The most interesting thing about Cablegate was not the secret information itself, but that so much of the information had already found its way into the public domain. Most of the diplomatic cables about the Scottish Government could have been drawn straight from The Herald or The Scotsman.

No one has done more to divide opinion on the ignoble pursuit of hacking than Wikileaks/Cablegate founder Julian Assange. The similarities between Salander and Assange are striking. Both have a "selective morality"; both are speculated to have autistic spectrum disorders; both are promiscuous up to - and perhaps beyond depending on who you ask - the point of disrepute; and both view their respective opposite sexes with what could at the very least be described as suspicion.

However, by the end of The Girl Who Kicks The Hornet's Nest, the stains on Salander's character are cleansed with revelations that her perceived immorality was little more than a construct of police chauvinism, a salacious media and ultimately an immoral government fighting to hide its own dirty secrets.

The jury is still out on Assange. Or, more accurately, the jury has yet to be called as he is still fighting extradition to Sweden where he is facing charges of sexual assault. It is unclear how Assange's story will play out. On the face of it his story is a simple "did he or didn't he" intrigue but speculation is rife that Assange was, like Salander, the victim of secretive international anti-espionage tactics. The honey trap is the oldest trick in the book. Perhaps the final word should go to Assange himself:

"I have never said that this is a honey-trap...I have never said that this is not a honey-trap. I'm not accusing anyone until I have proof."

Mikael Blomkvist couldn't have put it better himself.