Matt Rees's Blog - Posts Tagged "jo-nesbo"

The Swedish title of Part I in Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy was “Men Who Hate Women.” Which shows that you can write a huge international bestseller and not know why people would read your book.

Larsson’s U.K. publisher changed the title to “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.” With his original title, Larsson would’ve been a posthumous hit (he died in 2004 of a heart attack at the age of 50) in Sweden, where he was well-known as a Communist campaigner against racism and the extreme right. But he probably wouldn’t have beaten the rest of the recently popular pack of Nordic crime writers from Henning Mankell to Jo Nesbo.

It’s the title change and its focus on a character who’s both aide to the sleuth and victim of violent crime that made Larsson the second-biggest selling novelist in the world last year, after Khaled “A Thousand Splendid Suns” Hosseini.

All the other Nordic writers focus on the detective, which is after all the traditional route in crime fiction. We’ve bought 40 million Mankell novels to follow Inspector Wallander as he mopes his way to the villain’s doorstep.

You could read Larsson’s book like that, too: Mikael Blomqvist, magazine editor and irresistible ladies man, is commissioned to unravel an old murder mystery on a remote Swedish island. But it’s his assistant, a rape-victim filled with hate for her persecutors (the men who hate women), who’s really the heart of the book.

While Blomqvist is working the island case — a fairly typical “closed room” mystery, similar to the ones in which Agatha Christie’s sleuths used to inform us that “one of the people in this room is the murderer” — Lisbeth Salander is secretly setting up the vigilante vengeance that provides the book’s smooth twist in the tail.

No one reads beyond page 50 for Blomqvist. Just Salander. Which is why the work of a Swedish Communist is now being taken up by Sony Pictures for a Hollywood version probably to be directed by David Fincher (who made “Zodiac”), produced by Scott Rudin (“No Country for Old Men”) and scripted by Steve Zaillian (who won an Oscar for his adaptation of “Schindler’s List”).

So many readers warmed to Salander — the series has sold 27 million copies in 40 countries so far — that all three novels in the series have been made into movies in Sweden already. The first came out in the U.S. this month and the other two will be released in the summer.

USA Today urged viewers not to wait for the Hollywood version, calling the Swedish flick “indelibly great.” (Indelible, like a dragon tattoo, get it?) In an example of praising the atmosphere while half-overlooking a flaw in the central element of the movie, reviewer Claudia Puig wrote: “Though the relationship between Lisbeth and Mikael isn't fully developed and a few plot coincidences feel contrived, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo artfully and intelligently fuses a punk sensibility to an epic tale.”

Maybe it’s wise not to wait for Hollywood, if it’s punk sensibility that floats your boat.

Of course, Puig’s quibble is a red alert for likely scriptwriter Zaillian. You have to buy Lisbeth and Mikael, otherwise “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” is really a drag.

Let’s go back to the novel.

It’s 554 pages in my British softcover version — the first book of three equally bulky volumes, in case you haven't already read them. Much of that is the sort of thing you might read in a campaigning magazine such as Expo, the publication of which Larsson was the editor. It’s written in the chatty simple language that magazine — and, increasingly, thriller — editors like, because it’s direct and lacking in imagery, so you keep turning the pages. You’ll never have to stop and say, “Hey, ‘She gave me a smile I could feel in my hip pocket.’ Nice image, Stieg Larsson.”

(You won’t, because that’s Raymond Chandler. “Farewell, My Lovely,” chapter 18.)

That’s no problem for a screenwriter. Hollywood can do its own wisecracks, and other literary imagery is usually dropped before an actor opens his lips.

Zaillian can surely cut most of the lengthy portions of the book which Larsson probably liked best. There are long disquisitions on rape statistics in Sweden and background segments on the local business scene. Take Lisbeth’s repeated rape by her legal guardian. It leads to a page and a half of this:

“Guardianship is a stricter form of control in which the client is relieved of the authority to handle his or her own money or to make decisions regarding various matters.”

There’s more: “Taking away a person’s control of her own life … is one of the greatest infringements a democracy can impose … For the most part the Guardianship Agency carries out its activities under difficult conditions … Occasionally there are reports that charges have been brought against some trustee or guardian who has…”

If Karl Marx had written “Das Kapital” in the evenings as a thriller, it might’ve had more zip than Larsson’s preachy liberal legalisms. Just so long as Engels had changed the title to “The Guy With the Dialectic Theory.”

Niels Arden Oplev’s Swedish movie version boils down to a 152-minute procedural that’s quite televisual in its look. That’s too long for a Hollywood thriller, so Zaillian will have to pare it even more.

So what’s left when you take out the tedium? (Don’t get me wrong, a lot of readers tell me they love the tedious parts of Larsson. They soothe you when you’re sick in bed or trying to take your mind off work at the beach. You forget your troubles, immersed instead in how rotten it is to be a Swedish woman.)

Which returns us to Lisbeth. She drives the narrative and, perhaps because women fall too easily for Mikael, she’s where all the sexual tension lies, too. (The book is big on titillation and the Swedish movie doesn’t skimp on a graphic rape scene.) It’s Lisbeth who’ll take you beyond the statutory confrontation with the villain. She makes the book memorable.

Better hope Hollywood doesn’t change the title.

(I posted this on GlobalPost.com)

There are many theories as to why Scandinavian crime writers prosper in the bestseller lists. But I know why it is. Ikea.

I just bought a new set of Ikea shelves for my office. I’ll get into exactly how that has altered the configuration of my workspace, but at this point let me just note that it makes my writing room seem a thousand times more orderly, less cluttered. As any feng shui expert would tell you, a disorganized room will yield fractured thoughts and fill the mind of its occupier with distraction. For a writer who needs to focus on his manuscript and whose manuscript requires a consistent vision, that’s a bad thing.

So these shelves, produced by a company based in Sweden, have no doubt created the clean, neat spaces Scandinavian crime writers like Henning Mankell and Jo Nesbo need to write their clean, neat stories.

I was in need of a little neatening in my office, because my research had started to create clutter. There were piles of books on Mozart, music and the Austrian Empire related to my forthcoming historical crime novel MOZART’S LAST ARIA. Then new mountains of books and documents for CARAVAGGIO ON FIRE, my novel about the Italian artist which will be out in a year and a half.

But that’s not all. For my Mozart book, I learned the piano. So suddenly there’s a piano in my office. For Caravaggio, I’ve been learning to paint with oils, so there’s an easel and painting implements and canvases jostling for space with my guitars and bass guitars and amplifiers (those aren’t research; it’s a hobby).

Add to that the large numbers of foreign editions of my books I’m delighted to receive when I’m published in Indonesia and Romania and Iceland, but which I’m unable to give to friends due to the fact that I only know one Icelander, my Romanian landlord already read the book, and the only Indonesian I know is my editor and of course he has already read the book, too.

Read the rest of this post on my blog The Man of Twists and Turns.

When I worked as a journalist at a major US magazine, it was clear that readers didn’t respond to hard news. They wanted features. Not fluffy features. Serious features. But they'd had enough of news stories about what happened that week.

What did the editors do? They ordered correspondents to write hard news. Because they didn’t care what readers wanted. They wished to appear as serious journalists before their peers, and serious journalists write tough hard news stories. Even if no one wants to read them.

I was put in mind of this as I listened to a BBC Open Book podcast about whether crime fiction has become too gory. Specifically whether descriptions of violence – and the torture of women in particular – have gone too far. I interpret that to mean: whether the violence is indulged for its own sake, rather than for the sake of plot or character development.

After listening to the show I felt as though I had been tuned in to a discussion by European liberals about multiculturalism – or some other subject on which all “decent” types agree and then simply talk about the nuances of their shared position, rather than ever saying “hey, there’s a case to answer here.”

I’ve seen a great deal of violence in my life. I’ve been a foreign correspondent in the Middle East for 15 years. I’ve seen people shot, blown up, burned to death, horribly maimed, and I’ve been threatened myself. I take no pleasure in that and I have no sympathy for those who would treat others’ suffering as entertainment. Perhaps that’s why I believe there is very much a case for crime fiction to answer: too many writers and presumably readers appear to be indulging in psychotically prurient interest.

That isn’t to say there’s no violence in my novels. But I’m very careful about its purpose, and I don’t require it to take place in front of the reader’s eyes, as it were. I try to think about Chandler’s great dictum on Hammett – that he put murder back in the hands of those who actually commit it in real life. No doubt some of those people are sadists, but most are criminals and most murders are committed with dispatch. That’s how I like it to be done in my books: by a criminal, not a psycho, and quickly, as a piece of business.

Read the rest of this post on my blog The Man of Twists and Turns.