Last Orders: The Larsson Phenomenon
Barry Forshaw · Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks · 2012
Leaving aside the phenomenal sales — and the posthumous nature of his success — of the late Stieg Larsson, it is possible to discern an examination of the far right and extremist organisations as refracted through the work of the world’s bestselling crime writer, even though the books are closer to the mass-market blockbuster thriller than the literary crime fiction they were initially perceived as. Before his untimely death at the age of 50 in 2004, Larsson had produced three of the most remarkably successful crime novels ever written, and the first of his trilogy, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2008 [2005]), has broken sales records throughout the world on a weekly basis. It is instructive to examine the mixed response by Swedes to the final nail driven into the coffin of the Swedish dream by Larsson’s dark world of massive governmental corruption. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.