Flashes of action-swift and brutal.īut Larsson's prose-at least in the English translations-is pedestrian, missing the poetic flourishes and cynical humour of American masters of the style like Raymond Chandler and colleagues. Telling the story through blunt conversation in a series of sharp scenes. The books are a callback to the crime fiction of the 1930s and 1940s in other ways too. And they raise the social critique aspects of their stories to a level higher than in previous Scandinavian crime fiction and the original American noir. Stieg Larsson's novels making up what became known as The Millennium Trilogy are bleaker than anything that came before. Those works though were still essentially police procedurals. For at least a decade earlier, great Scandinavian crime writers, like Henning Mankell, had been winning acclaim for their gruesome mysteries investigated by flawed human beings tangling with society's darkest forces. Nordic noir had been around a while before the The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and its sequels made it a worldwide fad.
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