If you have not started reading the three Millennium novels chronicling the ingenious and daring investigations of the oddest private detective couple in fiction, you’re missing a literary treat as well as a thrillingly paced narrative.
The author, Stieg Larsson, was a radical journalist who spent the latter years of his professional life exposing fascist and far-right activity in his native Sweden. He completed what became the Millennium trilogy as a hobby during the evening, after work!
The first novel in the series, published in English as The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, introduces Mikael Blomkvist, an investigative journalist and amateur sleuth, and Lisbeth Salander, a violent young social misfit who happens to be both dazzlingly intelligent and a brilliant hacker, to boot. The two investigate the disappearance of a 16-year-old girl forty years earlier at the request of her wealthy uncle – and expose corporate trickery and serial murder along the way. Beginning as hunters, they become the hunted, pursued by some powerful and ruthless characters with a lot to hide.
Tragically, Larsson died aged only 50 of a massive heart attack just before these novels were published and never lived to see their immense success: in 2008, he was the second best-selling author in the world, with only Khalid Hosseini ahead of him. Two subsequent novels featuring the unusual sleuths, The Girl Who Played With Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, (published in Sweden in 2006 and 2007) are set to be released in English translation in July 2009 and October 2009 respectively.
A distinguished military historian who writes like a gifted novelist, Antony Beevor has accrued an impressive array of awards and honours during his scintillating career. A former officer with the 11th Hussars cavalry regiment, Beevor served in Germany and England before devoting himself to writing some the most compelling and evocative histories of the Second World War and more broadly, of the Twentieth century) to be published in recent times.
His most famous works; Stalingrad (which won the Samuel Johnson Prize, the Wolfson Prize for History and the Hawthornden Prize for Literature) and Berlin – the Downfall (which won the first Longman-History Today Trustees’ Award), portray the massive struggles between fascism, communism and liberty in terms of the moving and human stories of ordinary combatants, without ever losing sight of the bigger picture, of what was really at stake for all us. Disliking the triumphalism of ‘victory’ history, he brings out the flaws and weaknesses – the bouts of spite and vengeance – that bitter warfare often brings out in ordinary soldiers, as well as their evident heroism and altruism.
Most recently, his D-Day: The Battle for Normandy (published in May 2009) became a Number 1 bestseller in Britain, France and three other European countries. He has been likened to Tolstoy, creating literary masterpieces out of the history of our times, although his craftsmanship as a great story-teller never compromises his scrupulous attention to the facts. Today, he combines writing with a visiting professorship at the School of History, Classics and Archaeology at Birkbeck College, University of London.