The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo; The Girl Who Played With Fire

It is rarely a good idea to know much about the author of any novel, lest the "novel" part begin to seem less a work of imagination and more one of therapy. But the author of these two books, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played With Fire, is a shadowy figure lurking in the pages and is curious, mysterious and puzzling in his own right.

The main character of the books is an idealistic journalist and what a great coincidence, so is Stieg Larsson, the author! the "Girl" is a super-brainy computer geek who can find out anything with a few keystrokes. This sounds about as interesting as your average newspaper but hang on, the stories take flight despite the reporter-rhetoric.

By his author picture on the back covers we can see he is a typical reporter -- soft and squishy, not that attractive but not entirely un-; a bit nerdy, clearly a guy who didn't score big in highschool. He is dead, and these two books were published, part of a trilogy, posthumously. We anxiously await the third, as they improve as we go.

Larsson is also a bit pervy if the books tell us anything at all, a plain-faced and doughy man with a big kink and wild imagination, who is unlikely to have had much of the action he writes about. But then again, pervs don't often care much for beauty. His main character is a sexually voracious skinny boy-girl, almost autistic, who dislikes much communication. Talk about gift-wrapped for a man. The great news is she gets breast implants in the second novel so is skinny as a teenage boy, but with knockers. Gift-wrapped with a bow.

Larsson, it is said, is dead, felled in some way mid-story, while covering some intrigue. Sounds a bit perfect to me. I hope this is instead a massive marketing stunt and there's even more where the Girl came from.