#7 The Girl Who Played With Fire by Stieg Larsson

The Girl Who Played With Fire by Steig Larsson is the sequel to Larsson’s bestseller The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, which I read earlier this year. The series, which is dubbed “The Millennium Trilogy” and includes the just released The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest, is trumpeted in press releases as a publishing phenomenon selling a bazillion copies on both sides of the Atlantic, inspiring hardcore fans to import copies because they couldn’t wait for the American release dates, prompting two different film franchises, one in it’s native Sweden and a soon to be produced American version, and making “Swedish mysteries” a suddenly popular literary sub-genre.

All of this hubbub has got to mean something, right? Well, don’t drink the Kool-aid just yet. I was initially drawn to The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo based on a glowing New York Times review, which dubbed it exceptionally smart and literary for a mystery/thriller. The Times Book Review also put it in their top ten books of the year the year it was released. I don’t know what they were smoking, but there is nothing in this series to raise it above your standard beach read.

I’m going to talk about both The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played With Fire together because “Fire” is in essence the middle chapter of the Trilogy and really doesn’t stand on it’s own. Although it makes half-hearted attempts to bring new readers up to speed, it presupposes knowledge of the first book. In “Dragon Tattoo” we are introduced to Mikael Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander. Blomkvist is a recently disgraced investigative reporter who is hired by an eccentric industrialist to solve the mystery of his niece who disappeared 30 years earlier. Salander is a computer hacker who becomes his research assistant. She is “The Girl…” in all of the titles and this is basically her story despite how the first book starts off the overall story arc.

In “Fire” Salander is accused of murdering three people and in the ensuing investigation her mysterious past is brought to light. Salander is an extremely interesting and compelling character. She is the reason I kept chugging along through this often messy and convoluted story. Larsson wisely makes Salander the central character after the first book, even though her portrayal becomes unbelievably cartoonish as the series progresses. While she at first seems intriguingly conflicted and contradictory, as the layers are pulled back she is made to be a veritable super-hero to the detriment of any expectations of realism. We find out she is a savant with a photographic memory who can hack into any computer and memorize and learn “anything” by reading it once. There is a forced tangent shoehorned into “Fire” about how she reads theoretical mathematics textbooks just for fun and solves Fermat’s Theorem, which has perplexed mathematicians for hundreds of years, in a matter of weeks.

Salander’s characterization is not the only time Larsson falls into fan-fiction wish fulfillment in his writing. Blomkvist (a character clearly modeled on himself, they both share the same background) sleeps with every eligible female character in both books, just because he can under Larsson’s pen, whether it makes sense plot-wise or not.

Larsson takes many liberties story-wise. His plots are sloppy and meandering, he goes off on tangents that have nothing to do with the overall story, and he has a frequent tendency to bend plot logic to suit his needs. He tries to set up an underlying theme of Sweden’s backward attitude of violence toward women but revels in his salaciously detailed depictions of rape and torture throughout the two books.

These books are entertaining enough if you totally shut off your brain, Salander is an extremely readable character, and the momentum and cliffhangers are enough to propel you along. But for the life of me, I can’t understand why Larsson is so highly regarded, when in my estimation he’s no different than a populist page turner like James Patterson.

#6 The Hunter by Richard Stark

Bad people making bad decisions. That is the most succinct way to describe Richard Stark’s novel “The Hunter”.

Stark was one of many pseudonyms for the prolific crime/noir author Donald E. Westlake. In the days before James Patterson and Nora Roberts it was considered bad business to “flood the market” with more than one book by a particular author per year. Hence, writers like Westlake, who wrote three or four books a year, would release them under pen names. Richard Stark was the name he primarily used for his “Parker” series, of which “The Hunter” is the first book.

“The Hunter” centers on Parker (no first name is ever given), a con artist, thief and heist man who is out for revenge on the people who double-crossed him on his last job and left him for dead. It doesn’t matter that he was secretly planning on double-crossing them and they turned the tables on him before he could carry out his plan. He pursues them with a single-minded relentlessness, taking on a huge organized crime operation in the process.

“The Hunter” is pitch black, even for a noir novel. None of the characters have any redeeming qualities and Stark does not try to make them sympathetic in any way. Parker in particular is a remorseless thug. He leaves a long trail of collateral damage to innocent and not so innocent bystanders along the way and doesn’t seem to particularly care. In the most disturbing scene of the book for me, Parker breaks into a beauty parlor to stakeout the mob hotel across the street and in the process; knocks out the manager who was closing up, ties her up and gags her and inadvertently kills her when she suffocates from a asthma attack. He only notices she is dead when he contemplates raping her.

I’m not one of those people who need’s to like or identify with the characters to find a book interesting or worth reading. There really is no way to identify with the Parker, unless you’re a sociopath, but that doesn’t make it any less compelling, especially for fans of crime fiction/noir.

At the time it was written, 1961, I would think that it was rare or unusual for the protagonist to essentially be the antagonist and you can see the echo's and influence of "The Hunter" in much modern crime fiction. Stark paints a fascinating portrait of not only a place and time, but of a criminal underworld that is dank, dirty and sloppy. Parker is not so much smart as he is cunning. For as resourceful as he is in pursuing his objectives, he make tons of stupid mistakes that come back to haunt him. It is noir, after all, and nobody gets what they want.

Stark proves himself a master of the genre. His prose is taunt, clipped and hard-boiled. Like his characters he doesn’t mess around and gets right to the point, keeping the reader in the immediate moment and filling in the details later with the old noir standby, the flashback. The story moves fast and when the dust settles Parker is left with little except a trail of destruction behind him and an opportunity for continued misadventures.

“The Hunter” has been adapted for the screen twice, once as “Point Blank” with Lee Marvin and as “Payback” with Mel Gibson. Neither movie does the book justice. It’s not for everyone, but if you’re a fan of dark noir/crime fiction then go straight to the source material.

#5 Then We Came To The End by Joshua Ferris

Joshua Ferris’s impressive debut novel is set in a Chicago advertising agency at the beginning of the decade. The agency and its employees are starting to feel the pinch after the dotcom bust and are reeling from the looming specter of impending layoffs after the economically flush years during the nineties.

Ferris brilliantly uses the collective “we” of corporate speak as his narrative device and in the course of the novel both reinforces the truths and dismantles the myths of the collective “we” that inhabits any office. The way the narrative is structured, we the reader are part of the office “we” and are a voyeuristic participant in the gossip, goofing off, meetings, deadlines and after work happy hours.

“Then We Came To The End” encapsulates the surreal microcosm of office life. The office gossip that must be broken down in excruciating detail, the daily rituals that can’t be deviated from, the ingenious time wasters and ways to avoid doing work, the territoriality and unspoken hierarchy, the in-jokes and gallows humor, all of which is seemingly paramount to those caught up in it, but meaningless to someone on the outside.

It is that irksome outside world intruding on the hermetically sealed unreality of office life that gives the novel its emotional heft and perspective. We don’t operate in a vacuum, and illness, family tragedy, divorce and a changing corporate landscape all find a way to seep in. It’s a testament to the novel that none of the characters and situations go the predictable way that they may seem to be moving towards. Nobody is a stock character or stereotype and in the course of the novel all the main characters end up showing multiple sides of themselves.

Like any good office story, we get it in bits and pieces and from many different sources. Sometimes the pieces form a whole and other times there’s no way to get the whole story. People leave and take their details with them. That is part of the underlying theme of “Then We Came To End”. All of the team building and camaraderie and surrogate family are an illusion that ends when the elevator doors close on a laid off co-worker and their sad cardboard box full of personal belongings. They then just become an empty cubicle whose occupant you can’t quite remember the name of.

“Then We Came To The End” perfectly summarizes modern corporate culture and the fact that nobody is going to retire with a gold watch after working 30 years for the same company anymore. Nothing is guaranteed and those experiences and people that seemed so constant at the time are ephemeral.

If you’ve ever worked in an office, you’ll appreciate this book. It’s funny, poignant, tragic, and says something compelling about the world we live in like all the best books do. I ripped through it in a day and half if that helps sell you on it.