The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

What's inside (11 sections)

1. The fall and the offer
2. Hedeby and the rules
3. The Salander thread
4. Six months of nothing
5. The cat and the wasp
6. The basement
7. Harriet
8. What was promised and what it cost
9. What does not hold
10. Key takeaways
11. FAQ

I came to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo the way most people do, which is that I had seen the film first and thought I knew it. I did not. The book is slower, meaner and more procedural than the movie, and it took me the better part of a week to get through the middle, where nothing happens for months on end. What follows is the whole plot, twists and the ending included.

The fall and the offer

The novel opens in two voices. The prologue gives us Henrik Vanger on his eighty-second birthday, alone with the mail, opening a framed pressed flower that has arrived without a note. Harriet started giving him one every year when she was eight, and they kept coming after she vanished, more than forty of them now, and no one in the family can say who is sending them.

The second voice is Mikael Blomkvist, investigative journalist and part-owner of Millennium magazine, a magazine that runs on crusades and barely on money. Blomkvist has just published an article based on documents from a source who claims to have proof that the financier Hans-Erik Wennerström is rotten. Wennerström's lawyers tear the story apart in court. Blomkvist is found guilty of aggravated libel, fined 150,000 kronor and sentenced to three months in prison, which he will serve in 2003. His credibility is gone, and so is the magazine's.

Into this walks Dirch Frode, a lawyer who represents Henrik Vanger, one of Sweden's great industrial families. The deal Frode offers is strange: Henrik will pay Blomkvist to write the history of the Vanger family, a job that looks like a graceful way to keep him paid while his reputation recovers. The real job, which Frode eventually admits, is older. In 1966 Henrik's niece Harriet, sixteen years old, walked out of the Children's Day parade on Hedeby Island and was never seen again. Henrik has never hired anyone to look for her. He now wants someone who will actually look, and he wants it before he dies.

Hedeby and the rules

Blomkvist takes the job and moves into the cottage on the island. What he finds is a family that behaves like a small nation at war with itself. There is Harald Vanger, Henrik's brother, ninety-two years old, a hermit and a lifelong member of the Nazi party, and there is Isabella Vanger, Harriet's mother, who could not have been less interested in the girl. Running everything is Martin Vanger, Harriet's brother, the fifty-four-year-old golden boy who took over as CEO of the company and built the modern house on the island. The family also carries an older death: Gottfried, the father of Martin and Harriet, drowned in the lake by his remote cabin the year before Harriet vanished, filed at the time as an accident. The island itself is sealed off by a tanker accident on the bridge for hours at a time, which cuts the sixty-four people living there off from the world.

Harriet disappeared on the afternoon of September 24, 1966, last seen by the canal. She left no body, no note and no enemies. She was the only one of the Vanger children who spent real time with Henrik, which is why he has never let it go.

The Salander thread

Running beside the island investigation is a second, colder story in Stockholm. Lisbeth Salander is twenty-four, a hacker and a researcher who works freelance for Milton Security, the private intelligence firm run by Dragan Armansky. She is small, tattooed, legally declared incompetent as a teenager, and treated by the state as if she were a child. Armansky values her work and is afraid of everything else about her.

Her guardian is Nils Bjurman, a lawyer who has been assigned to sign off on her life. He has no intention of protecting her. He forces himself on her the first time in his office, and when she later asks him to release enough of her own money to replace a laptop he does it again and tells her that no one would believe her word against his. Salander's answer is to come back with a camera strapped to her rucksack, let him do it once more on film, then taser him, tie him to his own bed, and tattoo a sentence across his stomach telling him he is a rapist. Before all this she had a decent guardian, Holger Palmgren, who had a stroke and was replaced by Bjurman, which is how the system works.

The two threads barely touch for the first half of the book. Salander shows up in Blomkvist's life because Frode hired Milton to run a background report on him, and because the firm needed someone who could actually get into his computer. She does, and in that report she says the one thing nobody else will: she thinks Blomkvist was set up in the Wennerström affair, and that Wennerström is the real crook. Blomkvist reads the report, realizes he has been investigated, and does not mind. By June he is hiring her, and they end up on opposite sides of a table arguing, and neither of them is used to losing.

Six months of nothing

The middle of the novel is its most honest part and its hardest. Blomkvist works through the island records for six months, maps every family member, every grudge, every alibi from 1966, and gets nowhere. He also sleeps with Cecilia Vanger, who was twenty years old when Harriet vanished, until Erika Berger finds him in bed with her one morning and Cecilia calls the whole thing off.

Then the case turns on two small things. The first is Harriet's own date book, left behind when she vanished, full of names and long strings of numbers that look like telephone numbers. Salander reads them as Leviticus verses, and once she does, the names in the book match a series of women murdered and raped between 1949 and 1966, several of them killed in ways that echo the scripture. The second is a set of photographs from the parade that day, which shows Blomkvist something the police missed: Harriet was not watching the parade. She was frightened of her brother Martin.

The cat and the wasp

The book also tells you, in case you were wondering whether the Vangers are the only monsters here, that someone is watching Blomkvist. The stray cat that befriends him on his first night, Tjorven, is found one July morning mutilated and charred on his doorstep, which is not a random gesture in a family that did business with the Third Reich. Shortly after, while he is out jogging, someone takes a shot at him. The bullet hits the concrete beside his head and throws shrapnel into his scalp, and he is lucky to walk away from it.

Salander is the counterweight to all of it. She is the person who does the things Blomkvist cannot, and Larsson introduces her with a wasp on her neck, an insect that stings and does not apologize for it. Her own life keeps pace with the investigation: she hacks into the accounts of people who deserve it, and she never once asks permission.

The basement

Harriet's list of names and numbers leads Blomkvist to Martin Vanger. He goes to Martin's house to put the photographs in front of him, and Martin, who has been charming him for months, drops the act. He gets Blomkvist down into the basement and chains him up, and he begins to talk.

Martin and his father Gottfried were the killers. Gottfried started, and he taught his son the same trade, and between them they raped and murdered women across two decades, women they picked up as strangers. The two of them had been raping Harriet from the age of fourteen. At fifteen she drowned Gottfried in the lake, and Martin saw it happen and used it to hold her, and when he came back from school in September 1966 she knew that she was next. Her disappearance was not a murder. It was an escape, and Martin does not even know where she went.

Martin is not finished. He intends to kill Blomkvist and clean it up afterward. Salander turns up at the house at exactly the wrong moment for him, attacks him and frees Blomkvist, and Martin runs for his car. He gets onto the highway at speed and drives straight into an oncoming truck. Salander follows on her motorcycle and watches him die in the wreck.

Harriet

The question of what happened to Harriet is answered over the next chapters, and it is the most humane part of the novel. She did not die. She escaped with the help of her cousin Anita, who let her use her identity, and she got off the island and eventually made it to Australia, where she married a man named Spencer Cochran and ran a sheep farm for thirty-seven years.

Blomkvist flies out and finds her. Harriet is not a ghost and she is not a victim waiting to be rescued. She is a woman who has been living as Anita Cochran for thirty-seven years, married to Spencer Cochran with three children on a sheep farm, and she has to decide whether to give the borrowed name up. She does. She returns to Hedeby to see Henrik, who is eighty-three now, and the family has to absorb the fact that the girl they mourned walked away in 1966 and kept living. The pressed flowers, it turns out, were never a taunt. She has been sending them herself every year on his birthday so he would know she was alive.

Not everyone welcomes her. Salander, who has spent her life being told by the state what she is worth, is furious at Harriet for leaving the people who might have helped her and for not stopping Martin sooner. It is the ugliest exchange in the book, and Larsson does not smooth it over.

What was promised and what it cost

Two other pieces of business close the novel. The first is the decision Blomkvist never wanted to make: he agrees, against his own instincts, to keep Martin's crimes out of the papers so that Harriet and the company are not dragged through a trial and a tabloid week. It is the one part of the ending where the hero lets something go.

The second is the Wennerström material Henrik promised Blomkvist, which turns out to be worthless, and the prison sentence that comes due in the spring. Blomkvist does his three months, walks out in May, and picks the case up again in June.

Salander's payment for the work is not cash in any way she cares about. She asks that the Vangers donate yearly to a charity for women, and that Frode identify the families of the dead women. Then she goes back into Wennerström's computer and goes further than before: she flies to Zurich and helps herself to millions of his dollars while the authorities are still chasing him. From those files Blomkvist spends months writing a book and a long article, The Mafia Banker, that clears his name and saves Millennium from folding. The last section of the book is called the audit, and it is the most satisfying revenge Larsson ever wrote. The man who destroyed Blomkvist in court is taken apart by a woman he never knew existed, and when the police finally give up looking for him, Salander makes one phone call and Wennerström turns up dead.

The novel ends on a Christmas present. Salander spends the holiday with Blomkvist, realizes she is in love with him, and buys him a late gift: a metal Elvis sign reading Heartbreak Hotel. On the way to his flat she sees him with Erika Berger, and she walks to a bin and drops the sign in instead of knocking on the door.

What does not hold

The opening chapters are a slog, and Larsson knows it or should have. The financial journalism, the libel trial and the Wennerström setup take a long time to turn into anything you can feel, and a reader who has not been promised a body in the basement may well put the book down in chapter three.

The middle is slow for reasons that are not always artistic. There is a real stretch where Blomkvist reads documents on an island and nothing is at stake except a deadline, and the timeline keeps informing us that months have passed without anything changing. The book is four hundred pages and could be three.

The violence is the problem I hear about most from people I recommend it to, and they are right. The rape scene and the retort tattoo are graphic in a way that feels like a dare, and the serial killer material in the basement is played for shock rather than for insight. Larsson was writing about violence against women as a political subject, and sometimes he writes it as a set piece.

Finally, the translation. The English reads flat in places where the Swedish apparently does not, clipped and repetitive, with too many chapter endings that stop on a manufactured dramatic beat. Blomkvist's charm in particular gets flattened into decency. The book survives all of this because its two leads are impossible to forget, but the surface is rougher than it should be.

FAQ

What is Mikael Blomkvist convicted of in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo?

Aggravated libel. His article claiming the financier Hans-Erik Wennerström is criminal does not survive court, so he is fined 150,000 kronor and sentenced to three months in prison, which he serves in 2003. He steps back from Millennium's board, and his credibility as a journalist is what the rest of the book has to rebuild.

Who killed the women and sent Henrik the pressed flowers?

Martin Vanger, who carried on the work his father Gottfried started, raping and murdering women picked up as hitchhikers across decades. Harriet discovered it as a teenager, so Martin hunted her too. The yearly flowers framed for Henrik's birthday were the killer's taunt, and Harriet herself was the one who kept sending them after she escaped.

How does The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo end?

Blomkvist tracks Harriet to Australia, she returns to Hedeby to face her family, and Martin dies when his car runs off the bridge. Salander then exposes Wennerström through his bank accounts, which saves Millennium, and on Christmas she sees Blomkvist with Erika Berger and throws the gift she meant to give him into a bin.