The Costco Connection - September 2015

SEPTEMBER 2015 ;e Costco Connection 83 arts & entertainment

David Lagercrantz weaves
a new The Girl … tale

By Stephanie E. Ponder

TEN YEARS AGO readers met Lisbeth Salander and Mikael Blomkvist in Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Published a year after Larsson’s untimely death, the novel was followed by two more posthumous books, and to date the trilogy has sold more than 80 million copies worldwide.

In the five years since the last book in the series was published, fans may have given up hope that Salander’s and Blomkvist’s adventures would continue. Those worries can be laid to rest. Larsson’s publisher, Norstedts, selected Swedish writer and journalist David Lagercrantz to continue the series. In his new book, The Girl in the Spider’s Web, Salander and Blomkvist again face danger.

The Connection recently had the opportunity to sit down with Lagercrantz, a former crime reporter, novelist and author of a best-selling biography of Swedish soccer player Zlatan Ibrahimovi;. He spoke about the challenge of taking over such a popular series, what he did to feel comfortable with the characters and more.

Costco Connection: How did you prepare yourself for writing The Girl in the Spider’s Web?

David Lagercrantz: I really immersed
myself in the Stieg Larsson universe. The first
step, of course, was reading. I read each of the
books multiple times, taking notes on the
characters and the various threads Larsson
had embedded in the books for them. I started
asking questions about each of them, and their
backgrounds. Who are these characters? What
don’t we know about them?

Take Lisbeth Salander, for example. She has such an interesting background, with her evil father dominating her childhood. We know she’s a unique person, but there are still so many questions to ask about her. Why is Lisbeth such a great hacker? I really wanted to explore that question, and dig deeper into what made her who she is.

CC: What did you most enjoy about continuing the series and slipping into characters that Larsson had already created?

DL: From the beginning I loved the disparity, the contrast between Mikael and Lisbeth. I also loved writing about a newspaper, since [I was] a reporter myself.

I loved all of the characters, but I loved Lisbeth most of all. She’s the kind of character that I’ve been writing about my whole career: odd, antisocial geniuses that the world has treated badly. My whole life has been about understanding these types of characters. It was absolutely wonderful to try to understand Lisbeth and get inside her head.

CC: Did your training as a journalist help you stay true to Lisbeth and Mikael, characters who may feel real to readers?

DL: As a former journalist I had a lot of
experience researching, and I was able to draw
on that experience when learning about hack-
ing. I was also able to draw on that writing
style and use an authoritative, journalistic
prose that I learned from my days as a reporter.

[Larsson] was a journalist as well, and he wrote with such a page-turner style. I wanted to emulate his writing with prose that wasn’t too literary, and I definitely think my experience as a journalist helped me do that.

I was always stopping myself, wondering if Lisbeth and Mikael would really do the things I was writing about. I was testing their borders. Would Lisbeth do this? What would Mikael do? It was lovely that I worked with [Larsson’s] old publisher, Eva Gedin, because she really helped me as I tested those boundaries.

CC: What would you most like fans of the first three books to know about The Girl in the Spider’s Web?

DL: Fans will feel at home with The Girl in the Spider’s Web. They’ll recognize the universe that Larsson created, and the characters that he developed. I took the world that he developed and expanded upon it. Readers can expect to find out more about Lisbeth, and what made her the person that she is, and they can expect a thriller that’s worthy of Larsson’s series.

I worked so hard, with the deepest respect for Larsson, and I do hope they like it. C The Costco Connection The Girl in the Spider’s Web (Item #761713, 9/1) is available in most Costco warehouses.