The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest

In a recent blog, Martin Edwards referred to the rather old-fashioned habit of putting a list of characters at the beginning of crime novels. I could have done with one recently when I read THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNETS’ NEST, the last of Stieg Larsson’s trilogy. These novels, in particular the last two, are not free-standing and long as they are individually, together they make one enormous story. Some of the characters have rather similar names, too, and I didn’t always remember who was who from the second volume. I thoroughly enjoyed it: gripping reading. But what I find hardly credible as a writer is that he wrote the whole lot without looking for a publisher – of course, it wasn’t his day job, just something he knocked off in his spare time for fun. And that’s even more staggering. Just the thought of it makes me want to lie down with a wet towel round my head.