Rape, murder and woman haters – Niels Arden Oplev’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a thrilling and confronting film adaptation of Stieg Larsson’s best-selling “Millenium” trilogy. Larsson’s personal history was just as controversial as Amy Yang goes back in time and explores the feverish night of racial hatred and genocide that surrounded the author’s death.

Stieg Larsson's death, murder or natural? Image: Vicent

Hailed by Oplev as “the scariest thing coming of of Sweden since Abba” (Talk Cinema, March 2010), the film centres around shamed journalist Mikael Blomkist, played by Michael Nyqvistb, and acid-tongued hacker Lisbeth Salander, actress Noomi Rapace. The pair investigate a 40 year old disappearance case and become caught in a web of violent murders against women.

While the Swedish film has exploded with praise in Australian cinemas, there was a different kind of explosion in Stockholm on the night of November 9, 2004.

Stieg Larsson died only months after sending the first copy of his new novel Men Who Hate Women to his Swedish publisher. The book was published in English as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

Larsson was a civil-rights journalist and crime fiction novelist motivated towards exposing organised crime and the neo-Nazi movement in Sweden. He wanted to write as many as ten books about a fascist gangland of former USSR hit-men, traffickers and misogynistic neo-Nazis. However, Larsson died suddenly and silently on the anniversary of Kristallnacht- a feverish night of racial hatred and genocide in the history of Nazi Germany.

Back in the 90s, Larsson devoted his passion to critiquing extreme right politics and exposing neo-Nazi white supremacy and organized crime in Sweden. In 1991, he co-authored a book, Right Wing Extremism and began charting the spread of Swedish fascism both privately and publicly.

Consequently, Larsson and his partner Eva Gabrielsson received their first death threat from a neo-Nazi newspaper in 1993. The publisher of the paper was jailed for four months and as a result both Larsson and Gabrielsson knew their privacy and security was in jeopardy.

“In 1993 members of a right-wing group were arrested for telling people to kill Stieg,” Gabrielsson said in an interview for the The Guardian, UK.

“I went to the police, and I told them: we need secure identities. They agreed straight away. They knew the threat.”

“It made me feel safer. But two other journalists who were killed had deep secure identities, so…”

So it seemed Larsson and Gabrielsson still felt their lives were at stake.

Larsson founded the Expo group and magazine after a series of racially incited deaths towards Immigrants in Sweden by alleged neo-Nazi supporters.

In 1999, Mr Larsson had his own violent experience when he was forced to escape from a group of skinheads with baseball bats, who threatened him outside his office. It has been suggested that the incident occurred as Mr Larsson had only recently reported on the suspicious death of trade unionist Björn Söderberg, whose murder was said to be related to neo-Nazi groups.

In the interview with British left wing newspaper, The Guardian , Gabrielsson remarked on the tactical measures the couple took to retain anonymity during his time at Expo. Under Swedish law, married couples are compelled to publish their address, and identify themselves at the front of their door. Gabrielsson claimed that this was one of the reasons why she and Larsson never married.

On the November 9th, 2004 Larsson was killed dramatically and symbolically by a “silent” assassin.

He experienced a massive heart attack shortly after walking up several flights of stairs because the elevator was out of order. According to state officials and filed reports, Larsson was a classic victim of coronary thrombosis- a smoker, overweight and male. Case closed.

Larsson’s English publisher, Christopher McLehose, was also quick to believe Larsson died of medical causes.

“Sixty cigarettes a day, plus tremendous amounts of junk food and coffee and an enormous workload, would be the culprit. I gather he’d even had a warning heart murmur,” McLehose said in an interview for Vanity Fair.

“Still, I have attended demonstrations by these Swedish right-wing thugs, and they are truly frightening. I also know someone with excellent contacts in the Swedish police and security world who assures me that everything described in the ‘Millennium’ novels actually took place. And, apparently, Larsson planned to write as many as 10 in all. So you can see how people could think that he might not have died but been ‘stopped’.”

However, questions could also be raised when photos of the late author show an introspective individual wearing a shirt and trousers and looking fairly healthy, not quite the overweight smoker the reports claim.

Gabreilsson also said the opposite, believing that Larsson’s death could have been an assassination plot since the couple routinely received death threats as a result of the type of research they conducted.

“He wouldn’t have lived to write the books if we had. Someone would have killed him,” says Gabrielsson said in The Guardian.

She also despised MacLehose’s English translations of the novels, claiming important names have been removed, and the alteration and editing has resulted in a “prettified” novel.

But Gabrielsson agreed the Millennium Trilogy were not just inspired, but have been their lives. The couple met at an Anti-Vietnam War protest and were together for 32 years.

Plots to assassinate Larsson was nothing new to the writer. In the late 90s, police discovered the author’s photograph, telephone and address in the apartment of a neo-Nazi gang member who was later arrested for political assassination.

Hence, Larsson’s ‘natural’ death, just months before the release of three contracted anti-Nazi novels, stinking with state-sanctioned violence and abuse is possible but not in the national interest.

According to Director Niels Arden Oplevin an interview with Buzzine, Swedish novels are famous for dealing with dark themes from the past.

“If you looked at Swedish crime stories you’d think people did nothing other than having dark alliances with the Nazis, it’s been a vehicle for evilness in a lot of Swedish books and films. They, at the same time, the country has never had a real confrontation with what their past was.”

Oplev was particularly referring to crime fiction authors such as Henning Mankell, Kurt Wallander, Liza Murkland, and duo Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö who regularly write about racism, and crimes against women and immigrants in their novels.

Swedish Crime Fiction, otherwise known as “Schwedenkrimi” in German, sprung into international reading circles in 2000, and with the release of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo the genre is likely to spark further interest.

The common genre feature usually revolves around a a middle aged police officer as a main character, whose retirement has stirred some moral dilemma. In these stories, the line between public and private is made deliberately unclear and there is an emphasis is on the relationship between crime and society.

Andrew Nestingen, a Professor of Scandinavian Studies at the University of Washington suggested that popular literature, film and TV offer a space where people feel connected. Nestingten saw the phenomenal success in Swedish Crime Fiction as a way of stimulating questions about how we belong to and engage with our societies.

If popular culture can mobilise the public, then Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy are more than fanciful detective novels.

Larsson’s superhero is female, tattooed, and has been a casualty of abuse, but doesn’t play self pitying victim.

Oplev said the character of Lisbeth Salander, which actress Noomi Rapace spent seven months preparing for, is the only reason why he agreed to direct the film. In an interview in the USA last month, the director described how much of an effect Salander has on viewers. During the first screening of the film in Scandinavia, Oplev said the response from women in the crowd was incredible.

“There was an outcry, they started whistling, applauding, yelling and I thought, ‘Oh my god, we’ve released hell’.”

Since 2004, Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy has topped the bestseller’s lists in Australia, UK , US and Europe. In the US, the trilogy became the most successful translated book in 30 years and spent almost half a year on the New York Times Booklist.

In 2009, Oplev’s film was the highest grossing film in the European Union. It made $100 million at the Box Office , making it the most successful Scandinavian film in history.

Christopher Hitchens, a left-wing American journalist and columnist, said that the popularity of the Millennium Trilogy lies in the novels’ issues that readers are confronted with every day. Questions about gender, immigration, the repetition of history and the internet offer exciting reading and viewing for a modern audience.

However the dramatic irony of Larsson’s seemingly uneventful death remains the last unsolved crime. To this day, his partner Eva Gabrielsson maintains her own fears that Larsson didn’t just die, but was stopped.