Imagining Lisbeth

Rooney Mara has imagined her. Noomi Rapace has imagined her. You’ve no doubt imagined her.

But how did Stieg Larsson himself imagine Lisbeth Salander? How might he have “seen” her face in his own mind? We may have an answer, thanks to Brian Davis, a British writer and media artist.

Davis took the technology created by law enforcement to make composite drawings of suspects and used it to sketch her face based solely on the description of the character drawn from the Millennium books.

image by Brian Davis

In addition to Lisbeth Salander, he has used the software to crank out mugshots of the likes of Lolita, Emma Bovary, and other famed literary characters. The site Davis created for his work, The Composites, attracted 6,000 visitors in its first few days and many fans were soon asking him to apply his talents to their own favorite. Additionally, stories have been done about him on by the BBC and The Atlantic.

A clever idea, to be sure, but we’ll stick with the image of Lisbeth retained in our brain from the first time we met her.

More Nordic Noir Hits the Silver Screen

We were fortunate to be able to interview Sweden’s leading post-Larsson mystery writers for The Tattooed Girl before they became known to a world-wide audience. And now one of them, “Lars Kepler,” has signed a movie deal for all of his projected series of eight books – even though five of them have not yet been written.

Alexandra and Alexander Ahndoril. Photo by Julie O'Connor.

Lars Kepler is, of course, the nom de plume of the famed Swedish literary pair Alexander and Alexandra Ahndoril, pictured here, best known for their former “day jobs” as playwright (he), literary critic (she), and novelists and literary fiction writers (both). They had tried several times to do something together, they told us, but “we argued every time.” That is, until Lars (after Stieg Larsson) Kepler (after the famed astronomer) appeared in their lives, as they describe in Chapter 6 of The Tattooed Girl.

Their first book, The Hypnotist, came out last year in the US and their second novel, The Paganini Contract, is due out in English later this year. Both have been Swedish and European bestsellers and The Hypnotist was on the ‘top ten of 2011’ list of several US critics. The couple’s third book, The Fire Witness, is now at the top of the bestseller lists in Sweden.

Now come the films.

Will Rooney Mara win the Academy Award for best actress for her portrayal of Lisbeth Salander?

The field is very competitive and she is not the oddsmakers favorite. Indeed, according to one London bookie, she is the least likely member of the five woman field to win the Oscar.  However, we got to thinking the other day about her chances—and about a comment made to us in an interview for our book The Tattooed Girl by Katarina Wennstam. A Swedish journalist, nonfiction author and crime novelist, Wennstam is a thoughtful feminist who has focused much of her work on raising social awareness of violence against women. In The Tattooed Girl, we interviewed her on a number of subjects relevant to the Stieg Larsson trilogy. At one point we asked about her theory of how rape scenes in well known films served as a kind of “rite of passage” to becoming recognized as a great actress. The following is an excerpt from The Tattooed Girl (Chapter 9): 

It’s Not Just About Arnold Anymore

For decades, action heroes in films were the exclusive domain of a series of “manly” men: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis, Sylvester Stallone, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Jackie Chan, and so on. Women in these stories, just like in most Hollywood scripts,  were relegated to the ”hostage, victim, or conquest” stereotype.

Revenge is in the air. Slowly but surely studios have been waking up to the realization that female-led action films can be potent box office successes. Notable among the game-changers in this category are the recent Haywire and Underworld: Awakening. Notes Melissa Silverstein on her Women and Hollywood blog, “Haywire does what has been done before for the dudes – make a female athlete a movie star. The action is not toned down because she is a girl. In fact it’s ratcheted up because she is the best and no one can figure out how to kill her.”

Dragon Tattoo Leaves Its Mark On Stockholm Fashion Week

We are far, far from being fashionistas, but when we saw a report by the Stylefile blog that Noomi Rapace had opened Stockholm’s just completed fashion week and that she had come away from one show praising the Lisbeth Salander-inspired collection, we couldn’t resist a brief foray into the world of haute couture.

It was one thing when the department store H&M released a fashion-friendly version of Salander’s “dirty, worn down” look last Fall: hoodies, leather motorcycle jackets, boots, a Swedish/American flag hybrid t-shirt, etc.

But Lisbeth on the runway?

RT Book Review Salutes Edgar Nomination for The Tattooed Girl

The literary website and magazine RT Book Review recently passed on their congratulations to us for being nominated for a 2012 Edgar Allen Poe Award.

The 2012 Edgars, as they are informally called, are selected by Mystery Writers of America. The winners will be announced this Spring at the 66th annual banquet. This year’s Edgar Awards Grand Master is bestselling author Martha Grimes. 

RT featured The Tattooed Girl in the July 2011 issue, as that month’s non-fic pick. The book is an unauthorized but incredibly in-depth guide to all things Stieg Larsson and his series. In the July issue, RT’s Managing Editor Liz French interviewed Dan Burstein, one of our co-authors. Read Part 1 and Part 2 of the interview in these blog posts, or on the RT site.

India Will Not See the Hollywood Version of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

According to entertainment industry sources, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo will not be shown in theaters in India.

The Sony/David Fincher/Rooney Mara/Daniel Craig version of the film was to be released on February 10, but India’s Central Board of Film Certification insisted that several scenes be edited.

Director David Fincher refused to cut the controversial scenes, which included nudity in the love-making scenes and the troubling rape and torture scenes.

Sony acknowledged that it would not be opening the film in India and released a statement, which read in part, “While we are committed to maintaining and protecting the vision of the director, we will, as always, respect the guidelines set by the Board.”

According to TheWrap.com, the film has already made nearly $100 million in the U.S. and more than $165 million at the overseas box office, and appears on its way to more than $200 globally, with much of Asia still ahead.