Fiction crosses over into real life with “Salander” hacker in Spanish enclave Melilla

According to reports in Spain’s leading newspaper, El País, there is a real-life hacker calling herself “Salander” after Stieg Larsson’s fictional Lisbeth Salander made famous by the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series. The new Salander apparently operates from Melilla, the small Spanish enclave in Morocco. She has been gaining access to Spanish government files and publishing them online.

EuroWeekly reported:

“Spanish daily newspaper El País reported on Sunday that for the past two years the shadowy internet personality has been hacking her way into state institutions, then publishing them on the web to highlight corruption and wrong-doing. The Facebook page where she published most of the documents has been closed down and the “Spanish Salander” remains unidentified.In an interview with El País, she claimed she started her online campaign because she was “sick of people being scared to have opinions or rebelling”. She claimed that the political classes of Melilla had “exploited the geographical barrier of the Mediterranean to create an alternative, parallel reality”. One of her most notable achievements is providing inside information concerning the abuse of patients in a state-funded mental institution. This information led to an employee being fired for hitting a patient.According to El País, “Salander the second” has now gained cult status in Melilla. The paper says she was a popular choice for chirigotas – folk songs composed especially for a town’s carnival and adapted to political or social issues.

Salander may also be a particularly interesting fictional character to people in Melilla since Larsson set a number of memorable scenes for Salander’s super-heroine talents in Gibraltar, the best known enclave in the region, located between Spain and Morocco.

The book title with 91 imitators

Since Steig Larsson’s trilogy–The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played With Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest–became a publishing phenomenon in 2009, the title themes have been adopted by a whopping 91 other books. A rather surprising 23 percent of them were used on children’s books, and even though sales of the trilogy have been tapering off, far more of them were published last year (36) than in 2012 (19).

The list was originally compiled by New York Magazine for its February 3, 2014 issue and can be found here, on vulture.com.

Although we can’t vouch for the quality or content of the books, here are a few of our favorite knock-offs:

It looks like the there will be a new “Stieg Larsson” novel after all

But would Larsson himself have approved?

Earlier this week the global publishing industry was astir with the news that there is a new “Stieg Larsson” novel in the works. We put “Stieg Larsson” in quotation marks, because this new work is not the much-discussed “fourth” or “fifth” novel by the deceased author of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo we are discussing here. Rather, it is a novel written by author David Lagercrantz for the Swedish publisher Norstedts, which together with Larsson’s father and brother controls the exploitation of the literary rights associated the Tattooed Girl trilogy. Like deceased thriller writers from Robert Ludlum to Robert Parker to Ian Fleming, a new series of novels written under license will bring Larsson’s characters, Lisbeth Salander and Mikael Blomkvist, back to life.

The Tattooed Girl: Next Chapter

Duomo from Palazzo Vecchio. Photograph by Julie O’Connor.

We are pleased to inform our readers that we have launched a new blog and a new Facebook page for our newest book, Secrets of Inferno: In the Footsteps of Dante and Dan Brown. We hope you’ll join the conversation there. Please visit us at:

The Secrets of Inferno Blog

Secrets of Inferno on Facebook

Announcing our new book, Secrets of Inferno

Dear Friends of the “Tattooed Girl” Blog:

We hope you’ll be interested in knowing that we’ve done a new book in our “Secrets” series, based on Dan Brown’s recent bestseller, Inferno. 

We go well beyond his plot and characters to provide our readers with thought-provoking discussions of Dante Alighieri and the Divine Comedy, as well as issues from the population control debate to the virtues and dangers of new bioscience technologies.

In putting together Secrets of Inferno, we were aided greatly by a number of world-class Dante scholars and by experts in the demographic and scientific issues raised by Dan Brown’s book. We are very proud of the collective wisdom we have woven together in this volume from so many important academics and specialists. See the list of our contributors here.

The e-book version of our Secrets of Inferno is now available and the print book is due in stores at the end of September. You can find it at Barnes and Noble or at Amazon.com. We’ll also be launching a new blog for this book soon. (Secrets of Inferno will also be available in Italian, Japanese, German, Polish, and other editions internationally later this year.)

–Dan Burstein and Arne de Keijzer

New York Times reports early short story by Stieg Larsson to be published as part of anthology: A Darker Shade of Sweden

According to Julie Bosman at the New York Times, a short story by the 17-year-old Stieg Larsson will be published in English for the first time next year. The unpublished story is part of a new anthology of crime fiction, A Darker Shade of Sweden, scheduled for release in February, 2014. Mysterious Press, an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, is the publisher.

In addition to this work by Stieg Larsson, the anthology collects 16 other stories from 19 Swedish writers, including Henning Mankell and Håkan Nesser, Åsa Larsson, Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, Åke Edwardson, Inger Frimansson, and Sara Stridsberg. Eva Gabrielsson, Stieg Larsson’s companion, has also written a story – her first published piece of fiction – that will be included in the book.

John-Henri Holmberg, a writer and close friend of Stieg’s, has edited the anthology and contributes an introduction in which he gives a historical overview of crime fiction in Sweden, which began in the late 1800s but today holds a stronger position than at any previous time.

Will He/She . . . or Won’t He/She?

Will Daniel Craig return? Will Rooney Mara return? Will David Fincher return?

The guessing game about a sequel to Hollywood’s Girl with the Dragon Tattoo continues, afloat on a sea of speculation — informed, uninformed, half-formed, whatever. The latest twist (red-herring?) in this mini-saga comes from Mara herself, who told the entertainment press that she wants “in” and denied rumors that her hotter-than-ever co-star Daniel Craig doesn’t.

There has also been some speculation that if Craig is not available because of scheduling or money issues, Blomkvist could simply be pruned from the script. The rationale here is that The Girl Who Played with Fire is focused almost entirely on Salander. While we should never sell Hollywood short when it comes to torturing original material, it would seem highly unlikely in this case. The rumor mill forgets that our crusading journalist is indispensable to the book’s key plot points: the exposing of the human trafficking scandal, defending Salander to the police when she becomes a murder suspect, and rescuing her after her harrowing, bloody showdown with Niedermann and Zalachenko.

Two of the more “newsy” stories are the MTV.com report that includes the Fincher dimension and the AccessHollywood story that leans more toward “maybe” and “I hope so”. We reprint the latter below.

Oh, well, something to distract us from the Sweden-like cold snap here in the Northeast. Why couldn’t we be bundled up with Larsson’s fourth book instead?

Rooney Mara: I ‘Hope’ To Make Dragon Tattoo Sequels; Actress Says Daniel Craig Also Game To Return

Vogue features Rooney Mara on its cover

Photograph by David Sims. Published in Vogue, February 2013.

The February issue of Vogue features a profile of actress Rooney Mara, who played Lisbeth Salander in the Hollywood/David Fincher version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo movie that debuted in December 2011. It’s a worthwhile character study of the Academy Award nominee.

The article opens with this word picture:

Before Rooney Mara was cast as Lisbeth Salander—the heroine of Stieg Larsson’s novels—the only thing edgy about her looks were her enviable cheekbones and piercing blue eyes. Her traditional beauty underscored her lineage: Born in 1985 in Bedford, a tiny suburb of New York, she is the great-granddaughter of the founders of both the Pittsburgh Steelers and the New York Giants. But her preparation for her role as the antisocial computer hacker in the Millennium trilogy consumed her. Her chestnut locks vanished beneath a sheet of black, razor-sharp hair; her ivory skin was made somehow paler; she was covered in piercings and tattoos; and her girlish softness was replaced by sinew and muscle….

Read more here.

Noomi Rapace and Niels Arden Oplev re-team for Dead Man Down

Alex Billington of FirstShowing.net reports on this gritty thriller, due in theaters in March, which reunites Noomi Rapace, the star of the three-part Scandinavian-made film series based on Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy, with the trilogy’s Danish director,  Niels Arden Oplev. Excerpts from Billington’s report follow, with a link to the trailer:

An early trailer for FilmDistrict’s crime thriller Dead Man Down has surfaced…. Colin Farrell and Noomi Rapace star in Dead Man Down, directed by Danish filmmaker Niels Arden Oplev who made the first original The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo film. It also co-stars Dominic Cooper, Terrence Howard, Isabelle Huppert and Armand Assante in a powerful portrait of the relationship between two people caught in the crosshairs of revenge. It has a bit of a Drive kind of vibe, so check it out yourself. Here’s the very first international trailer for Niels Arden Oplev’s Dead Man Down, found on YouTube.

Following the cinematic phenomenon The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, acclaimed filmmaker Niels Arden Oplev and brooding beauty Noomi Rapace reunite for another thrilling tale of vengeance. Colin Farrell joins the prestigious team as brave enforcer Victor, right hand man to an underground crime lord in New York. He seeks to avenge the death of his wife and daughter caused by his boss. When his employer is threatened by a mysterious killer, Victor also becomes detective. Victor is seduced and blackmailed by Beatrice (Noomi Rapace), a victim turned avenger whose intense chemistry leads them spiraling into payback delivered in violent catharsis.

The Who’s Pete Townshend: I am drawn to Scandinavian fiction

The New York Times recently interviewed Pete Townshend, star of the legendary rock band, The Who. Townshend, whose lyrics have always been among the most interesting in the rock ‘n roll genre,  also has a genuine literary side to his intellectual life and once worked as an editor at a British publishing house. In the interview, the NYT asked him about what he reads these days. After talking about his interest in Scandinavian fiction, he zeroed in on what he liked—and didn’t like—about Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy:

“The last in the Stieg Larsson Millennium trilogy was pretty bad. The first drew me in skillfully, and I adored it before I realized I was being suckered by a radical feminist man-hating man masquerading behind his vision of a society allegedly full of powerful men who all hate women. That said, I would have loved to see where Larsson went next. Tragic that he died so young, whirling in his own creative torment, Scandinavia’s literary Kurt Cobain.”