The new Girl With the Dragon Tattoo novel will be written in the hardboiled style of Raymond Chandler, according to its Swedish author David Lagercrantz.
Lagercrantz published his official follow-up to the late Stieg Larsson’s Millennium novels, The Girl in the Spider’s Web, last summer. Continuing the adventures of hacker Lisbeth Salander and journalist Mikael Blomkvist, made famous in Larsson’s three hit novels The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played With Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, the fourth book in the series was authorised by Larsson’s father and brother, who run his estate. His long-term partner Eva Gabrielsson, however, made clear her opposition to the extension of the series. Larsson had intended to write 10 books, before he died in 2004.
Lagercrantz told Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter that he was writing a follow-up to The Girl in the Spider’s Web, which topped book charts around the world and has sold 3.5m copies to date. The fifth book will be published in 2017, said Lagercrantz, explaining that he would be writing it in the style of noir master Raymond Chandler.
In The Girl in the Spider’s Web, Lagercrantz said, he featured passages about popular science, as he did in his novel about the death of Alan Turing, Fall of Man in Wilmslow. “It won’t be like this in Millennium Five … Now I’m starting to write more like Raymond Chandler … And it is becoming a lighter, more hardboiled affair.”
Lagercrantz pointed out that Larsson himself changed his writing style in the Millennium trilogy, but admitted that turning his prose hardboiled had been challenging in the first 200 pages of the new novel.
“It’s much more difficult to write hardboiled than you might think,” he told Dagens Nyheter. “Good hardboiled prose needs a rhythm. You have to vary sentences, even if they’re short, and when the punchline comes, you have to be ready for it.”
A sixth book in the Millennium series is projected for publication in 2019.
