With The Girl in the Eagle’s Talons, Karin Smirnoff begins the third trilogy of the Millennium series, created in the early 2000s by journalist Stieg Larsson. He died suddenly before seeing his trilogy published and all the success it enjoyed (more than 100 million copies sold worldwide and film adaptations). He was then working on a fourth title which never saw the light of day, and he intended to write seven novels to complete the series. After a long legal battle between his partner and his family, who ultimately inherited the rights to the series, Swedish journalist and author David Lagercrantz was chosen to write volumes 4 to 6. Then Karin Smirnoff was commissioned to write volumes 7 to 9. This former journalist turned novelist had written four books before embarking on Millénium. Only one of them has been published in French to date: My Brother, a dark family novel published by JC Lattès in 2021.
The action of this seventh opus is located in the north of Sweden (where the author lives), in a fictional town which has become “a real gangster’s den” since massive investments in green energy have attracted dangerous criminal gangs. Mikael Blomkvist, mourning his Millénium magazine which has become a podcast show, goes there to join his daughter who is to marry a municipal employee, plagued by corruption. “A lot of things are invented, but it’s still reality, with the large sums of money coming in… And I think it’s a global problem,” says Karin Smirnoff. Lisbeth Salander, for her part, must save her young niece who lives in the same town and who is being exploited by bikers to whom her mother owes money.
While Mikael Blomkvist gets closer to his daughter and his grandson, we discover a more mature Lisbeth Salander and a new central character, her niece Svala. “I was a little tired of Lisbeth because I found her a little too adolescent,” confides Karin Smirnoff. I wanted her to be more feminine, less like a heroine and more like an anti-heroine, with more flesh and blood. » No one – and especially not the Larsson family –, the author emphasizes, gave her any instructions regarding what she could or could not do. “Like everyone else, characters can change, something can happen to them. It was very important for me to create my own characters to get closer to them. Mikael was the most difficult character for me because I didn’t like him much in the previous books, so I didn’t really know what to do with him exactly. I need to relax him a little to make him see life differently. So this is just the beginning and I think I need three books to get there [laughs]. »
In her previous novels, such as in The Girl in the Eagle’s Talons, Karin Smirnoff does not hesitate to describe scenes of violence which are reminiscent, in a certain way, of those in Stieg Larsson’s books. “David Lagercrantz doesn’t like violence; he wanted to write action novels, emphasizes the author. Me, I’m coming back a little towards Stieg Larsson, I wanted it to be a little more daring. You can try to describe violence from different angles, but there is the risk that it becomes more entertainment than something you want to explain. It was therefore important for me to keep in mind that I am a woman and that the violence I describe is done through a female gaze. And I think violence against women is just as present today as it was in 2005 when Stieg’s books came out. I know a lot of people disagree with me about depicting violence in fiction, but I think if you stop talking about violence, then you’re trying to hide something that still exists and is still a problem in society. »
Will the new trilogy be as successful as the three novels written by Stieg Larsson? According to Karin Smirnoff, the excitement around the series is no longer what it used to be, at least in Sweden. “There are people who think that’s enough of the show,” she says. A lot of people already thought it was enough with the Stieg Larsson novels, so I don’t think they’re in favor of another trilogy. But the book [published a year ago in Sweden] is selling well. I think people want to find Lisbeth again and I’m trying to make this trilogy something that would be more like my own books than the continuation of the saga. » This is also why the novelist introduced the character of Svala. “Svala can be the heir to this whole story, and she’s a character I can continue to write about for three books because she’s young and she’s closer to Lisbeth. »
Karin Smirnoff has already started writing the eighth volume of the saga, which is due to appear next year in Swedish and focuses on the mining industry. But it is difficult for her to tell us more at this stage since she does not make any plans when she writes. “I have a vague idea and I just try to follow the characters in the story. For me, it’s a lot more fun to write when I don’t know what’s going to happen,” she says. The final volume of his trilogy should appear two years later. Who knows what will happen to Lisbeth Salander and her courageous niece…
