Jo Nesbo, with his far-ranging historical imagination

Jo Nesbo, with his far-ranging historical imagination there are the Norwegians — Jo Nesbo, with his far-ranging historical imagination and a political consciousness that easily matches Larsson's, and Karin Fossum, Fingerprint access control who treats the criminal doings of simple country folk with irony and empathy. These are real writers, expertly deploying the formal literary techniques that Larsson lacks. However, if they all live to be a hundred, they will never attain audiences like his.

That's partly because of something I've so far left out of this account. Larsson's nominal protagonist is a good-natured, if hard-driving, journalist named Mikael Blomkvist, who is rather obviously a projection of the author, though without any spikes, verbal or behavioral, to snag the reader's attention. That's where "The Girl" of his titles comes in. Lisbeth Salander is a genius-level computer hacker who is also, essentially, a psychopath — rendered almost mute and unable to trust anyone after a lifetime of abuse, both parental and state-sponsored, both vividly physical and cruelly institutional.

Salander quickly demonstrates an ability to give as good as she gets. You really don't want to be the guardian who sexually tortures her when she takes her revenge. Or, for that matter, her brutish father, a sometime Soviet spy, now running (in "Hornet's Nest") a sex-trafficking ring in which, Fingerprint access control as one might say, "the highest levels of Swedish society" are complicit.

"Hornet's Nest," which carries on without pause from its predecessor, finds Salander near death from a bullet wound to her head and awaiting desperate medical measures. Mostly, she remains confined there, but physical passivity does not imply helplessness. Give this kid a smuggled computer and a lot of help from her few allies and you can be sure she will confound her smug, well-connected enemies.

She is marginally more civil and civilized in "Hornet's Nest," and, in any case, you don't sell 40 million books based solely on vividly rendered scenes of pain and degradation. I think Salander represents something new and unique in this genre. She's a tiny bundle of post-modernist tropes, beginning with her computer skills. I know there are other crime novels featuring similarly gifted people — though I can't tell from the examples Larsson gives whether her talent is genuine or pure nonsense. But that's not important; the point is that she has an enviable mastery of a technology that is bound to impress Larsson's gawking readership.