was late coming to Stieg Larsson and his wildly popular Millennium Trilogy. Last spring, when I started reading the first volume, some 20 million people had already beaten me to it. By August, when I finished the third, that figure had almost doubled. Numbers that big — phenomenal even beside such recent literary juggernauts as Harry Potter and The Da Vinci Code — almost always result from word of mouth. But the buzz over Larsson’s books began even before they were published.

It started shortly after he submitted the manuscripts of all three novels to his Swedish publisher, Norstedts, in April 2004. Word spread quickly, and when the Frankfurt Book Fair rolled around that October publishers from all over the world were clamouring for a look. Translations were commissioned shortly after the first book appeared in Stockholm in early 2005, under the title Men Who Hate Women, and from there the groundswell grew, country by country. By the time it reached North America in 2008, as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, not even a bad review in the New York Times could stop it.

I’m a fan of crime and espionage fiction, but the Millennium books were different. There was something mysterious about how, despite their obvious flaws, they drew you relentlessly into a world that was both familiar and strange. Instead of seeing that world from the perspective of a police force, detective agency, or newsroom, you saw it through a small magazine with big ambitions. Like his main character, Mikael Blomkvist, Larsson had been a journalist and a magazine editor, and I wondered how much of his own life had gone into his books? Or was I simply fascinated with Larsson’s Sweden, a country I’d always dismissed as being pretty much like Canada, only with more blondes, fitter grandmothers, and a better sense of design? His books made me want to know more.

hen I went to Sweden last September, it was for another purpose altogether. My brother-in-law, Gordon, had recently died of an inoperable brain tumour, and my wife, Patricia, and I had gone to attend his funeral in Kungsholmen kyrka, a stately seventeenth-century church surrounded by a green park in Kungsholmen, one of the largest of the islands and headlands that comprise the city of Stockholm.

Coincidentally, the church was only a few blocks from the office where Larsson had suffered a fatal heart attack shortly before the first book in the trilogy was published in Sweden. As we listened to the pastor deliver the eulogy in soft, melodious Swedish, Larsson was on my mind, because it was Gordon who had introduced me to the novels, which had in turn fired my curiosity about Gordon’s adopted country.

A Glaswegian by birth, Gordon had come to Sweden as a young man in pursuit of a love that didn’t pan out. He stayed on, found a greater and more lasting love, settled down, learned the language, and made a life for himself that included both print and television journalism. Recently, he’d been travelling to China to teach the Chinese how to do stand-up news reporting. He was at the top of his game when the cancer struck, but he never lost his droll sense of humour: as his battle with the disease intensified, he began referring to himself as “the Scottish Patient.”

We were both fans of Henning Mankell, another internationally renowned Swedish crime writer. Gordon and his wife, Charlotte, owned a summer place in Skåne, the southernmost county in Sweden, not far from the picturesque coastal town of Ystad, where Mankell’s fictional detective, Kurt Wallander, works for the local police detachment. Skåne is a sunny part of Sweden, a place of rolling farmland and woodlots not unlike parts of southern Ontario, but Mankell’s tales are anything but sunlit; the lives Wallander encounters in his dogged pursuit of justice are filled with menace, sinister obsessions, and extreme cruelty. It’s common knowledge among aficionados of Nordic crime fiction that all is not as it seems in the sunny lands of Scandinavian socialism.

“Now that you are into Swedish crime fiction,” Gordon emailed one day, “you must try the Stieg Larsson books!”

And so it began. I bought a softcover edition of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and started reading.

ike many who come to Larsson cold, I found the book hard to warm up to. It runs to well over 800 pages, and although it’s touted as a thriller it begins at a maddeningly leisurely pace, almost like a Victorian novel. There is a mysterious prologue that includes a lengthy botanical description of a dried flower. Next, a respected investigative journalist, Mikael Blomkvist, loses a defamation suit brought against him by a wealthy financier and is fined 150,000 kronor — approximately $20,000, a slap on the wrist by Canadian standards. In addition, he’s sentenced to three months in prison, no doubt some Swedish Club Fed with uniforms by H&M and furnishings by IKEA. Then comes a rambling, twenty-five-page flashback involving a sailboat trip to a place called the Archipelago, where Blomkvist and a former schoolmate get plastered on aquavit as Blomkvist hears the convoluted tale that will get him sued. Next, there’s a lengthy introduction to Milton Security and its CEO, Dragan Armansky, complete with his exotic family tree and a detailed history of his business. By this time, it is page 47, and still no sign of a plot. I put the book down and turned to other things.

The following Sunday, Gordon phoned from Stockholm and asked how I’d liked it.

“I bogged down,” I said.

“Give it another try,” he said. “Just make sure you have a free day ahead of you.”

So I started again, from the top. This time, it was different. Maybe I’d had a good night’s sleep, or maybe I had accepted the fact that this wasn’t going to be the kind of thriller that begins with a bloated corpse floating in on the tide with its fingers cut off. I began to realize that with Stieg Larsson God is in the details.

In addition to being a reporter, Blomkvist is also part owner and publisher of an ambitious little magazine called Millennium that had published his defamatory story and presumably bears some of the blame. It has a circulation of about 20,000 (pretty decent in a country of nine million), but appears to have little capital, and it’s losing advertisers because of the lawsuit. Blomkvist, however, is convinced that he was fed false information to destroy the magazine, and when the editors gather to discuss what to do next, their main concern is how to survive so that one day they can bring down their wealthy adversary for good.

I’ve been involved in several small Canadian magazines and know what frail vessels they are; how exhilarating the struggle to launch and keep them afloat can be; how pathetically dependent they usually become, either on government largesse or the backing of fickle investors; not to mention how hard it is to get investigative pieces off the ground on a tiny budget. This Millennium crowd lived in a world I knew, but it felt almost like a parallel universe. Larsson now had my full attention.

It’s only after page 47 that we meet one of the major reasons for the trilogy’s success: a troubled young woman of uncertain sexuality who dresses like a punk, has hair “as short as a fuse,” and sports the eponymous dragon tat on her left shoulder, along with a large but undefined grudge. Like Garbo, Lisbeth Salander wants to be left alone. Larsson has endowed her with powers that verge on the miraculous: he’s made her a genius hacker who can perform what she calls “hostile takeovers” of other people’s computers; he’s also given her a photographic memory, and a knack for research that any reporter would die for. These skills have earned Salander a secure position as Armansky’s star researcher, and we first see her in action as she presents him with a confidential report on Blomkvist, commissioned, for reasons not yet clear, by a wealthy client.

By Canadian standards, the material she turns up on Blomkvist could only have been gathered by a serious invasion of his privacy, but this is Sweden, where invasion of privacy is apparently routine. The report ultimately brings Salander and Blomkvist together, and thus, in a single stroke of brilliant plotting, Larsson launches an unlikely partnership that, over the course of the three novels, will ripen into one of the strangest, most haunting relationships in modern popular fiction.