Stieg Larsson's Influences

If you witnessed something gruesome happen to another person and did nothing to stop it, you’d probably be pretty affected by that.  It would probably stick with you.  In an article written by Kurdo Baski, a personal friend and business partner of Stieg Larsson’s, an event that stuck with Larsson was also revealed.

When Larsson was 15, he watched a group of his friends brutally gang rape a girl, and he did nothing to interfere.  A few days later, he tried to apologize to the girl.  She told him she would never forgive him.  That event haunted Larsson for the rest of his life.  His friend recalls that when Larsson heard news reports of deaths of other women at the hands of men, he would often tear up. 

Baski said that Larsson told him, “Every day, all over the world, women are mutilated, murdered, ill-treated or circumcised by men rich and poor.  It might happen in South Africa, Saudi Arabia, Norway, Mexico, Tibet or Iran. But the fact is that there's no such thing as soft or hard oppression of women: men want to own women, they want to control women, they are afraid of women. Men hate women. The oppression of women has nothing to do with religion or ethnicity.”

Book critic Sarah Weinman had this to say about  Larsson’s obvious inspiration: "The books reflect both Larsson's sense of righteous indignation about how women are treated in Swedish and overall society and his love of crime fiction.  It was clear to me how much his heart and soul comes through, even filtered through heavily edited translation, and you simply cannot fake that sort of wonder-filled enthusiasm about characters and knowledge. Readers know that and sense it."

So it’s pretty clear where the content of Larsson’s books was inspired from. But where does his style come from? 

Several sites list authors like Agatha Christie, Sara Paretsky, Elizabeth George, and Val McDermid as his favorite and most influential writers, and many of those claims are backed up by quotes from personal friends of Larsson.  Some of these writers are actually mentioned in his books. The blog for the book “The Tattooed Girl”, written as a backstory to Larsson’s series, offers some insight to why Larsson liked these writers.   One post suggests that “Larsson liked Paretsky for her fearlessness, her smart political point of view, and her tough female private investigator.”  There is a pattern to the type of writing he liked, and he applied that to his own writing. 

Many online articles also claim various influences on the main female character, Lisbeth.   She is a strong-willed person, an extremely skilled computer hacker, and a victim of sexual violence. Neil McDonald writes for Quadrant Online that Lisbeth is based off of Peter O’Donnel’s Modesty Blaise character, who, like Lisbeth, has some very specific skills and came from a rough childhood.  Others suggest Lisbeth was inspired by Carol O’Connell’s novels, where her character Mallory was also a heroine very similar to Lisbeth in her strength and gruesome childhood.   There are numerous examples of potential influences on the internet.  Larsson’s friend Baski claims there is a lot of Larsson himself in Lisbeth’s character, from their bad eating and smoking habits to their unwillingness to discuss their pasts.

Larsson himself claimed that the inspiration for Lisbeth was a grown up Pippy Longstocking, from the children’s books by Astrid Lindgren.  In the only interview Larsson ever gave about his series, he said “I considered Pippi Longstocking. What would she be like today? What would she be like as an adult? What would you call a person like that, a sociopath? Hyperactive? Wrong. She simply sees society in a different light. I’ll make her 25 years old and an outcast. She has no friends and is deficient in social skills. That was my original thought.”

I think it’s clear, through the research I’ve done and my own reading of the books, that Larsson put a lot of himself into these stories.   These authors that he liked obviously influenced him enough to include their names in his stories, so it’s likely that the writing itself was influenced too, especially through the characters.