This book has truly had the most extraordinary success in Europe. It has sold all formulas and copies in Scandinavia which is an extraordinary amount for a small country like that. And, at one stage it was number one, number two and number three of the trilogy in the Scandinavian best-seller list. And this has happened in France, in Germany, in Italy, we are really the last in a long queue of people to publish this. And I suppose we are the beneficiaries for a certain degree of anticipation and excitement that's built up, and it’s kind of cascaded across Europe.

I don’t really know an awful lot about Stieg Larsson. I do know that he was an enormously gifted and crusading journalist who founded a magazine called EXPO in Sweden. And a magazine that was devoted essentially to sort of combating and exposing racial and religious intolerance. And apparently, he took to writing crime fiction in his spare time which was partially at night, I think probably to distract himself from some other things he had to deal with during the daytime.

And the tragedy was that he died just after the first book was published, very suddenly, at the age of fifty, of a very severe heart attack. So, he didn’t live to see these three novels of his become the most extraordinary best-sellers in Scandinavia and across Europe, as a matter of fact.

The girl with the dragon tattoo, Lisbeth Salander, is actually, I think, one of the most extraordinary sort of modern heroines. I believe Larsson said in an interview that he’d often wondered what Pipi Lamstrung was gonna be when she grew up and, I think, that is what Lisbeth is in this novel.

Reviewers will probably want to compare Stieg Larsson to his Swedish contemporaries, people like Henning Mankel and others but, I think he is totally different. I think he paints on a bigger canvas. I think parts of his …, the social commentary, the social analysis, the social consciousness that he has, reminds me of John Grisham. Otherwise he reminds me of some of the preoccupations that Sara Paretsky or Michael Connelly or George Pelecanos, for instance, might have.

But you know, the interesting thing about Larsson, and something we haven’t touched on yet, is that he was also a book reviewer and his passion was crime writing so, this trilogy is peppered with references to his peers and the crime writing community and he read crime novels ferociously. And the book has got references that..., or takes, that take you back to say, Agatha Christie or Dorothy Sayers or … and he mentions a novel that has just been published or scene from a particular book by a contemporary American or a contemporary Brit writer. And, and ...so I, you know, it’s like a mad pile that way and that’s part of, to me, the pleasure of reading and I think other readers will share the, sort of, the references.